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April 6th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda FRIDAY, April 6 (HealthDay News) — Three months into 2012,
chances are good that those grand plans for self-improvement hatched at
the start of the new year have become more of a dead weight.
Many people vow to eat less and exercise more; stop smoking, drinking
or spending too much; and better organize our wayward lives.
Research in the Journal of Clinical Psychology has found that
only 64 percent of New Year’s resolutions are maintained after one month
and, six months later, less than half still stand.
Why the swift breakdown?
“People make resolutions that are not necessarily well-coordinated to
either their ability or to reality,” said Peter Herman, a psychology
professor at the University of Toronto. “We know that when people make
resolutions in the first place, merely making the resolution energizes
them. That emotional positivity is really hard to sustain when you get in
the hard slog. … It tends to decline and shift into negativity.”
One of the top problems with most resolutions, Herman said, is that
they’re too broad, not firmly defining what it is you’re seeking to
accomplish. “If you resolve to lose weight, what does that even mean? How
much weight?” he asked.
“Clearly, concrete resolutions would be better,” agreed Daniel Akst, a
columnist for Newsday, a Long Island, N.Y., newspaper, and author
of We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess. “Don’t
resolve to be a great novelist, resolve to finish a novel.”
All isn’t lost, however, if you find yourself backsliding on your
pledges about a quarter of the way through 2012. To get back on track,
Herman and Akst said, people should:
Structure strictly
Resolutions are much easier to follow when the steps to achieve them
are almost brainless. That’s why Akst is a big fan, for example, of diets
that cut out entire food groups, such as the Atkins diet (which eliminates
carbs) or veganism.
“If you’re ever going to succeed at something, I think you need a
pretty detailed plan to offer fairly low-level instructions to yourself,”
Herman said. “Even saying that you’re going to go to the gym twice a week
is vague. … You want to say, ‘I’m going to use the elliptical machine
for X number of minutes,’ and you probably have to talk to a trainer about
what is a sensible plan for you.”
Make it public
Up the ante by telling loved ones, friends, co-workers and even your
Facebook friends what you plan to accomplish, Akst recommended. Faced with
embarrassment if you fail, this kind of kick in the pants is a well-known
psychological tool, he said.
“Tell people to chide you when you’re doing the wrong thing — it can
help a lot,” Akst noted. “Just as Odysseus got men to help tie him to the
mast so he wouldn’t succumb to the Sirens’ song, you can do that.”
Set ‘proximal’ goals
So-called proximal goals are more realistic simply because they set the
bar lower — like aiming for a half-pound of weight loss a week instead of
two pounds. But success is also more frequent and tangible.
“If my resolution is to write a novel,” Akst said, “a better resolution
would be that I’m going to write two pages a day, five days a week. That
way, each day you get to succeed, and success builds success.”
Herman also pointed out that “we live in a culture not noted for
training people to persist in the face of tremendous odds. We want things
to come fairly easy for us. Trying to do something less ambitious is a
rational thing to do, but people are not very good at saying, ‘I bit off
more than I can chew.'”
Plan for failure
Many resolutions get derailed because of small, potentially temporary
setbacks that compel us to chuck our big plans altogether. Going off a
diet at a party, for example, doesn’t mean you can’t get right back on the
wagon the next day, with little damage done.
“If you decide to stop smoking but have one cigarette for some reason,
… does that cigarette represent a failure of your entire resolution
or is it simply a blip you can get past?” Herman said. “It’s not very
difficult to anticipate that sort of thing, but some people don’t think
that far ahead.”
More information
The U.S. General Services Administration offers a list of resources to help achieve common goals.
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