Need help fulfilling your New Year’s resolutions?
You’ve come to the right place – I went six for eight on New Year’s resolutions last year, batting a solid 0.750. It helped that I kept those resolutions simple, like eating more beans and finishing the year with more money in the bank than I started with, but on the whole it’s encouraged me to go a little bigger this year.
I’ve realized that you can’t change who you are or stop the habitual things that you do overnight – human beings are just not programmed that way.
A new study from Washington University in St. Louis found that it’s incredibly hard to break old habits because it’s hard to unlearn our learned behaviours. For example, while nicotine may be physically addictive, most smokers can’t quit because the act of smoking has become automatic – a programmed response to a need or a situation that’s ingrained in a smoker’s memory. To drop a habit, you have to change your association with it, and reinforce that new association every day.
A specific example: if you equate smoking with a feeling of satisfaction, breaks at work, relief from stress, driving, getting out of bed, or consuming alcohol, then you’re going to crave a cigarette every time you’re satisfied, on break stressed out, behind the wheel, waking up in the morning or going out for a beer.
On the other hand, if you equate smoking with lung cancer, heat disease and standing outside in the freezing rain, you’re developing a healthy negative association – part of the reason graphic warnings on cigarette packs and tobacco laws that make smokers go outside are so effective.
If those associations doesn’t work, you may have to make your associations with smoking even more negative. If someone punched you in the crotch every time you lit a cigarette or took a drink of alcohol or put $50 down on the Bears to win, you’d kick your habit in a matter of days. I’m not suggesting anything that drastic, just that you have to make an association bad enough for you to want to quit, and everyone’s threshold is different.
Keeping that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of websites to help you keep some of the most common New Year’s resolutions. Good luck!
Smoking
Your first stop is The Truth www.thetruth.com, a militant anti-smoking site. You’ve probably seen their ads, but the website is chock full of facts about the industry, health statistics on smokers, and generally disturbing information – if you’re looking for a negative association, they’ve got it.
If you need help quitting and staying a non-smoker, the National Health Service in the U.K.,www.givingupsmoking.co.uk has created a good site with lots of helpful advice for people looking to kick the habit. Health Canada also has a pretty good site at www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hecs-ses/tobacco/quitting/.
Start at these sites and see your doctor before you start any treatment that involves drugs, gums, patches, or herbs.
Lose weight
A lot of us could probably stand to shed a few pounds, but the habits that made us gain all that weight in the first place are not easy to break. Fitness is about adopting healthy lifestyle, not drastic changes through fad diets and exercises. You have to shed yourself of unhealthy habits and learn some good habits before you can lose any weight.
Health Canada also has some good advice on what constitutes healthy living these days at www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/lifestyles/ – how much exercise to get, what kind of foods to eat, those kinds of thing.
Another good site to learn about foods and nutrition is the American Dietetic Association at www.eatright.org. The Canadian equivalent would be the Dietitians of Canada at www.dietitians.ca.
Exercise is easier – Health Canada recommends a minimum hour of physical activity a day for optimal physical health. This can be almost anything, although I suspect the main problem for most people is finding time, rather than finding an activity they’d like to do. It’s hard to get up early and exercise, and people are generally too tired after work. Still, you’re going to have to either suck it up or find a way to exercise on your lunch break if you’re serious about losing weight.
Saving money
This is probably the toughest of all the common New Year’s resolutions.
Economizing is a lot harder than you think. For example, if you put $2,000 on your credit card one year at 18 per cent annual interest, you’ll have to cut $2,000 plus interest out of your budget the following year just to get back to zero. That’s why so many Canadians have fallen into the credit trap, and why it gets harder and harder to climb your way out.
Saving equals sacrifice – to get ahead these days you have to go without by buying second-hand clothes, brown bagging your lunches, staying home when you’d rather go out, cutting your expenses, and prioritizing your needs.
Bankruptcy is always the last option, but there are some good suggestions for reducing your debt at www.bankruptcycanada.com/debtfree1.htm. Another good site is the Motley Fool at www.fool.co.uk/debt/articles/tips.htm.
Once you’re out of debt, saving money means doing the same things you had to do to get back to zero. The Internet has lots of advice about how to save your cheddar, most of it obvious, but sometimes you need to hear it anyway. Check out the extensive list of ideas at www.free-financial-advice.net/save-money.html.
