When setting any new goals for self-change, let alone the ones we tend to make around New Years’ time, having optimism and hope are critical for success. If you didn’t hold any hope for losing the weight you want to lose or improving your life in some other way, why would you bother setting any goal for yourself?
An overabundance of optimism and hope, however, can also be detrimental to achieving goals. It might just be the very thing keeping you in a cycle of failure.
What is False Hope Syndrome?
Too much optimism allows us to think that we can achieve more than we can, quicker than we can. The impact of that is a tendency to set unrealistic goals that sees us give up on them when our lofty expectations are not met. We concede defeat, mourn, recover emotionally, and then repeat.
It’s a process that is known as False Hope Syndrome (FHS). Psychologists believe that it might explain a perpetual cycle of statistically unflattering success rates for New Year’s Resolutions.
There are a number of problematic behavioural areas that contribute to FHS. The first is an underestimation of how challenging self-change is. Then comes the tendency to set goals that are outside of our skill-set to achieve. Following that is an overestimation of how much our lives will change should we succeed in our goals. And finally, having poor coping mechanisms when challenges and road-blocks begin to emerge delivers the death knell in the cycle.
Why early success can be a bad thing
The preliminary study that explored the concept of FHS took place back in 2001, and the theory has been discussed and studied since. The authors of the original work identified that once the overly ambitious plans are set, a key driver of this cycle is the early successes that people often experience.
Your goal for 2022 might be to lose 30 kilograms — a monumental task. You embark upon an extensive training and nutrition plan and in the first two weeks, you experience some success. You lose a few kilos.
The quick gains reinforce your belief that success is inevitable. But losing weight gets harder the further you progress, particularly when the goals are extremely ambitious. Invariably, we hit a plateau, and the work we were doing no longer delivers the same outcomes. The weight stops coming off as easy.
It’s at this point that we begin to experience the negative emotions and the poor coping skills that will impede our progression towards our goal. We’re still a long way from our 30-kilogram target, and we begin to question whether we are really capable. Our optimism takes a hit, and our weight-loss behaviours start to fall off.
Avoiding reinforcing pitfalls
This overconfidence is reinforced by things we see in society. We are exposed to countless get fit quick programs, self-help books promising rapid and monumental changes to our lives, and online videos that tell us it’s easy. We are being reinforced to make these unrealistic goals for ourselves.
Why is this something that is prominent around the New Year? Because the power of new beginnings at the start of a year amplifies the message of change, and as a result, we have a tendency to not only make plans for change, but big change.
Making better New Years’ Resolutions
Instead, experts recommend setting smaller, more realistic goals. Understand that some goals are a long-term proposition and not something that can be achieved quickly. We should also see set-backs and road blocks as learning and growth opportunities. It’s an opportunity to better understand the process so that you see fewer set-backs as the journey continues.
Also, there is research that tells us that goals that focus on adding behaviours rather than removing them, increases success rates long term. At a 12 month follow up, almost 60 per cent of participants that that had set ‘additive’ goals stated that they were still delivering on their goals, compared to 47 per cent of those who had set ‘avoidance’ type of goals.
So instead of focusing on the foods you plan to take out of your diet, instead think about the good things you want to be eating more of. Focus on the exercise behaviours you want to add into your routine and make the repetition of those the focus.
Finally, remember to be resilient. Your plan might not be going to schedule, but it only fails when you give up on it. Here’s to making positive but realistic changes to ourselves in 2022.