The Psychology Behind Resolutions — Why We Make & Break Them

Before you tell yourself you’re not going to make a resolution this year because you are tired of the trend and are “over them or have broken resolutions in the past — can I tell you what makes us want to set them to begin with?

As a human, you are inherently designed to seek out improvement to your standard of living. To reset, to reflect, to restart.

We are cyclical in nature. We even crafted our lives around natural cycles. We have seasons, and moon cycles. We mapped our understanding of time into years constructed of months, weeks and days. Days broken into hours, minutes and seconds.

We are addressing our lives, relationships, careers, health and financial matters in the ways we are made to. By experiencing our lives, assessing its measurable results or levels of satisfaction and asking questions about areas in which we feel need to change. Coming up with ideas on how we can bring about change, we formulate better systems, ask better questions, move our paths, our homes, our careers, and our choices all in the name of bringing ourselves closer in proximity to an ideal.

Perhaps its not our resolutions that are problematic, but our apathy toward the hope they speak to.

Perhaps we have a heart issue, not a habit issue.

A mindset that would hold us from ever entering into the open hearted conversation about what we truly want and what it will ask of us to get there.

It takes courage to make a resolution these days. So many in the stands, ready to criticize, point out your failure, magnify the crack in your mirror and kick dirt in your face.

By what other means will you see your new life, your hopes for the future, or your innermost desires?

As you may have experienced, last year you had many dreams that pulled your heart into asking, at the cost of your ego, to try something different.

Do those same dreams still lean dusty against the wall behind you?

I challenge you with my deepest empathy, to question the outcome of the continued preservation of your comfort. Will they still be there next year? Or worse, will they atrophy from lack of movement and fall into the shadow of long lost childhood hopes?

Don’t put away your desires another year in hopes that they will animate themselves into your life by osmosis. You are the catalyst, the cause, the fuel, the fire. Without you, your devotion, clarity, discomfort and consistency…you will bury the life you dream of with you. Or worse even still, attend the funeral of them daily in a life of mediocrity.

MAKE a resolution. Make a small one, a big one, a hard one, an easy one, a fun one. Make one that is complex and creative, make one that challenges you or forces you to feel and think in a new way. Make a simple one that pushes you enough to keep the heat of change from burning out in the atmosphere of your environment. Make one that requires you to make decisions or see things from another point of view. Make one that experiments with your personality, your thoughts, your emotions. Make one that you keep secret, and consult it like a best friend.

Do something to move the needle in the direction you want to go and then take ANY step that you will feel toward it.

Being resigned to resolutions failing is just not good enough. Its lazy, its cheap and it doesn’t unseat your desire to grow anyway. You will want to see your dream life, but be stuck with seeing it in flashes when your heart reminds you every New Year’s Eve. 365 days at 1% difference is an entirely different course on day 365. It matters what you do with today’s 1%.

We make resolutions because we have an inner knowing that will always move us to align ourselves with it. We are constantly being given direction, guidance and answers. We tend to busy ourselves with other matters, get caught up in smaller circumstances that distract and disorient us from the constant place of stability our inner being has.

We break resolutions when we come up against the gap between where we are and where we want to be when we feel the pain ahead is greater than the pain we are currently experiencing.

We bargain with ourselves that it is for noble cause, out of care or compassion for ourselves that we are relinquishing the task of improvement. We make “better” unnecessary. We lie that it is unrealistic, unreasonable, unfair, unattainable or unattractive. We tell ourselves that change is going to be bad, and that the current isn’t so bad after all. Or that our one slip, one skip and one trip isn’t going to amount to anything detrimental in the long run.

Before we know it, the water is boiling and the frog is dead. We didn’t have the hindsight to observe the rising temperature and our resolutions die from death by a thousand cuts rather than an overt resignation.

We don’t often decide all at once that we are no longer going to go after what we want. We do it in the shadows, hoping it passes by in the night without notice. We have to preserve some sense of our own BS so we can go on living without change. Otherwise, we might have to face that we no longer have any integrity with ourselves.

If we break our promise to ourselves, how readily will we break promises to others? And when we know we are one that cannot be counted on, trusted or stable, how quickly does our self-esteem begin to deteriorate?

And how easy is it to give up on someone who isn’t worth their own word? Pretty easy. The cycle fulfills itself year after year, creating a larger gap between the person who once dreamed of a happy home, financial freedom, a healthy body and a fulfilling relationship and the poor sack of excuses that maybe might try to eat less sweets.

There is not a “doing” to be done in the world of change and transformation, but an “undoing.”

We don’t need to cover ourselves with new habits, affirmations and vision boards. We need to do the opposite.

Our true identity is usually covered by these habits, beliefs and patterns of thought. When we remove the layers of false pretense, outdated identities & labels, badly defined life events, unresolved issues and hurts and poorly articulated desires, you typically don’t need to do much more than acquainting with the inner being. That alignment, is the most valuable and longstanding resource we can ever hope to develop in our lives.

With it, we naturally answer internal questions, our focus is defaulted in resonance with our desires, we become the living manifestation of our dreams OR the best leader in the way toward it.