Women, more so than men, seem all too familiar with the New Year drill. We verbally commit to no more chocolate, to take the stairs and to rise an hour earlier to hit the gym only to find that by mid-month we lose all motivation. In fact, statistics show that over 500,000 of those who make resolutions will have broken them by the January 2.

So why do we punish ourselves with unrealistic goals? Are we all just dreamers who think things will come easy to us? Or do we purposely make false promises to ourselves and expect to be disappointed?

The key lies in the way we make our resolutions. American self-help author Melody Beattie says: “The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.”

“By this Melody means, we should take smaller steps to reach our ultimate goals,” says nutritionist Zoe Martin.

“If your goal is to lose 20 kilograms then break it down and make it more achievable. Set yourself a target weight to lose over the course of a month, and set smaller targets in between such as going to the gym twice a week or not eating takeaways. These small resolutions will change your behavior in the long term and can really feel like you are making progress, rather than think the challenge is just too great and giving up within days.”

The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written

Having said this, around 92 per cent of people fail at their resolutions by the end of the year. It is usually not because they have not tried or are not committed but they merely choose the wrong type of resolution. You may be flying along sticking to your new fitness routine for the first month only for things to get on top of you and you miss a session. It does not mean you have failed. If you plan your resolutions beforehand you can create ones that you will always be able to reach with reasonable effort.

Although it can be inspiring and fun to have an ambitious goal, if you can’t tell if you are getting closer to achieving it then you will fail. For example; you can’t exactly measure how happy you are but you can measure how many nice or good things you have done for others in the past week.

It is also important that while working towards your goal, you must always believe you can do it, Martin says. If you doubt yourself, you will start to become complacent and will slowly give up. If you allow yourself to take a break even for a small period of time you will most likely never get back to working on achieving your goal.

It could also help greatly if you can have a friend try to achieve the same goal. Photo: Shutterstock.com

Having a list up on the wall of what your goals are and how you plan to achieve them will help stop you from giving up. For example have it on the wall facing you when you wake up, it will keep it fresh in your mind so you won’t start to forget or doubt yourself.

It could also help if you try and keep your resolutions short. This happens more often than you think, where people set themselves extremely long-term goals that can be very difficult for many people to stick too. This is purely because the more time it takes to achieve the goal the more time you have to quit before you achieve it.

For example; it appears easier to stop drinking carbonated drinks for six weeks than trying to stop for an entire year.

After you have been working towards your set goal, you can start to give yourself small challenges to keep you from slipping into laziness. It could be a simple challenge like adding an extra five minutes to your workout or not checking your social media accounts until the evening.

It could also help greatly if you can have a friend try to achieve the same goal. This buddy system helps both of you not let each other down by giving up or putting it off.