7 psychological tricks to get your New Year's resolutions
A new year arrives and, with it, something inevitable: the illusion of a new beginning , the desire to undertake projects that make us improve as people and break with the problems of the past, the desire to leave behind habits that we do not like ...
In short, the New Year's resolutions come.
What New Year's resolutions are you going to mark yourself?
To what extent these exciting ideas are more fanciful or more realistic, depend more on us, our capabilities and the desire that we put. However, there is another factor to consider: the possibility of using what we know about the human mind to make our new goals easier to reach.
Or what is the same, the option to know and apply certain psychological tricks to face in the best conditions the challenges that will come.
Here you have 7 keys that will help you to be a little closer to that "me" of the future in which you want to become.
1. Specify your objectives
It is usual to create new year resolutions that are too abstract or ambiguous to be persecuted. For example, desires like "I want to be freer" or "I'm going to learn more" tend to be nothing because we do not even know what specific goals we should reach. What is free? What do we want to learn?
That's why it's important that, right from the start, let's have clear, rather concrete goals . This, on the one hand, will make us have consistent objectives over time (which will allow us to approach them and not other "distractions") and, on the other, will make it possible to assess as objectively as possible If we have fulfilled our New Year's resolutions or not.
2. Create intervals
In the previous point we talked about the importance of detailing as much as possible the objectives or sub-objectives we want to reach. However, once this is done, we can transform these concrete goals into intervals with a maximum value and another minimum that marks what we consider acceptable. For example, If we want to lose weight, it is better to set the sub-goal of losing between 1.2 kg, and 0.8 kg every two weeks to set the goal of losing 1 kg. biweekly.
This is because there is evidence that if we set goals in intervals, we perceive them as something more achievable and more motivating.
3. Plan short-term goals
This step, in fact, serves to not always leave for tomorrow the tasks that, to achieve your purposes of the new year, you must start today . That will be an almost irresistible temptation if you do not set intermediate goals (between your current situation and the end of the year that begins) at very specific times of the calendar, but if you divide your personal development plans into several pieces and you are causing them to be distributed in small daily or weekly goals, you will have much easier to meet your goals.
For that, nothing like doing well established schedules and set short deadlines to reach your small personal goals.
4. Use a physical calendar
Having a physical calendar and placing it in a place that you see very often is important because ... it is more important to run away from it! If your calendar is digital, you can probably only see it if you want, by clicking on certain buttons. Instead, a calendar on paper with annotations and dates marked with garish colors is harder to ignore . Even if you want to do it.
5. Start now with your new year plan
Several studies suggest that the end of the year night and the first days of January are a unique date to start seriously with your projects. The reason is that in this small period of time, and not in another, people tend to consider that we have changed by the fact of having gone through that time frontier that is New Year's Eve and, therefore, we think it is easier to "unlearn old habits and adopt others while we are in those days.
It is something like a window of opportunity that opens in our calendar and that could make us less inclined to resist change. Possibly this also happens on a longer time scale: according to an investigation, people with an age whose last digit ends in 9 (29, 39, etc.) they have a greater desire to undertake new projects and give a new meaning to their lives .
Knowing this is important, because even if it is something to some extent irrational and unconscious, we can take advantage of it in a very rational way. The method is simple: if during we are predisposed to stop thinking about ourselves as people chained to their habits, it is better to start adopting new habits at that moment and not in another.This will make the transition to this new way of behaving more comfortable and more likely to come to fruition.
6. Take advantage of the group pressure
In the field of psychology, it has long been known that the group pressure is able to raise our capacity to strive in a very significant way . For example, psychological therapy programs for smoking cessation are usually more successful if performed in group sessions, and the performance of athletes also improves when they strive alongside other people who do the same, although theoretically they are not competing between yes.
That is why it is a good idea to share your New Year's resolutions with other people and that they do the same in turn, to share the aspirations of each one. This will create a kind of contract around these promises that will be harder to break and will keep us away from the tantalizing possibility of throwing in the towel.
7. Make an assessment of the year that has passed
This part may seem less exciting and exciting than the task of setting goals and imagining the future that is to come, but it is also very necessary. Why? Why allows us to make sense of the idea of proposing new year goals , or what is the same, to make the moment in which a new period of our lives begins to see as something interesting the option of setting ourselves again new objectives, being accustomed to take this as a serious and important project.
In addition, of course, this will allow us to see our progress in certain areas of personal development, which is very motivating and will make us want to face the challenges that are to come.
