Habitual Failure: New Year’s Resolutions (NYRs) Every year, millions of well-intentioned people make New
Year’s resolutions, but less than five percent of us stick to them. A
NYR is really just a positive habit (like exercising or early rising) you
want to incorporate into your life, or a negative habit (like smoking or
eating fast food) you want to get rid of. You don’t need a statistic to
tell you that, when it comes to NYRs, most people have already given
up and thrown in the towel before January has even come to a close.
Maybe you’ve seen this phenomenon in real time. If you’ve ever
gone to the gym the first week of January, you know how difficult it
can be to find a parking spot. It’s packed with vehicles owned by
people with good intentions, and armed with a NYR to lose weight
and get in shape. However, if you go back to the gym closer to the end
of the month, you’ll notice that half of the parking lot is empty. Not
armed with a proven strategy to stick with their new habits, the
majority continue to fail.
Why is it so difficult to implement and sustain the habits we
