New Year, New You?
As many of us know, people tend to use the New Year as a temporal milestone to mark when they want to make a change in their lifestyles. This is known as the “fresh start effect” and it carries different influence depending on an individual’s country or culture.
This study from Sweden looked at the most popular types of New Year's resolutions made in a cohort of 1066 people. Then split these individuals evenly between three groups, each group receiving a different level of support in succeeding in their resolutions, with regular follow ups and check-ins. The three most popular resolutions involved diet, fitness and weight, and the least popular resolutions involved hobbies and love life.
Interestingly, the cohort that reported the greatest sense of achievement or success, were those that received a medium amount of support, which may have been unexpected and the writers discuss a few reasons why this could be. The first group receiving the least support was treated as a control, when in practice, they were guided more than they would have been otherwise simply by being asked to define their goals for the study, which may have had some impact on motivation. The group with the most amount of support, with guidance on the importance of setting smaller targets and goals within the larger goal, reported a reduced sense of accomplishment compared to their cohort that received a medium amount of support, which could be due to the specific and time-framed goals defining what the person should not be doing, potentially framing the resolution in a more negative way. This suggests that approach-oriented goals may be more effective than avoidance-oriented goals.
On the whole this study is well thought out and the statistics are carried out incredibly thoroughly, however the subjective nature of the individuals’ responses mean that a similar study in a different context could produce quite different results.
Read, rate and review this paper here!
Martin Oscarsson, Per Carlbring, Gerhard Andersson, Alexander Rozental