Happy New Year! There have been a lot of jokes and memes this year about not declaring 2022 your year and letting the calendar flip quietly without showing it any attention. We tend to have high hopes for each new year and were all caught off guard in 2020, and 2021 didn't really go as we hoped either. People, in general, seem to want to be cautious this year with their hopes and dreams but still feel that pressure to set annual goals and New Year's resolutions.
In our previous blog post, we discussed the importance of identifying your personal values and mission statement instead of setting goals and resolutions based on what you think you should be doing. We encourage you to read that if you haven't already.
We know there are still lots of questions though about goal setting and resolutions, so we decided to answer those for you today.
Q: Why should we set goals for ourselves? And more specifically should we set New Year's resolutions?
Setting goals, in general, gives us long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses our attention and helps us organize our time and resources so we can make the most of our lives.
Motivation and procrastination are not diagnosable disorders. You don't either have them or not have them, and too many people tend to think of them that way. Being an adult means deciding to do things because the result of doing it is greater than the reward of not doing it. If we all waited until inspiration struck to do anything, we'd all be one with our couches.
Overcoming short-term pain for long-term gain
When you're not motivated, take inspiration from the Netflix series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. She cranked the mystery crank in the bunker for 10 seconds at a time and said "You can stand anything for 10 seconds. Then you just start on a new 10 seconds."
She didn't think about the stretch of minutes or hours in front of her. She looked at a task she didn't want to do, weighed the consequences of not doing it, and began to count to 10. And when she reached 10, she started over.
We can all apply this concept to parts of our life. Let's look at the example of exercising. When Olivia Amato from Peloton is making us do bicycle crunches for an entire minute, we can choose to break it into 10-second chunks of time. When you get to 10, start counting again. Before you know it, your time is up and you're moving to the next exercise. The time is going to pass either way so think about how you will feel when that minute is up. Do you want to skip the exercise to avoid the short-term pain of doing the work? Or do you want to do the work so you can reap the benefits? When that minute is up, Olivia’s abs have gotten a little bit stronger, and you can choose to be in the same place you were 60 seconds before or you can join her in making incremental changes.
The role of visualization in goal setting
Some people create vision boards at the beginning of each new year. This can be a helpful way of getting inspired and motivated, but manifesting is only half the work. We can't just say we want to be on Broadway and then sit on the couch and wait. We have to put in the work with voice lessons and dance lessons and acting lessons and attending auditions. The same applies to any other goal we have.
As adults, we have to learn how to keep ourselves accountable to make progress toward the things we want to achieve. We don't have the luxury that children do of having someone else who monitors how much we eat, when we go to sleep, and how we spend our time. It's up to us, and visual aids like a vision board or tracking sheet can be just the thing we need to help us stay on the right path.
Life is full of constant progress
Too many of us think happiness is a destination to be reached. We get this notion that happiness is a fixed place that we can reach and stay forever but it's really more like hunger. We can't have the most delicious, filling, and satiating meal ever and say "I'm never going to eat again." We know that's not true and that we'll be hungry again in the future. And the next meal we eat may not be nearly as delicious, but we will have another wonderful meal again sometime in the future. We will also have another mediocre meal again, and so on and so forth. The same is true for happiness.
We can feel the most joy, elation, and pleasure we've ever felt and believe that we will never feel sadness again, but we will, and then we'll feel joy again too. The pendulum will continue to swing as long as we're alive. Rather than reaching happiness and white-knuckling trying not to lose it, we would all be a lot less fearful if we acknowledged that happiness and sadness will come and go. This allows us to leverage those into the steps needed to reach our goals instead of having our progress derailed when feelings and emotions change.
Q: Is there a psychological reason why so many resolutions don't work out and how do I actually make mine work?
This is a great question because as we shared in our last post, the research shows as many as 80% of resolutions fail by February. We've all seen gyms crammed with people at the start of January only to see the crowd taper off in February and be reduced to pre-January levels by March.
Giving up on New Year's resolutions is often related to the following issues:
Difficulty breaking old habits
Focusing on specific outcomes
Problems with purpose
You can increase your chances of achieving your New Year's resolutions by setting realistic and achievable goals. That will help you form new habits as well as follow other steps for success.
The role that habits have on our goals and resolutions
Habits are hard to break, full stop. Our brains love automaticity. If we had to consciously think of every action we had to do it would be exhausting and impossible. Our brains would have to think things like “open eyes, move arm, move leg in front of the other leg, turn the door handle…” before we even left our houses.
Thankfully, our brains default to automating whenever they can, which is great at making sure we don't waste energy on remembering how to walk, breathe, and get out of bed. When it starts automating things we don't want to keep doing, such as unhealthy eating habits, it becomes a struggle.
Our habits are ingrained and embedded in something called our implicit memory or automatic memory. It uses our past experiences to help us remember things without having to actively think about them. This makes it easy for us to stick to similar routines and challenging for us to make changes. It's what allows us to zone out and drive home from work on autopilot and pull in the driveway without remembering any of the conscious steps we took to get there.
We have to understand that we don't only do things that are bad for us. For example, we don't continue to put our hands in fire and hold them there, because there isn't anything rewarding about it for us. It’s just bad for us, full stop. This means when we continue doing something we consider bad for us, there's some shadow of a reward we're getting from it. Recognizing and acknowledging that can help us start making changes.
Habits are also multifaceted, meaning more than one element goes into reinforcing and making them more challenging to break. In the example of unhealthy eating habits, it may be embedded in the environment or reinforced by your lifestyle. The places you go and the people you interact with when you eat can all play a role.
Breaking habits to reach our goals
To break a habit, we have to identify the trigger, habit, and reward tied up in the automation of it so we can change each of them. For example, if every afternoon you stop by a coworker's desk to chat and snack from the candy bowl, their desk is the trigger. The habit is getting up and walking over to the desk. The reward is the social interaction and bonding from talking to your coworker. You also have the reward from the dopamine increase your brain gets from the sugar in the candy.
Habits are kind of like scribbling so hard on a piece of paper with a pencil that you leave indentations. You can take an eraser and remove all the graphite, but the indentations remain. You can't get rid of them, but you can cover them up with things like crayon, marker, charcoal, or paint, and make a better version of the original.
There are infinite resources at your disposal to make new habits, but first, you have to let go of your attachment to the old habits. You also have to accept that some trace of them will always be there. You may never completely get rid of your craving for the candy, but you can put other layers on top of those indentations of craving so you don't give in anymore.
Q: How do you set achievable goals?
People often make goals like getting healthy, losing weight, and being happier. The problem is that “healthy and happy” might look different to me than they do to you. If we don't define for ourselves why we're setting a goal, what the measurable outcome looks like and the steps we're going to take to get there, it's the same as trying to manifest with magic.
Goals should occupy the sweet spot between ambitious and feasible. They should be lofty enough that we feel accomplished when we reach them and require us to stretch ourselves or learn some new things to get there, yet reachable enough that we're not setting ourselves up for failure and disappointment.
One of our favorite strategies is called setting SMART goals. This is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Q - How do we determine whether the goal itself is worthwhile or even healthy?
We often set goals because someone told us it was a good idea, like reading 52 books this year. We may already love reading, but it’s possible that if we set a goal of reading 52 books, it's going to feel like a chore instead of a pleasurable activity. It's important to think about why you're setting the goal.
Let's look at the example of getting healthy. For example, one person’s definition of being physically healthy means being able to run for a train as the doors start to close, lift a suitcase into the overhead bin without help, stand straight without back pain, and sleep well. These may sound like things that just naturally happen but that person may have to work really hard at all of them due to a combination of physical formation and past injuries. For a person without the same physicality, getting healthy may mean training for a marathon. For someone with different physical limitations, getting healthy may mean being able to walk for 30 minutes straight without losing their breath. Everyone’s starting points are different so their goals will look different, which is why SMART goals need to be tailored to your uniqueness.
This might sound like a lot, but that tends to be because we assume the solution to chronic problems should be quick and easy. Our quick-fix mindsets are inherently tied up with the way we tend to think about New Year's resolutions.
Why does January 1st mean you should be a whole new person? Are you setting that timeline or is someone else setting it for you? Do you make the same resolutions every year without examining why you're not keeping them or if you truly even want to do them?
Getting to the root of these questions can help you determine what goals are worth setting and when.
Q - How can we incorporate mental health in our New Year's resolutions?
We have seen a spike in clients reporting anxiety, spirals, panic attacks, and catastrophizing. We can use sublimation to combat this behavior.
In psychology, sublimation is a type of defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviors that can potentially result in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.
That's a mouthful, so think about the end of Mean Girls where Regina channeled her aggression that she used to use in manipulation the student body into becoming a lacrosse star. In this instance, anxiety can make us spin out into an endless "what if" that makes us feel hopeless, helpless, and despondent. We like to describe anxiety as a character in our brains that sits, criticizing, like the Mucinex cartoon. When it has something to do, like study for an exam, write an article, meet a work deadline, create a marathon training schedule, or meal plan for the week, anxiety gets to work. It motivates, focuses, and keeps us on track for our goals.
When anxiety has nothing to do, on the other hand, it will choose something at random to focus on. This could be wondering how much longer this pandemic will last and what long-term impact it's having on your children, how you'll be able to save up for retirement while paying off your student loans, or what ramifications for health still loom ahead, and on and on and on.
When we sublimate anxiety, we intentionally choose something to focus our attention on. This could be a new project, learning a new skill, completing an old project we've been putting off, creating timelines, or doing other things that help us make progress toward our goals. It also includes changing our self-talk and stopping ourselves when we begin to spiral by using a conversation as if we were two people while using the same calming logic we would use with friends and loved ones. By doing this, we can redirect the nervous energy into productive energy.
A final thought on goals and resolutions
Instead of focusing on resolutions, let's ask ourselves what we want from 2022 and how we're going to make it happen. Let's compare and despair less and manifest more.
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