Let’s just start out with a stat that few people will probably believe, but I double and triple checked it. This paragraph or the next does NOT include that stat. Be patient. I’ll get there. We need a backdrop.
Approximately 40-50% of Americans will make a New Year’s Resolution this year. That means that out of 330,000,000 people in this country, between 132,000,000 and 165,000,000 will make New Year’s Resolutions. For now, we will ignore the overzealous crazies that make multiple resolutions this year. We’ll just pretend all of those people will make only one each.
Now for the crazy stat. 88% of those people who make a New Year’s Resolution will fail. And a craziER stat: The people who will walk in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and resolve to quit drinking in 2019 will have roughly the same success rate. I found numbers anywhere from 5% to 15%, but none of them are all that dependable because of the anonymity of the program. Regardless, it’s probably about right and a twelve percent success rate is absolutely believable.
That means that your resolution to limit the number of cake pops you eat this year has the same success rate as a guy who has ruined his life, lost his marriage, can’t get a job, has no shot at reconciliation with the children that disowned him, and reuses Spaghettio cans for bowls because alcohol wiped him out.
But what exactly does that tell us? For me, it says a LOT. And in the end, it tells me that New Year’s Resolutions – as they are currently marketed – will have a much better success rate if you treat it like a New LIFE Resolution, not just one that you hope to knock out this year. You know, kinda like a successful former addict. And the reason the success rate should be higher is that, in theory, your typical New Year’s Resolution should be easier than ending an addiction. That might not be the case for every person, but it’s a legitimate theory. Here’s five things to think about:
The Triviality of Some New Year’s Resolutions
The first thing we have to remember here is that one person’s life-altering change is another person’s “Who gives a rat’s ass?” For example, somebody is no doubt going to resolve to lose twenty pounds this year. At some point in the first few weeks, they are going to be chatting with a friend and that friend is going to say, “But it’s a Super Bowl party. Who gives a damn if you have a few hundred cheat calories?”
To somebody, your New Year’s Resolution is meaningless. You absolutely MUST remember that. (Think about an alcoholic at the same Super Bowl party whose “friend” says, “Come on, man, it’s just one beer.”) If you consider what they say and it affects your thoughts on your resolution, then it suddenly can become meaningless to you. Or, at the very least, it has a little less meaning. When you slowly chip away at why it was meaningful to you, you won’t remember why and it’ll soon be forgotten. Resolution failed.
Obviously, weight loss is not a trivial resolution to most people. When people make that resolution, it is because they are negatively impacted by the mental beating they give themselves because of their weight. It is FAR from trivial. But an 88% failure rate has cheapened the weight loss resolutions, and most likely it has affected the ability to charge into this resolution with complete positivity.
My opinion on this is that most trivial resolutions have become cheapened because of lack of preparation or lack of anger. If we go back to the cake pop example, you truly have to think through what that resolution means from a preparation standpoint and how it will affect you on a daily or hourly basis. You also have to consider how and why it has angered you enough to make this important enough to resolve to control it. This is the addict mindset. It’s actually a great way to think through any and every resolution.
One of the first things they tell you at AA is to change “people, places, and things.” Get away from the people you drink with, stop going to places where you drank, and get rid of all the “things” that you associated with drinking.
Now apply that to cake pops. For the entirety of 2018, you got a cake pop every time you went to Starbucks. You went there twice a week. Mostly you went with your daughter because she was a precious little angel that did well in school and you rewarded her with cake pops. So now you have to stop going to Starbucks. You might even have to stop drinking coffee altogether for a while. You have to find another way to reward your daughter for her super grades.
No matter how trivial the resolution is, temptation and outside influence will most likely destroy any chance you had at succeeding. You’re in control of both of those things because you allow them to affect you. You can’t let them control you. Easier said than done, I know.
Prior Success
There’s really no need to spend a lot of time on this one. There’s no gray area or conditions that must be met. It’s as simple as this: If you have succeeded at resolutions before, you have a MUCH better chance at succeeding this year. If you have failed every time, chances are you will fail this time. And that means that if you go into January 1 and you make a resolution, but you have not changed anything about your approach from years past, you WILL fail again.
And yes, that statement lacks support. Whatever. It’s true. I look at this from the standpoint of an addict. We addicts tried to quit forty-two thousand times and we tried the exact same way every time. It wasn’t until we changed everything about us, starting with our approach and leading with a MUCH stronger hatred for failing again, that we succeeded. And just so you know, you don’t succeed just once with beating an addiction. You succeed every single damn day. Prior success helps you learn how to do that.
Commitment and Accountability
Who are you accountable to with your resolution? In the cake pop scenario, who gets upset if you fail? Who is disappointed if you fail? If it’s only you, there is a really, really good chance that you will fail. This is not rocket science, and if you are anything like me, you’re about as dependable as gas station toilet paper. Not only that, you have an uncanny ability to rationalize the hell out of your failure. And this rationalization can actually take shape as a good deed, like you have actually done yourself a favor by failing.
This is why twelve step programs require you to get a “sponsor,” because you are a manipulative liar and you don’t really have the ability all by yourself to succeed at anything you resolve to stop doing or change.
So if you are heading into a resolution of something far too trivial for a support group, find a way (and another person or group) to hold yourself accountable. And if you can’t find a better way to succeed, you can always find a person who will take your money and never give it back if you fail. In other words, give somebody two hundred bucks, and if you fail, they get to keep it. Just an idea.
Mental Toughness versus Mental Problems
Allow me to paint you a picture of my wife and I for the past month. This should illustrate the difference between mental toughness and mental problems.
My wife is 38 weeks pregnant, meaning that a month ago she was 34 weeks pregnant. She is very, very pregnant. No matter. Five or six days a week, she has awoken at 5:30 in order to go walk three miles before everybody leaves the house, because she wants nothing more than to stay in as good a shape as possible leading up to this baby making his or her appearance. Even though she often says, “I feel like this baby is about to fall out,” the nutty woman still walks three miles every day. She’s crazy.
She has not necessarily dieted, but she doesn’t snack a great deal either. She eats what she needs to keep her satisfied and the baby healthy. There hasn’t been a day that has passed that she has not taken her prenatal vitamins, checked on the heartbeat, been completely anal about germs, and whatever else is necessary to be a good steward of that little life she carries. This is a woman who needs a New Year’s Resolution about as much as she needs to be tied into a pretzel.
I, on the other hand, have a heart condition that I inherited from my mom’s side of the family. It isn’t as severe as others in my family, but it is definitely limiting. The thing is, however, I proved this summer that I can control it’s severity on my life by controlling my diet. If I eat all natural foods, eliminate sugars, dairy, and gluten, and exercise daily, I can almost completely eliminate all symptoms of the heart condition and feel like I am twenty again.
Instead of doing this, I ingest approximately half a gallon of sweet tea per day, don’t give a rat’s ass about my caloric or fat intake, snack after 8:00 every single night, and allow myself daily to hate my weight and health. But I keep right on eating unhealthy shit and not giving a damn.
Do you see the difference in mental toughness and mental problems? Be the former.
The Repercussions of Failure
This is very similar to commitment and accountability, but it’s deeper. This is the one that affects you long term. If you fail at your New Year’s Resolution, it will require some tough questions before it happens and some tough realizations after it’s over.
The questions you ask yourself prior to failure are things like this: If not now, when? Are cake pops more important than the money savings or the calorie savings? How will I feel about myself if I give in? Who will I disappoint if I fail? Blah, blah, and a hundred more.
The repercussions of failure are much tougher in the aftermath. Most of the time – and this is most definitely speaking from experience – the moment you cave is like a hundred orgasms on a bed of money in the land of Utopia. It’s just amazing in every conceivable way. The next day, you’re standing at the gates of hell with a bear trap securely clamped around your ass and you’re crying to some imaginary new god hoping they can send you a time machine because you now hate yourself.
But I don’t know. That might have just been me.
These repercussions are serious, though. They truly can be long-lasting. Obviously the failures of an addict can be a little more severe than our cake pop addiction, but enough failures can make a person feel like a very talented failure. There have been very few days in my life that I have not felt like a failure. It’s not fun. But I can tell you one thing. I am better than I was eighteen months ago. I proved I could beat something, even if I’m forced to prove it every single day. Little victories can mean a lot.
Not only that, those little victories can add up. They can inspire you to want more little victories. They can expose themselves in the form of new dreams and aspirations that repetitive failures shielded from you.
The vastness of personalities on this planet are as vast as the resolutions people might make, and that means failure might not have the same level of severity to each person, but there is one very simple way of looking at this.
If a New Year’s Resolution is important enough to make, it is important enough to succeed at it. If that thing is to stop drinking, I can give you one more understated thought. Success will never be bad. Failure will never be good. Simple as that.
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