THE YEAR OF HIGH HOPES
It’s like a yearly last hurrah, the way we spend the Christmas week, which is immediately followed by the yearend, the New Year in other words.
For many of us, it’s that dramatic: Eat all the red meat you want, drink as much as you can, smoke ‘til you can’t take it anymore, party every night around Christmastime in preparation for the year to come, in which you resolve to do without them. That’s how many of us arrive at our New Year’s resolutions.
The good news was, based on a Social Weather Station (SWS) survey conducted in 2017, 96 percent of Filipinos, an all-time high, entered 2018 with high hopes.
Filipinos have always been optimistic about the New Year. When SWS first made the survey in 2000, it started at 87 percent, going up to 88 percent in 2001 and jumping to 95 percent in 2002. It has since stayed at 90s levels, dropping only to 89 percent in 2009 but recovering quickly at 93 percent in 2010.
In the same 2017 survey, however, of the 46 percent of Filipinos who made New Year’s resolutions for that year, only six percent said that all or almost all of their resolutions had been fulfilled.
An earlier US survey by Salt Lake City-based international management firm Franklin Covey found that four out of five people who make New Year’s resolutions would eventually break them. In fact, a third of them would have forgotten about these resolutions by the end of January.
It only goes to show that if we must make resolutions at all, in the hope that we are not just wasting our time, we must do it with a little less drama and a lot more practicality. Keep the end goal in
mind: This year, 2019, has to be better than the one before it and you ought to be better in it.
In an informal survey we held for this issue, the top resolutions have to do with the desire to keep things simpler, reflecting goals so simple yet so luxurious in the context of today’s technology-driven life — quality sleep, for instance, or physical health, slowing down and being “in the moment,” and more time with family and friends.
Whatever your resolutions are, aim for what is doable. You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself and sometimes that’s enough, if only because that is all you can do. With hope, everyone else can keep this in mind and succeed in their resolutions to improve their lives where it matters.
If you are serious about your goals, make them specific and concrete. It’s not enough, for example, to want to sleep better. Resolve to be in bed at a certain hour, identify how many hours of sleep you want daily, and do it. Also, measure your progress. Keep a sleep journal or, better yet, buy yourself one of those wearable activity trackers with sleep monitoring features. This New Year’s gift should mean more to you than the Christmas gift you gave yourself, if you do want 2019 to be better, if only in the sleep department.
That’s the other point: Your New Year’s resolution must really mean a lot to you, not to your friends, not to your boss, not to society, not to the mood of the moment, not because it’s trendy.
Also, give yourself a deadline against which to measure either your progress or your failure. If you find yourself failing at a certain point, then find a way to reverse the failure. See a sleep doctor, for example, or try sleep meditation. It’s not called a resolution for nothing. It does take resolve.
Lastly, aim to form a habit. In the 1960s, American cosmetic surgeon wrote in his book Psycho-Cybernetics that, based on a pattern he had observed among his patients, “it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.” From this observation arose the myth that it only takes 21 days to form a habit. It’s not true because it may take more than that—or less. In fact, in a newer study conducted by British psychologist Philippa Lally, it is said that a habit can be formed anywhere between 18 days and 254 days or more.
But don’t let this discourage you. A habit starts to form as soon as you start forming it and as long as you keep doing it, it gets you to a better place. Don’t worry too much about failing at one point. If you fail today, just do it tomorrow. Try and try until you succeed. Enjoy the process. This is the best way to make any resolution work. Make life better every day.