What to Do When You’ve Failed

If you’re like most people, you probably started the year off with high hopes. You told yourself that THIS is going to be your year. You’re finally going to get healthier, get more exercise, and save more money.

Then, you encountered a hiccup. Maybe you were stressed or busy or tired. Or maybe you just plain didn’t feel like doing what you promised yourself you would do.

If so, you’re not alone. When psychologists John Norcross and Dominic Vangarelli tracked the progress of 200 individuals who made New Year’s resolutions, they found that nearly half of the participants had failed within the first month. In fact, nearly a quarter of the participants didn’t even last a week!

How we respond to our slip-ups can help determine whether we get ourselves back on track or fall off the rails completely.

So, what should we do if we’ve already failed to keep our New Year’s Resolutions?

The problem of perfection

Let’s start with a scenario that might be familiar to you: You make a New Year’s resolution to eat healthier and then you cheat on your diet for lunch … and then for dinner … and then for dessert.

How can one slip-up so easily derail us?

Psychologists have a colorful term for this. They call it the “what-the-hell effect.” It’s what we do when we tell ourselves, “I’ve already cheated on my diet for the day, so what-the-hell, I might as well have dessert too.”

One problem is that if we only consider ourselves successful when we achieve perfect adherence to our goals, then a single slip-up will put success out of reach for us. Then we tell ourselves that since we can no longer count today as a win, we might as well just wait until tomorrow and start fresh. And, in the meantime, we might as well enjoy that bowl of double fudge ice cream.

Another problem with demanding perfection is that it can make us feel worse about ourselves for any slip-ups. And while it might seem that feeling guilty about slipping up should make us less likely to slip up again, we need to consider what we tend to do when we feel bad about ourselves: We try to make ourselves feel better. Often by turning to whatever guilty pleasure it is that we’re trying to curb—overeating, shopping, binge-watching Netflix, etc.

If we’re not careful, our one-time slip-ups can lead to a cycle of bad habits. Luckily, there is something we can do about it.

Show yourself some compassion

Researchers have found that self-compassion can help us break the negative cycle. In other words, being less hard on ourselves for our set-backs can make us more likely to overcome them.

So, instead of drowning our bad feelings in ice cream after dinner, we should try showing ourselves some compassion for slipping up at lunch. And when we feel guilty for procrastinating on our work project yesterday, instead of trying to make ourselves feel better by binge-watching Game of Thrones today, we should show ourselves some compassion for our initial slip-up. Doing so can help us get back on track.

Do you have a hard time with positive self-talk? Just imagine what you would tell a friend who experienced the same slip-up. Would you tell your friend that they might as well give up? Or would you tell them that nobody’s perfect and they shouldn’t be too hard on themselves?

Remember your ‘why’

And finally, if we want to avoid completely falling off the wagon, it helps to remind ourselves why we want to stay in it.

Suppose you made a New Year’s resolution to go to the gym three times a week. Now suppose it’s Friday and you’ve been to the gym exactly zero times so far this week. If you can no longer meet your original goal, then focusing on that goal itself is no longer motivating.

So, shift your focus. Instead of focusing on the narrow goal of going to the gym three times a week, focus on why you wanted to go to the gym three times a week. You wanted to go to the gym to get healthier. And that is a goal you can still make progress on. You can no longer go to the gym three times this week, but you can do something to make yourself a little healthier—you go to the gym today.

Our actions add up. What we do now will always matter.

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Also published on Medium.