4 Reasons Most New Year's Resolutions and Other Habit Changes Fail and What You Can Do to Succeed
Derrick Lumsden | Friday, January 1, 2010 Derrick's essay on effective habit changing is appropriately timed with the turning of the New Year. He explores the reasons why people so often lose their resolve and fall back into familiar patterns. He offers short and simple recommendations for making lasting changes and he also provides further reading from the Writings of Emanual Swedenborg and the Bible.
Making and keeping resolutions to change habits is hard. You will probably see a lot of blog posts or magazine articles about making and keeping your New Year's Resolution this time of year. The New Church offers some new perspective about what goes wrong when we try and fail to change our ways. Here are four things that often go wrong and what you can do to prevent or fix the problems.
1. Making a resolution you don't really want to keep.
New Church Teachings tell us that there are two things that constitute a person's mind: the will (the loving or feeling part) and the understanding (the thinking or reasoning part). These two parts work together, but one of the two is actually in charge—the will.
If you are making a resolution to improve yourself in some way, on some level you want to change, and therefore on some level you have a will to change. (Give yourself a pat on the back.)
However, that doesn't mean you really want to keep the resolution. Another part of your will will try to stop the change process. Fundamentally speaking, you are already doing what you want to do. If you wanted to do it any other way, you would be.
Solution: Strengthen your will to change.
If you want to succeed with your New Year's Resolution, take it seriously enough to find and eliminate the barriers or habits that stand in the way. It can also help to focus on the things you love that support the change you want to make. For example, if your New Year's Resolution is to be better about keeping your temper, find out and try to circumvent circumstances or behaviors that cause a short fuse and focus on the ways losing your temper hurts the people you love.
2. Not being willing to suffer through self-compulsion.
If the greater part of your will actually opposes the proposed resolution, then you must go in knowing it is an uphill climb. Fundamentally you don't feel like making this change, otherwise you would just do it, and it would be easy. If you don't feel like doing something but you do it anyway, that is self-compulsion. Self-compulsion is not fun or easy, but if you are going up hill, it's the only way.
Solution: Go in knowing you don't feel like doing it, but do it anyway.
You don't want to do it—your will opposes the change you are trying to make—but use your understanding to make yourself do it anyway.
There are tons of tricks to making yourself do something even if you don't feel like it, and most New Year's Resolution or goal setting articles focus on this part. Search out and try different strategies for tricking, coaxing, or generally bullying yourself into action. Do what works for you.
3. Not bringing the Lord into the process.
Two teachings make up the heart of what the New Church is all about: the Lord Jesus Christ is the one loving God and the process of becoming a better person leads to eternal life and happiness. A New Year's Resolution is a great way to involve yourself in the process of becoming a better person (especially if your resolution is moral or spiritual in nature), but not bringing the Lord into the process is just plain wasteful.
I say wasteful because the Lord wants you to succeed; He loves you and would love for you to be happy. He wants to give you the strength, determination, and joy that it takes to succeed in the change process. That being said, what is most important to your happiness is your relationship to your loving God. All good things in your life He gives you and much unhappiness comes from not recognizing His presence in those gifts.
Solution: Pray to the Lord for help and strength.
The Lord can give you more blessings and more success when you turn to Him in prayer to ask for the tools it takes to succeed in change, and then act as if of yourself to scrape and claw your way to success all the while knowing He is giving you every ounce of fight and every little win.
4. Failing to fail successfully.
There is no way you are capable of making a change without falling short in someway. It is insanity to expect anything else. Many New Year's Resolutions are abandoned because we convict ourselves of failing to keep the resolution and give up. The insanity of this attitude is easy to see in physical attainment goals. Would you expect to be able to hit a bulls eye with every shot you took from the first time you picked up a bow and arrow? Would you expect to juke all the defenders and score the winning goal without lots of missed shots and many stolen balls? Don't reasonably expect more in the other areas of your life.
Don't expect too much of yourself, but do hold yourself accountable. Just like you would not be happy with the arrows that flew wide of the mark in archery, don't be pleased with your failures to reach your goals. But just like learning archery, review why you missed and why you hit the mark.
Solution: When you miss the mark, ask yourself why and make the changes.
When failure happens, go back to the fundamentals and ask yourself why didn't that work. And when you do hit the mark with you resolutions, ask why did that work. I would suggest using the first three areas as a guide to reviewing your failures and successes. When your change becomes a habit, you can stop asking yourself why all the time. But until your change is a habit, it's best to keep asking yourself why what you did worked or not.
Summary—Questions to Help You Succeed in Your Resolution
Here are questions you can ask to guide your evaluation of the change process.
- What in me stands in the way of this goal? What do I love that I can attach this goal to?
- What do I need to do to make my goal happen when I don't feel like doing it?
- Was I making the Lord a part of the process and what can I do to make the Lord a regular part of the change process?
- Why did/didn't it work this time? (Back to question 1)
Further Reading
Will and Understanding
Luke 14:28-33; New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine has a small summary of the will and understanding (7 pages in a paperback sized book) starting from paragraph 28. (There is lot's of great stuff that follows on after that about levels of the mind and how these levels relate that will give you great insights into what any change process entails, so don't feel like you have to stop at just understanding the will and understanding.)
Self-compulsion
Luke 9:23-25; Secrets of Heaven 1937; Zen Habits on New Year's Resolutions. (The Zen Habits blog has lots of great tips and tricks for doing what you don't feel like doing; scroll to the bottom of the linked article to see more articles on the same topic.)
The Lord in the Change Process
Mark 11:22-24; John 14:12-18; there is a whole section in True Christian Religion (starting at paragraph 509) on the change process called "repentance," which in less Latinate English simply means "rethinking life," but paragraph 538 deals specifically with what to pray for.
Failing Successfully
John 15:1-8 (think of pruning as getting rid of what doesn't work); Luke 11:5-13; True Christian Religion 720.
Derrick Lumsden
Derrick is a father, husband, life-time student and student of life. He is also the assistant pastor at New Church Westville in South Africa (a new church). Some of Derrick's current hobbies include: strength training (which began with this program); gnu-linux-ubuntu; dog training with his German Shepherd puppy; dreaming of planting a church; learning and reading.
Wondering about the inspiration for this article? Look up the New Church, which is based on the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Reader Comments (12)
Awesome! Thought that comes to mind for me is that the command to "begin a new life' means in part to no let oneself be guilt-ridden by the old life. Putting the past behind you as you move forward in a new way is very powerful.
Great article. I didn't make a resolution, but I am considering it now that I have these great tools.
Hi Dave, Thanks! I agree that guilt is a burden not worth carrying. Guilt is only useful if it helps you resolve to change. After that, it's just hanging on to the past, and an unpleasant past at that. The only thing you can change is your decisions in the present. So resolve to change and work the process.
Hi Ropemaker, I hope you make a resolution and do it successfully. May the Lord bless your journey.
I appreciate a good post on making and sticking to changes. I think my adult acceptance of the New Church (beyond a general belief in God) came when I finally began to believe that life change was possible. I'd heard that repentance was a key part of religion but my early efforts in high school and college seemed to be a bunch of mental activity with almost 0 sustained change. I still find it difficult to find traction - because, as you say, part of me loves what I am trying to leave and mental gymnastics don't hold a candle against an embedded love. Two parts of the process that are key for me is learning to meaningfully draw on the Lord's power (still hard) and being able to fail without giving up.
Oh, sorry - one more thought. For some reason it has been very important for me to fully accept where I am starting from. I don't mean accept in the sense of "embrace" but accept in the sense of "understand" and "look in the face." When I try to change only accepting where I want to be I don't seem to get off the ground.
Brian
I am reading book by Bob Junge called "What can I do to inherit eternal life?", and Junge just said (roughly) that we must never look behind ourselves if we are attributing anything to ourselves; never look back to appropriate your successes to yourself, but only to honor the Lord. I thought that was interesting in light of making resolutions, because it is so satisfying to stop and congratulate myself, but I find that when I do, my process usually starts crumbling because at the point I look back, I am taking the Lord out of it and putting myself as responsible for the change. The Lord is just crucial to change and it ONLY happens because of Him. Thanks for the article Derrick. I found it extremely insightful.
Janine
Hi Brian, I absolutely agree with you about accepting where you are. It was a great revelation to me when I realized that I was stuck in a destructive pattern because I actually loved what I was doing. Part of me was disgusted with myself, but I got something out of what I was doing. When I recognized and accepted that I was not perfect and not able to live up to my standard of perfection, I began to rely more on the Lord and His promises to help me. The guilt that came with not living up to my own illusions of my perfection or even potential perfection was part of what kept me from changing. When I accepted my faults as who I was, I was able to turn more control to the Lord to give me a clean heart and change for real.
Hi Janine, Bob Junge's insight is spot on with my experience (and yours too apparently). I have found that whenever I have taken credit for the changes I have made, I get sucked right back into what I was before the changes. It took me a while of failing and reflecting on that failure before that failure turned successful. I finally recognize that I was taking the Lord out of the process when I took credit for His gift of change. I began to recognize the feelings and thoughts that came before the fall, and flee right back to giving credit to the Lord and asking for His help.
Hi Derrick,
Excellent article. I really like everything you had to say, and would add one thing that I've found to be key in my life, when trying to keep a resolution. (It goes along with strengthening your will to change, I think).
Basically, if you're trying to add something, you must be willing to remove something else, and vice versa.
Here's a simple example: People (myself included) often will make a resolution like "I'm going to go to the gym 3 times a week to get fit." That's great, but it's never going to happen unless you're willing to not watch the TV, or play with your kids, or sleep, or whatever it is that would have otherwise occupied that time slot in your life. Same idea with taking time to pray, spending time with your family, eating healthier, etc.
Hi Kevin,
You are spot on. You have to want your change more than you want your current life. If you want your current life, don't pretend to want something else. Strengthening your will to change definitely entails letting go of other--hopefully less important--things to make room for the change.
A quick one: I'm very glad this site exists.
Hi Reade,
Thanks for the love. And you (one of our lovely readers) are the reason we exist.