Resolutions of the year | The basics of behavior change

This is the time of year when we promise to do more sport, to stop eating meat, to take less of our car. And these resolutions often fall flat. Why ? What are the winning conditions for changing behavior?

Catherine handfield
Press

Meditate 15 minutes a day. Read a book a week. Watch a maximum of two hours of television per week. To stop screaming.

These are some of the resolutions that Marjolaine Goulet has taken in recent years. For her, it’s a tradition. Around the 1^er January, she takes a sheet of paper and a pencil and writes down the behaviors that she would like to adopt or those that she wishes to get rid of. There was a time when she made 15 resolutions a year: 5 for her career, 5 for her health, 5 for her relationships!

“Of course, the resolutions that I put, I don’t really keep them,” she explains, laughing. Sometimes the resolutions are so grandiose they are just plain unbearable. ”

Marjolaine, 41, does not take offense. “It puts me in a good state of mind to start the year, summarizes the account manager. The idea is to give me an idea of ​​the directions I want to have. ”

The few studies carried out on New Year’s resolutions show that Marjolaine is far from being the only one in her clan. According to a longitudinal study of 200 resolution-takers, almost half of them gave up after just one month. And after two years, only one in five people were still staying the course.

Three criteria for success

A professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Kim Lavoie holds the Canada Research Chair in Behavioral Medicine. She is interested in interventions that help patients change their behaviors, including junk food, physical inactivity and smoking. In short, fertile areas in terms of resolutions.

“To change any behavior, it is necessary to tick three criteria”, explains Kim Lavoie. First, you have to recognize that the behavior is problematic. Then you have to have the motivation to engage in the process of change (“by finding what I call the carrot,” she says). Finally, you have to be confident in your ability to make the changes. “Among smokers, for example, where it bugs, it’s often in self-confidence,” explains Kim Lavoie. They tried eight times, but never succeeded. ”

Failure can erode confidence. Setting realistic goals is therefore very important.

“If you’ve never been to a gym, now is not the time to set the goal of signing up to a gym and going four, five times a week for two hours,” summarizes Kim Lavoie. .

The fact of undertaking something very often makes it possible to demystify things, adds the researcher, who underlines that people are regularly held back by their apprehensions. It’ll hurt, running on a treadmill. It’s impossible to eat healthy. “It is cognitive work that makes it possible to correct certain distortions that we may have,” she says.

According to psychologist Stéphanie Léonard, behavior change should be seen as a process, and not as an “all or nothing” switch.

“That’s the problem with resolutions: people expect that, overnight, because they’ve decided something, it’s going to generate change. It’s a process, with ups and downs. The important thing is to improve your statistics, ”says Stéphanie Léonard, who emphasizes that the message of“ take charge ”conveyed by the training and weight loss industries is simply not realistic for most people.

Stéphanie Léonard emphasizes that for lasting change, the chances of success are greater when motivation is intrinsic. It is more profitable to train to feel good than to do it because it is in January or to see such a figure appear on the bathroom scale, she illustrates.

Kim Lavoie isn’t a big fan of New Year’s resolutions either. What drives those resolutions, she says, is often shame and guilt for bingeing on Christmas. And these difficult emotions do not (fortunately) last over time.

Marjolaine Goulet, for her part, holds to her tradition of the month of January, which she has maintained since childhood. There is something powerful about writing, she says. When, for example, she writes that she no longer wants to scream, the mother thinks about it when she raises her voice. “And maybe I’m screaming less,” she said.

Still, the nature of its resolutions has evolved. The pandemic is teaching her to be more forgiving of herself. Instead of writing that she wants to read 50 books a week, Marjolaine will write this year that she wants to be someone who takes the time to read. “I am more in what I want to be and less in the quest for performance,” she concludes.