New Year's resolutions: How to boost success rates
01 January, 2020
Do we make New Year's resolutions just to ignore them? Are they merely promises doomed to fail? In this feature, we ask whether, statistically speaking, these resolutions work, and what increases the chances of success.
New Year's resolutions are an ancient tradition that continues to this day.
The Babylonians started each year with pledges to pay debts and return borrowed items.
The Romans began their year by promising the two faced god, Janus, that they would behave better.
In modern societies, many people still promise to make changes as the new year dawns; this desire, in many cases, is fueled by the excesses of the holiday period.
Most commonly, it would seem, New Year's resolutions revolve around weight loss, quitting smoking, reducing drinking, and exercising more.
Although resolutions are popular, they are not always successful. In this article, we will dissect the evidence and answer the question: Should we bother making New Year's resolutions in 2020?
How effective are annual resolutions?
A study from 1989 tracked 200 people living in Pennsylvania as they attempted to make changes based on New Year's resolutions.
On average, the participants made 1.8 resolutions, most commonly, to stop smoking or lose weight. Less frequently, people pledged to improve relationships, and a surprisingly low 2.5% were hoping to control their drinking habits.
An impressive 77% managed to hold to their pledges for 1 week, but the success rate dropped to 19% over 2 years. Although that is a substantial drop out rate, it means that 1 in 5 of those participants achieved their goal.
Of the 77% successful resolvers, more than half slipped at least once, and, on average, people slipped 14 times across the 2 years.
A study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1988 followed the efforts of 153 New Year's resolvers who were determined to quit smoking.
At 1 month, 77% of participants had managed at least one 24-hour period of abstinence. Overall, though, the results seemed a little disappointing with the authors writing:
"Only 13% of the sample was abstinent at 1 year, and 19% reported abstinence at the 2-year follow-up."
Another study, appearing in PLOS ONE, took a more general look at behavior. The research team tracked the food shopping habits of 207 households from July 2010 to March 2011.
Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that, during the holiday period, expenditure increased by 15%. Three-quarters of this increase went on less healthful items.
Also, as expected, when January rolled around, the sale of healthful items shot up by 29.4%.
However, the sale of less healthful items did not drop in tandem with this health drive — people were buying more nutritious items, but still purchasing the same amount of unhealthful food.
Overall, the number of calories they purchased in the New Year was higher than during the holiday period. The authors conclude:
"Despite resolutions to eat more healthfully after New Year's, consumers may adjust to a new 'status quo' of increased less-health[ful] food purchasing during the holidays, and dubiously fulfill their New Year's resolutions by spending more on health[ful] foods."
The authors believe that the key to successful resolutions is to focus on replacing unhealthful items with healthful ones, rather than buying both.
That is sound advice, but not necessarily easy to implement.
Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com
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