Why Setting New Year Resolutions Isn't Working for You and What To Do Instead
Around this time of year, you hear a lot about New Years Resolutions. Personally, I am not a huge fan of the idea of a resolution because I believe it puts pressure on people. What I have seen is that a lot of people end up breaking it in the first few weeks or so and then just say, “forget it”, or they use other words to suggest abandoning it.
However, the idea behind recentering and focusing on what you want for the year to come and beyond is a great idea. In lieu of the resolution, my wife and I have adopted taking the first couple days or week to create a sort of vision board around our focus for the new year. It is often full of pictures that we use to symbolize what we want to focus on. It can have words or other things attached to it as well, mine often has numbers around an amount I want in my bank account or to save for certain things I may want. There is always something grand on it too. For instance, every year since I started training to get a pilot certificate, I have picture of plane on mine because one day I want to own a plane of my own.
The beauty of the vision board over the resolution is that you hang it in an area that you will see it every day. So, you aren’t just setting a singular goal on December 31st and trying to hold on to that goal as long as you can, but instead you are focused on doing something each day for the goal. It takes the pressure off feeling like it is an all or none proposition.
What this does to the brain is that it activates a different area. When you make a resolution, for that instant you are using multiple parts of your brain. One of those main areas is the right prefrontal cortex. This is a very important part of the brain. It is what allows us to see the big picture, connect to others, it controls our stress and connects us to something bigger than just ourselves and our problems. But then, when in the form of the resolution, you stop using that right prefrontal cortex and instead it becomes a sort of ultimatum. If your resolve is strong and you have great will power, you can use the resolution as motivation coming from deeper centers in the brain like the limbic centers or emotional brain. Basically, it becomes a dopamine hit. You make it one day of the resolution, your brain feels good about that and releases dopamine. You make it another day and the same thing happens. This is working on the reward system and using fear and reward as motivation.
At first this doesn’t seem that bad, but then when you realize the neurophysiology of that is the same as addiction, you might stop and say wait a minute. You see that is the same pathway that drives addictive behavior. And if you know anything about addiction it takes more and more of something to feel good. This can result in obsessive behavior around something that was a great idea in the beginning, and worst of all, when you do reach the resolution it won’t feel good any more because the brain will still be responding to the dopamine.
You see as much as dopamine is our reward chemical in our brain, it is activated when we WANT something, not when we get it. So, you will continue to want more and more, never reaching that good feeling. That is addiction in nutshell.
The opposite is true with the vision board. When you have a clear picture of something you want and do put the pressure on yourself to perform every day, it allows you dream about it and start to imagine yourself having the object of your desire. This activates that right prefrontal cortex again and allows you to start unconsciously doing things throughout your day to draw the things nearer to you until they just kind of show up in front of you. Ever hear of the law of attraction? This is the how the neuroscience of it works. Ever buy a new car, and now that is like the only car you see on the road. Like they had a huge sale and the day you bought yours, everyone else bought it too. Well in most cases it wasn’t a huge sale, but your focus and awareness shifted unconsciously. You now start to see the things you think about. This seemingly draws all those cars to you to notice but in reality, it is your concentration and focus that has changed. That focus and concentration is also the right prefrontal cortex. The same thing happens with our actions. We unconsciously start to make decisions based on what is just in the back of our mind.
That is how a vision board can keep your goal in your mind with visuals to make it even more real and allow you strive and unconsciously change your behavior to draw in the things and see the opportunities you may have missed before.
Join us Jan 7 at our FREE Vision Board Workshop