Could Your New Year Spirit Be Working Against You and Your Resolutions?
Beware of “false hope syndrome”
“It’s January 1”, my former boss said. “So what?”
Many people revel in the high of yet another new year — but not him. Despite being an optimistic, goal-driven person, he didn’t bother with grand resolutions. He also questioned the extraordinary hype around self-change — and perhaps for good reason.
It’s a well-known statistic that approximately 80% of resolutions fail by February. Last year, fitness app Strava ran the data on 800 million activities and predicted that people quit their goals as early as January 19 — a date the company coined “Quitter’s Day.” Indeed, what is the fuss about making resolutions if it seems to be a lost cause for many?
It turns out that all that fuss may very well be the cause of our downfall. According to University of Toronto researcher J Polivy, when people dream about self-change, that resolve “appears to promote a sense of control, which may contribute to elevated expectations of success.”
Enter the phenomenon called the false hope syndrome. Polivy explains that as admirable it may be to dream big and aspire to change, such high hopes often lead us to ask too much from ourselves and too soon, or to underestimate how tough the journey…
