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Have you ever toasted in a new year -- be it over New Year’s champagne or your birthday candles -- and thought, this is the year everything changes?
Have you ever sat down on such occasions and sorted through all of the aspects of your life and identified ways you could improve in every last one of them, starting tomorrow?
On these occasions, have you found yourself pledging to lose 10 pounds AND finally stick to a budget AND start saying no more to people’s requests on your time, to that second glass of wine, to brainless television?
Turns out, you may have been setting yourself up for failure.
Be a Selective Goal Setter
A large body of research suggests that self-control is like a mental muscle. And just like a muscle, its capacity is limited. You can wear it out in a certain block of activities and it will be weak and listless when you try to use it again too soon.
One example from this body of research is a study that showed that participants who used self-control to eat a radish rather than an enticing chocolate give up more quickly on a difficult problem they were given to solve immediately afterward. It is as if they wore out their self-control muscle on the food choice and then had little energy to spare for the problem solving.
And it appears this plays out in real life, too: Substantial research has extended this finding into examinations of dieting, spending patterns, acts of aggression when provoked, sexuality, and decision making.
This isn’t to suggest that you should give up on goal-setting. Rather, focusing your efforts on one aspect of your life at a time is much more likely to yield a satisfying result than the wholesale life makeover approach.
More happy news: also like a muscle, you can train up on self-control with small and repeated exercises. More on this next week!
Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Ph.D., is professor of psychology in affective science at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. To learn more about her research, please visit LacasaEdu.com.
From: Why You May Want to Put Your Resolution In the Form of a Question - Whole Living Daily : Whole Living | 12/30/10 at 12:01 pm
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