Happy Quitters Day!
Make your New Year’s resolution stick longer than most by realising it is more than just for the New Year.
What is Quitters’ day
Today has been dubbed as “quitters day” because the second Friday of the year is statistically the day that the most people give up on their New Year’s resolutions.
That’s not to say that a lot of people haven’t already given up, and its not to say that there aren’t many more who still will. About a quarter of people have given up by the end of the first week, 2/3rd by the end of the first month and overall just under 1/10th of people make it to the end of the year.
Have you given up?
If not, great! But you may be starting to falter or may not realise what might be round the corner. If you have already stopped, then let’s dub today “Re-resolution Day”. Starting new plans on a day which has significance (the start of a new year), can be a helpful line in the sand in your mind. This is a helpful motivational tool BUT it only works once. Inevitably we will hit a setback and when that happens everything falls apart. It’s all or nothing, which is good, until the answer is nothing. Then we wait until next year to start again (and fail again).
What do we do now?
The first thing to recognise is that it is better to start again on 13th January and do those few extra visits to the gym, or smoke one less cigarette than to wait until 2024 because we failed in 2023. When setbacks have happened we can reset, recognise it, plan ahead and then continue on with a blemish in the record than give up completely because we haven’t managed it. Yes “I’ve done my workouts every day this year” sounds better than “I’ve worked out 23 days out of 30 this year”, but that still better than “I started off doing them everyday but I haven’t done them recently” which happens more often.
You might be the lucky one, where nothing gets in the way of you maintaining your 100% record and you can keep it going, but the chances are you’re not. So when that happens, do we allow that to stop us completely because “I’ve failed now anyway” or do we reset and learn from the things that stopped us to make it more likely we can keep it up in future?
Check out follow up posts that I have done to see how we can make keeping these habits more likely (I will add them as they’re added):
Yes “I’ve done my workouts every day this year” sounds better than “I’ve worked out 23 days out of 30 this year”, but that is better than “I started off doing them every day but I haven’t done them for a while” which happens more often!
Happy Re-resolution Day, lets start again together and get our “not quite perfect” adherence to our resolutions back up and running instead of accepting “that’s it for this year”!
Let me know what your resolution is for this year in the comments and what things you find difficult about keeping up the habit so that future posts can answer some of those issues.