Fairbanks Daily News-Miner community perspective:
I was hopping around the web to find the most popular New Year’s resolutions, and I came to a site that collected the funniest ones. Here’s a sampling:
• I will not bore my boss by the same excuse for taking leaves. I will think of some more excuses.
• I will do less laundry and use more deodorant.
• I resolve to work with neglected children — my own.
• I will read the manual — as soon as I can find it.
The New Year’s resolutions we actually make are far more predictable. According to data from the University of Scranton’s Journal of Clinical Psychology, the top resolutions are:
• Lose weight
• Get organized
• Stay fit and healthy
Almost half of Americans usually make New Year’s resolutions, according to the latest statistics. But only
8 percent of these keep them. Still, making New Year’s resolutions is good for you. People who do make specific resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t.
Why is failure so high? One answer is the type of coping strategies people use.
Certain coping strategies are more like likely to work, find John Cross and Dominic Vangareli in their article published in the Journal of Substance Abuse, “The Resolution Solution: Longitudinal Examination of New Year’s Change Resolutions.”
They selected 200 adults who volunteered to help the researchers study New Year’s resolutions.
These volunteers made common New Year’s resolutions, such as losing weight or stopping smoking. They were followed for two years. After one week, 75 percent kept their resolutions — but after two years, just 19 percent did so.
(You would expect these people to be more successful in keeping their New Year’s resolutions than people in general since this is a self-
selected group who volunteered to participate in a study tracking their success.)
The people who were most successful in keeping their resolutions used strategies quite different from those who were not successful. Those who succeeded were significantly more likely to change the environment so they wouldn’t be tempted. They were less likely to put a tub of ice cream in the freezer, for example, or buy that box of delicious chocolates.
Those who were least successful at keeping their resolutions blamed themselves and bemoaned their lack of self-control.
Since self-control is so valuable in many aspects of life — getting higher grades in school, greater popularity and more resistance to substance abuse — many studies have tried to figure out how self-control operates.
Self-control is a limited resource, psychologists find over and over. When you exercise self-control on one task, you are less likely to exercise self-control in the next task. You get tired.
That’s why so many of us eat healthy food during the day but indulge ourselves in the evening.
Self-control requires energy, a high level of blood glucose (a type of sugar in your blood) find Gailliot and his colleagues in a study on self-control published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In a series of nine laboratory studies, they found:
“Acts of self-control reduced glucose levels, low levels of glucose after an initial self-control task predicted poor performance on a subsequent self-control task, and consuming a glucose drink after a task requiring self-control eliminated these impairments on the next self-control task.”
Self-control is like a muscle that you’re trying to strengthen. Your goal is training your brain to create good habits so you can exercise self-control even when you are tired.
So go ahead and make that New Year’s resolution. Just remember that you’re more apt to keep it if you set concrete, limited goals, change your environment and routines, and, above all, strengthen your self-control.
Judith Kleinfeld is a professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and longtime columnist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.