The 2nd day of the year

The winter holidays are over. You’ve made it through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. Hopefully, your New Year’s Day hangover is also over. If you’re like 45% of Americans, you made some resolutions. So now what?

Only 8% of Americans are successful in achieving their resolutions annually. You really have two viable options with your resolutions. Go for it, starting now, as hard as you can, and don’t give up until you’ve achieved those goals. Here are a few strategies to help you get there:

• Stick it out. The longer you maintain your resolution, the more likely you are to succeed. Only 46% of Americans manage to maintain a resolution past 6 months. So if you can hold out that long, you’re far more likely to be one of the 8%.
• Be a realist. It’s not how much you change, but that you do it, and that you make progress.
• Start small. This is part of being a realist. If you want to exercise more, commit to going to the gym twice a week, not every day. Want to lose weight? Commit to small dietary changes rather than a radical diet plan.
• One thing at a time. Don’t decide that you’re going to quit smoking, lose weight, and finish your college degree all at the same time. Pick one and work hard toward that goal.
• Tell others about it. You’re more likely to stick with a goal if you’re accountable, but you can also get support from others as well. There’s no shame in a support group to get where you’re trying to go, either, or any other help that you might need – medical, behavioral, educational, or physical. If you knew how to do what you want to accomplish, you’d likely have done it by now.
• Fail small, recover quick. Don’t let minor failures sabotage you. If you have a donut, there’s nothing you can do about that donut. But you don’t have to aggravate it by saying to yourself “I blew it today, I’m going to have the other eleven in this box.” The time to recover is now, not tomorrow. Now is always the best time.

The other truly viable option for resolutions is to say “Screw it. I’m good enough as I am, and I don’t want to deal with the guilt of failing myself again.” Taking this tack is just fine. It can save you a lot of time, effort, and subsequent guilt. It will also save others a lot of hassle. 38% of resolutions are related to weight loss. We of the gym rat clan anticipate it every year – there’s a flood of new people in the gym in January. As regularly as the tides, the vast majority of them disappear by March. Interestingly, the vast majority of them don’t cancel their memberships, either. 67% of people who have gym memberships never use them. Commercial gyms count on this. Essentially, that 67% subsidizes the 33% of us who actually do use the gym. Do you want to pay for me to go to the gym?

I didn’t think so. Get back on the horse and meet that goal.

(Resolution statistics by the University of Scranton Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2015. Gym membership statistics by StatisticBrain.com)