MIND + BODY
Revive Your New Year’s Resolutions Follow these tips for successful change By Jennifer Ackerman • Illustration by Zohar Lazar
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Accept the busy, stressed person you are today. Accord-
ing to McGonigal, people often fail to make change because they imagine their future selves with Herculean powers of self-control. “Don’t wait for the efficient person who resists all temptation to show up. Take action now and understand that you’re human and you’ll have setbacks,” she says.
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Pick your battles.
Studies suggest that glucose in the bloodstream fuels willpower; when levels are low, it’s harder to stay the course. Likewise, engaging in acts of self-control all day depletes glucose. So prioritize and try to limit the number of times you need to exert your willpower each day.
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I
f you’re like millions of americans, you woke up on jan. 1
and vowed to turn over a new leaf—run three miles a day, stop smoking, lose a pound a week, save $200 a month, whatever. You vividly imagined a better you. And for a while it seemed to work. But then, come late January or early February, you stopped jogging. You snuck a cigarette. You went on a QVC spending spree. In other words, you slipped back into your old habits. It doesn’t have to be that way. Willpower is not the brute strength to resist temptation, but “the ability to do what you really want to do when part of you really doesn’t want to do it,” says Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University and the author of The Willpower Instinct. “It’s remembering what you really want, your bigger goals, in the face of your immediate desires.” And it’s a skill you can strengthen. Science may not yet have devised a surefire formula for keeping every resolution, but it has lately revealed some tips to help all of us make real and lasting change.
Rethink your environment.
“When your surroundings stay the same, so do your ingrained habits,” says Miriam Nelson, director of the John Hancock Center on Physical Activity, Nutrition, and Obesity Prevention at Tufts University. “But when you tweak your environment to make healthy choices easy, your habits automatically change.” Trying to lose weight? Get rid of the junk food and store bowls of cut-up veggies in the fridge. Looking to build muscle? Keep dumbbells in the TV room and do bicep curls while you watch.
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Start small.
“Many people are too ambitious in their goals,” says Nelson. Instead of vowing to get fit, try building a 10-minute walk into your day. “If you stick with that goal for a week, congratulate yourself and up the ante the following week.”
Anticipate challenges—the plate of cookies at the office, the fatigue that makes you want to skip the gym—and imagine how you’ll overcome them.
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Envision how you’ll achieve your goal. Visualization—
the way an Olympic athlete imagines the perfect pole vault or high dive—boosts your odds of success. A 2011 study from McGill University in Montreal found that among people who set a goal of eating more fruit, those who pictured when, where, and how they would buy, prepare, and eat it consumed twice as much as those who didn’t. By the same token, anticipate challenges— the plate of cookies at the office, the end-of-day fatigue that makes you want to skip the gym— and imagine how you’ll overcome them.
14 • February 19, 2012
© PARADE Publications 2011. All rights reserved.