No More New Year's Resolutions, Please!
If you wish to reach your goals
(who doesn’t?), don’t get seduced into making New Year’s resolutions. Why?
Because research says resolutions don’t work. Paradoxically, by not making them, you may be more likely to achieve and maintain your
goals.
According to The New Year’s Resolutions That Won’t Fail You by Oliver Burkeman
(NEWSWEEK, 12/24/12), “psychological research increasingly suggests that
‘repeating affirmations’ makes people with low self-esteem feel worse; that
visualizing your ambitions can make you less motivated to achieve them, [and]
that goal setting can backfire.” Positive messages deliver only a “short-lived
boost, and when that fades, the most obvious way to revive it is to go back
for more.” Kinda like dieting, huh?
Burkeman goes on to talk about why
change is difficult, giving a similar explanation to the advice in my book, THE
RULES OF “NORMAL” EATING. Even making one change, say, around food, is hard
because it involves so many aspects of life—family, friends, work,
emotions, impulse control, stress, lifestyle. According to Burkeman, trying to
change too much about yourself “would require impossible psychological
acrobatics: somehow you’d have to change everything about yourself while
simultaneously being the self who is
directing the changes.” See why improving eating is such a challenge?
The article also talks about the
myth of focusing relentlessly on goals. A better approach is to “set ...
Source: Normal Eating - Category: Eating Disorders Authors: eatnormalnow Source Type: blogs
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