The Difference Between Wishes and Resolutions

by Melissa Petro

Around 50 percent of the population make resolutions each new year. Three quarters of us are promising ourselves we’ll lose weight, quit smoking and exercise more regularly. We also want to better manage our money and reduce our debt. The fourth most popular New Year’s resolution is to “Enjoy life to the fullest.” A UK study conducted in 2007 and involving 3,000 people showed that 88 percent of those who set New Year’s resolutions fail.

Year after year, my New Year’s resolutions remain the same: stay in shape, and keep eating right. Easy for me to say: I’ve been working out regularly for years and am one of those strange people that actually enjoys eating vegetables and whole grains (probably because we didn’t have a lot of these things in my house when I was growing up). I have a much harder time making and keeping resolutions that have anything to do with the actual things in my life that could use improvement. More meaningful friendships, financial security, career goals that as of yet escape me — these things feel more like wishes than “resolutions,” airy visions to fantasize about as I am drifting off to sleep. I don’t make resolutions about these things because I don’t like to fail. I don’t make promises I can’t keep.

The “five stages of change” are: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. If you’re making a New Year’s resolution, you’re in the contemplation stage. As you begin educating yourself, gathering information, and making a plan, you’ve begun to prepare. Interestingly, statistical evidence suggests that what your resolution is has nothing to do with whether you’ll be successful or not. According to researchers, successful New Year’s “resolutors” are those among us that take practical steps towards accomplishing their goal, versus those of us that simply rely on what one researcher termed “consciousness raising strategies.”

In other words, dream boards are pretty much bullshit. To get something done, experts agree: you’ve got to do something.

In some cultures (France, for instance) procrastination is considered a moral failing and is less of a social issue as a result; but in a culture such as ours — one obsessed with image, self invention and reinvention — contemplation without action goes unchallenged and is, some might say, even encouraged. New Year’s resolutions began as a religious tradition that involved seeking and offering forgiveness through repentance and sacrifice after reflecting on one’s wrongdoing over the past year; but the present-day, secularized tradition of New Year’s resolutions seems more like a kind of procrastination. Timothy Pychyl, an expert on procrastination, describes it as a form of self-deception. Most New Year’s resolutions are more performative than an honest effort to reinvent oneself made by someone who’s not truly ready to change, Pychyl contends, thus accounting for their high failure rate.

The typical New Year’s resolution may be less like a goal and more like aspirational thinking, sort of like the “selfie” that resembles us but in reality looks nothing like us. We build these images of ourselves that we like to hold near and dwell on to make us feel better about ourselves, even as these images are totally unrealistic, unattainable and unearned. Clinging to such avatars may put us at ease, but it could potentially do more harm than good. Setting unrealistic goals or repeating affirmations you don’t actually believe as possible can damage your self esteem; overconfidence breeds false hope, which engenders inflated expectations of success and eventually the misery of defeat. A New Year’s resolution can stand in the way of seeing the difference between the life you’re living and the life you want, and keep you from going for the latter.

Contrary to how we’re often encouraged to think, experts argue against making New Year’s resolutions that are specific and measurable and time-bound, suggesting that instead, we keep goals more general and that we recognize habit-breaking as a process, rather than an event. Doing so will tap into our intrinsic motivation, they say, and encourages collaboration rather than competition. According to behavioral psychologist Peter Herman, it does not help that we overestimate other people’s successes and what’s possible. Herman also cautions that we be aware that succeeding at one’s goal (losing weight, for example) might mean failing at what we thought would go with that (changes in your life that fail to materialize even after achieving that goal — a new career, improvements to one’s personal life, improved health, whatever). If self-change occurs, it will do so incrementally, adding up slowly to bigger results — sometimes results beyond our wildest wishes, and not always what we had in mind.

Self-efficacy — a concept developed and studied by Albert Bandura, PhD, of Stanford University, which is defined as a measure of personal belief in one’s ability to succeed at something (in this case, to succeed at changing ingrained habits) — is also recognized to be an important predictor of resolution success. To successfully make or break a bad habit or otherwise accomplish a goal, we need to change our actions, not just our thinking. If you want to make a resolution, go ahead and make one. I just did.

Every year, just below the list of things I easily accomplish is the one New Year’s resolution I have yet to make true: every year I make a secret New Year’s resolution to find a publisher for my book, and every year I fail. Why? Well, for starters, writing a book — let alone publishing one — was for years, for me, an overly ambitious goal. In the past three years I’ve taken slow steps towards establishing myself as a working writer — improving my craft, establishing a platform, meeting contacts and learning how the industry works — all of which has made my goal of becoming a published author more feasible. And yet, publishing a book still feels like something out of reach. Fear of failure keeps me from trying. I don’t dare to reach for things not in my control. Book deals, even modest ones, are the kind of thing that happens to other people, not me. Not yet. Maybe next year. Or, maybe next year is now.

Melissa Petro is a freelance writer and writing instructor living in New York City.