Why New Year Resolutions Don’t Work

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions?
Join a gym on January 2^nd?
Throw away cartons of cigarettes, candy, cookies and whatever else you might hope to remove from your life?

… and then around January 15^th,
or March 1at (if you’re lucky) it’s all a memory?

Maybe not. But if you do, here are five possible reasons why.

1. Because you’ve done it before, and have entirely negative associations with your January 1^st resolutions. You’ve become used to failing at them, you may even expect to; at least on an unconscious level.
2. You have no real strategy. You may join a gym but you have not sat down and worked out exactly when you’re going to get there, made an appointment with a trainer, set up a schedule, and developed a long term strategy.
3. You have not made yourself accountable, or if you have it’s with people with whom you have shared your New Year’s Resolutions before, and who have come to expect you to fail at them. Of course, expectations like that are contagious.
4. You’ve set yourself up using negative associations – lose weight, stop smoking, stop doing this or that, abstaining, ceasing, and desisting. It would be better to imagine your future year by using positive terms and associations.
5. Deep changes can’t be accomplished by an act of will alone. Something inside must change too. My work as a hypnotherapist in Los Angeles – World capital of New Year Resolutions (just kidding, I have no idea!) -  tells me that people change when they start identifying internally with the new behavior, and with their new self. Then the steps to get there are simply a question of time and strategy.

The first few days of January are not necessarily the best time to implement new behaviors and habits. Then again, it’s never a bad time to make positive changes to your life, through hypnosis, or by whichever means you choose.