Why New Year's Resolutions Don't Work for Perfectionists - Video Transcript

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen the anxiety therapist, I hope everybody had a happy and healthy holiday season and that your new year is off to a good start today. I'm going to be talking about new year's resolutions and how they can actually be counterproductive for perfectionists. So if you are somebody who has perfectionistic tendencies, then this might apply to you.

There are two main reasons that resolutions don't tend to bode well for perfectionists. The first is that we often want conditions to be perfect or ideal in order to start something and that's just never going to happen, right. There's never going to be a perfect time to start something. The important thing is just that you create. The other reason resolutions tend to be kind of counterproductive is that often we will go full force right out of the gate, commit to this big change in our lives, kind of go on this self-improvement binge, so to speak, and then we'll keep up with it for a while and then something will happen.

You know, we'll skip a day, we'll skip a week, we'll skip a month or whatever and just kind of fall off and never revisit it as a goal, right? Because we are very all or nothing in our thinking. And so it's like if we can't do it perfectly and what we originally committed to, then it's a failure and we're just not going to do it at all.

Right? So neither of these approaches is going to get you where you want to be, the goal is to create lasting sustainable change and to make something a habit, right? You want it to be a lifestyle change and that takes a good amount of time to implement. It takes at least 21 days to create a habit. So we're looking at at least three weeks if not longer to, you know, kind of incorporate something new um or or have a change in behavior, be an effective part of your life.

So I would recommend if you have already made a resolution just to see how you might be able to break that down into smaller, very concrete, very specific, more manageable goals. Because if you break it down into smaller goals and you're actually able to commit to those and follow through with those, then that sort of empowers you and motivates you to keep going and it's a snowball effect, then you can build on those smaller goals and eventually work your way up toward whatever the resolution is.

But if you try to do it all at once, then you're eventually going to crash and burn. So the goal is to start very, very small. Start with something that is manageable so that you can actually set yourself up for success and feel like you're making progress as opposed to setting yourself up for failure and trying to do too much all at one time.

So anyway, I hope this video was helpful for you guys and I look forward to talking with you more next week. Take care.