Why Most People FAIL New Year's Resolutions....

Now, today I want to talk a little bit about New Year's resolutions. And seeing as this is a channel all about setting and achieving goals, you'd probably think that I'd be supportive of anyone taking on a resolution this year. However, the problem is that oftentimes New Year's resolutions are more harmful than they are beneficial, so you might be better off just not making them at all. Let me explain. It may seem counterintuitive, but according to Carleton University's psychology professor Timothy Pitchell, setting goals around New Year's can actually be a form of cultural procrastination. Cultural procrastination is an act of avoiding difficult tasks by finding endless distractions and excuses. Pitchell states many people aren't ready to break from old habits, so they use New Year's resolutions as a form of telling themselves they'll get to it in the new year, and then the next new year, or the year after that. Cultural procrastination is one of the main reasons only 8% of people actually achieve their New Year's resolutions, and this can be quite problematic for the other 92% who come up short. Quitting smoking, spending less, eating less. These goals are based around addressing negative perceptions that we have about our own lives, and when we come up short in remedying those things, we tend to devalue our self-worth and oftentimes double down on those vices that we're trying to fix. Tying a goal around a single date in the year prepares us to try and take on that goal in a single running charge, and in doing so we make our chance at success almost impossible. According to science, breaking away from bad habits and succeeding at long-term goals requires us to actually rewire our brains. Neuroscientists Antonio Deemson and Joseph Ledoux used MRIs to evaluate how people make decisions. What they found was that our brains create neural pathways that direct how we make decisions. Trying to block these pathways by simply willing ourselves not to do something actually just causes that desire to build up. Success is only reached when we create new pathways through continuous habit. So, rather than giving up when we hit failure, our goal should be to keep failing, but fail better than that time before, until we can form new neural pathways and change our long-term behavior. So, what should we do if we still want to give New Year's resolutions a try? Well for starters, try picking goals that give you a positive incentive. For instance, rather than picking the goal of wanting to lose weight, pick something like, I want to become passionate about running or cycling or I want to run my first 5k race. Things with positive incentives are going to give you more long-term motivation and in the end be more effective. Number two, set short-term goals that are measurable and you can keep yourself accountable with. And finally, consider not starting your goals right on January 1st. Most often people fail their goals because they don't have a clear and set plan that they can follow and keep themselves accountable with. So, rather than starting January 1st, start March or April and take January and February to plan a strategic route that you can take and crush your 2017 goals. Anyways guys, I hope you liked that video. If you did, make sure to smash that like button and if you want to see more content like this, make sure to subscribe down below. Just a heads up, this video is a re-upload from last year, thus the 2016-2017 calendar and talking about that. But, I figured it would be helpful with a lot of people picking goals and resolutions for 2018. I myself am planning my goals and what I want to achieve in 2018. If you have some picked out, make sure to leave them in the comments below because I need some inspiration and I would love to see what you guys are hoping to achieve in 2018. Brendan, my brother, is getting into town in two days I think and as soon as he gets here we're going to be nose to the grindstone, planning videos, working on videos together and really trying to take this channel to the next level as we go into 2018. I hope you guys have a stellar holiday season and I will catch y'all in the next one. Cheers.