Why are New Year’s resolutions so hard to keep?

Actors enacting the Mahabharata during the Jagannath Rath Yatra in Kolkata take a quick chocolate bar ice cream break. Setting a resolution to cut out sugar puts the subconscious brain into rebel mode and sabotages our efforts. Rather, fashion an intention—”I will get leaner this year”. Pic/Getty Images

Let us put first the gist of this article, if that's all you are going to read: Mindful breathing is the easiest and most potent tool to maintain health. We take it for granted because yoga is as benign and ubiquitous as pani puri wallahs.

Moving on.

Many studies show that resolutions drop off by mid February. Why are they so hard to keep? It's a funny cocktail of the beliefs held by your inner child, a trauma response, dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system, neurodiversity, a hunger for thrill, and even ancestral patterns from another lifetime. Yes, that's overwhelming. Breathe.

Ghazala Ansari, a presence-oriented psychotherapist, who works with trauma resolution sees dysregulation as an invitation by the body to do deeper work. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi

We deep dived into this quagmire and found that it's more than just willpower that makes one stick to resolutions about managing emotions, sticking to a diet or stop being spendthrift. Authentic and sustained change comes from self-reflection, recognition and understanding.

Let's examine where the resolution comes from. Take cutting out sugar, for instance. "Does it come from self-care, like for a person with diabetes, or from guilt, shame or external pressure to look a certain way," asks Ayurveda doctor Krupa Kelkar, who practices psycho-spirituality in Goa. "Addiction could also be the result of acute and chronic anxiety or depression. If it's the latter, set intention and not a resolution; be compassionate with yourself. Allow yourself to give in from time to time, and not cut it out completely."

Rohini Master says setting an intention for the year works better than making a resolution.

Before putting away all pictures of cupcakes and macaroons, understand how you could be sabotaging yourself. "When we resolve to do or not do something, we over commit," says Rohini Master, a psychotherapist based in Vasai. "We compel ourselves, dominate, which puts the subconscious brain into rebel mode and sabotages our efforts. Set an intention, instead." The difference between a resolution and an intention is to leave the action part out. So, you could resolve to avoid all sugar, or set the intention, "I will be leaner this year." Here, the action plan is left for the subconscious mind to chart out, which it gets down to quickly.

Nidhi Pandya, an Ayurveda practitioner based in New York City, offers another point of view, specifically for sugar addiction. "Sweetness is the first taste we are used to as human beings when we turn to our mother's milk for nourishment," says the third generation Ayurveda practitioner. "It creates intimacy and subconsciously, makes us feel worthy. Every time we cry as babies, we are offered breast milk. So, we associate sweetness with comfort very early on in life."

Through the Ayurveda lens, stress dries things up in our body, like our mouth. "In Ayurveda, sugar is slimy and moist, so we seek it out," says Pandya. Also, scientifically speaking, sugar releases sucrose [main constituent of sugar] directly into our body; it doesn't need processing, and you suddenly feel energetic. "So when you are feeling stuck, it becomes a natural tendency to turn to sugar."

Nidhi Pandya, Rizwana Nulwala and Krupa Kelkar

Trauma and addiction are closely related, and trauma makes the nervous system oscillate between flight and fight. While this is necessary for survival, the hypervigilance born from trauma imprints does not let the autonomic nervous system settle down. You go into a loop of memory, and connecting thoughts, dissociating from the present moment. This is a physically painful place for the body to be in, and guess what soothes? The sweet stuff, but also any numbing agent such as alcohol, drugs or nicotine.

Addictions such as shopping give a dopamine hit, which leaves you feeling high. "Sugar, shopping and exercise activate the same neural pathway," says Rizwana Nulwala, a psychotherapist based in Andheri. "As does posting and getting likes on social media. If you are an emotional person overall - easily excited, impulsive, high strung - you are placed on the higher end of the spectrum. Such people are more likely to seek out dopamine hits. You have to replace the addiction with something else that's as exciting, that activates the same neural pathways."

A crucial step to make lasting change is to examine addictions and compulsions closely. "A person may have a vulnerability to addiction due to neurodiversity," explains Ghazala Ansari, who is based in Nerul, Navi Mumbai. "One must look at the intensity of the compulsion. The important question to ask is: What am I getting from this addiction? What pain is it soothing or alleviating? What is it supplementing?" Once you zero in on this, then begins the healing work.
To this end, Pandya recommends keeping a sugar journal. ‘What was happening within me when I craved sugar?' ‘How did I feel after?,' are some prompts. Once the triggers are recognised, "it's time to write a new script which goes like this: ‘Whenever I feel like this, I am going to reach for water…'" This applies for addictions such as gaming, social media posting and shopping.

Pandya also recommends breathing, along with consuming more rice and milk, without sugar, and complex carbohydrates to reduce the cravings. "Also chewing your food longer releases sugar, which mixes with your saliva and satiates you," she says.

Controlling one's anger, or other negative emotions such as frustration, is also an oft-made self-promise. "Emotion regulation is a skill." says Nulwala, "and it can be learnt and strengthened with practice."

It all starts with a deep breath.

"Recognise the dysregulation in the body and the triggers that cause it, observe it," she says. "Breathing increases the oxygen in the bloodstream, which calms the nervous system down." The act of breathing mindfully also brings you to the present and breaks the loop of memory, and associated negative feelings.

Ansari sees dysregulation as an invitation by the body to do deeper work, which can be done with the help of a therapist, or even a support group which creates a safe space for the physical body. "You can observe what's stuck that needs to flow," says the presence-oriented psychotherapist, who works with trauma resolution.

But before you engage with and investigate it, you have to experience it. Master recommends the five-minute rule: You are allowed to feel angry/frustrated/disappointed/sad for five minutes, and then you must move on. "The first thought we have when we are angry," she says, "is that we shouldn't be. Thus begins the shame and guilt cycle. We are humans, and humans will experience emotions. Unless we feel and own them, we can't let them go. Tell yourself it is okay to be angry."

After you are done feeling, come back to the present with…no prizes for guessing, five deep breaths. "Come back to the moment," she says. "Don't let a new pattern form." Anger, according to her, stems from fear and manifests as fever. So you'll have to dig deep into what it is that you fear? What are the insecurities that you'll need to work on? Is there a loss of control that you fear, for instance?

Pandya, who goes by @my_ayurvedic_life on Instagram, also recommends befriending and embracing the storm. "Be grateful for it, it is telling you something about yourself that needs to be healed," she says, "a story needs to be unlocked about something you felt harshly and strongly in the past. Allow the storm to build up, embrace the storm, but don't let it erupt outside. Slow down in the moment when that happens."

Emotional First-Aid can be salivating and spitting anger, frustration and anxiety out of your body. Even crying can help. Chewing something mechanically, going for a run, doing a little dance routine - all these can help at the moment.

Procrastination or unpunctuality is an avoidance technique, but also has physical roots. "Neurodivergent people have a different concept of time," says Nulwala, "as do those whose forebrain is challenged. They are not able to make executive decisions such as estimate how much time it would take to get ready and reach a place."

Pandya admits that some people lose sense of time because they get immersed into the minutia of a task. However, it is also "the lack of desire to be somewhere on time. It could be an act of rebellion also, but it could also be that you don't want to experience the feelings that come with being at the place early - social anxiety, idling, waiting, or confronting the task at hand itself."

Here too, if you face the discomfort by, all together now - pausing for a breath - facing the discomfort and see what it wants to tell you about yourself, it could
be helpful.

"After all," she reasons, "even the most unpunctual person has things s/he is never late for - flights, dates, doctor's appointments."

Saving money, or plugging a shopping addiction is a bit more tricky. A lot has to do with your relationship with money and your beliefs and thought patterns that surround it. Master says that thought patterns are formed in the first eight years of your life and imprinted there. "They could come from your parents, or a conclusion your child-mind drew after an incident," she says. While she has always been "blessed with money" , a childhood incident led her to hold the belief that "money only comes at the last moment…just as the credit card bill is due, for example."

She held on to this before recognising and re-writing it in inner child work. "Your inner child holds on to these beliefs s/he could have inherited from her parents," she says, "from other lifetimes, from an ancestral pattern, coming down from a grandmother, in this lifetime; or an ancestral pattern from other lifetimes." Yes, that's a lot to chew on. Take a few breaths to soak it in.

Commonly held beliefs about money include that it's only for the Tatas and the Ambanis:

That you have to work hard for it; it's the root of all evil; it's never enough or it goes as quickly as it comes; it's bad to chase money. Some people learn to hate money.

"None of this is true," says Pandya, "Money is as essential as food and air. Just as we work on cultivating a relationship with our spouse, our children, you have to repair and rebuild a poor relationship with money." Money is essentially an energy, according to her, and you have to allow it to flow in and out of your life. "When we create reverence for money, honour it, be grateful for it, you change the relationship," she says. Gratitude and reverence being the two words she stresses on.

Then, respect and recognise how it is coming into your life and how it enhances it. "Most people are insecure about money," she continues, "so they hoard it, or sometimes they hoard and binge splurge." Instead, think about how you would like a relationship with a good friend to be like - respectful, understanding, patient. Now cultivate all of these towards money.

While all this sounds exhausting, Master throws us a line: "Realisation resolves 70 per cent of the problem. These feelings, compulsions, beliefs dissolve when you own them. Then comes the healing through therapy or breath work. Healing is easy; people complicate it."

So, take your resolution, whatever it may be, and turn it into an intention. "Say it out to the universe as if you are ordering dishes from a menu at a restaurant," says Marker. "You don't worry about whether the dish will come or if it will be made well, do you? You just trust it will."