Small new year’s resolutions more likely to be kept and achieved, Deakin University researcher says

BREAKING your new year’s resolutions down into manageable chunks is the key to keeping them going strong for the whole year, a Deakin University researcher says.

Breaking your new year’s resolutions down into small manageable chunks is the key to keeping them, according to a Deakin researcher.

BREAKING your new year’s resolutions down into manageable chunks is the key to keeping them going strong for the whole year, a Deakin University researcher says.

Senior philosophy lecturer Patrick Stokes suggested that when it came to selecting a new year’s resolution, it paid to be realistic and incorporate small goals or milestones.

“If you break large goals into little chunks, you get to have a little moment of victory when you’ve achieved each smaller goal,” Dr Stokes said.

“If your goal is just to get fit, for example, break that down into little milestones — I’ll be doing 10 laps by February, 20 laps by April, etc. — rather than just comparing yourself to an end goal.

“This kind of storytelling and focus on intermediate ­stages might help to make the whole thing a little more manageable and a little more comprehensible rather than simply trying to identify with some distant future state.”

According to Dr Stokes, making radical wholesale changes is much harder.

“I think for the most part, really big transformative changes are not all that possible for people because at some point that becomes almost identity-destroying,” he said.

“It almost evolves into the desire to be a completely different person and that ­becomes almost incoherent.

“Smaller changes make a bit more sense as they have some purchase on you as you are now rather than being this radically different envisioned state.

“In terms of identifying with your future self, it’s probably easier if that future self is not too different from the self you are now.”

Dr Stokes says resolutions are part of how we make sense of our past by relating it to an imagined future.

“You could say new year’s resolutions are really about narrative control. They’re about trying to turn your life from a bunch of stuff that more or less just happens, into a structured and coherent whole, a story in which you’re hero and narrator,” he said.

But Dr Stokes said the problem with resolutions was the knowl­edge you were free to break them.

“But even if you’ve ended up breaking them all by February, resolutions at least help to give you an idea of what you care about and what you see as being within your power and responsibility,” he said.

Originally published as Small new year’s resolutions more likely to be kept and achieved, Deakin University researcher says