Changing Habits
“Unlike most people with their New Year’s Resolutions, they try to change too many habits all at once, which is the main reason most people fail in the first few weeks.”
This is an excerpt from the book titled The Strength Code written by Eric Falstrult. The statement made my Eric is indeed true. Moreover, it’s better to have a realistic and reasonable goal. However, most of us have extravagant goals and when we don’t meet the expected results we abandon them. However, on the flipside, for example, I will say “I will try to lose 2 or 3 kilos in 1 month,” which is reasonable. On the contrary, we would have liked to say, “I want to lose 15 kilos in 45 days, for it’s my lives one of the most important day—marriage and I am supposed to look lean.” How excessive!
I believe the major cause for such high expectation is that we live in a fantasy land–we like to be hyper stimulated. Hyper stimulation is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency. In simple terms, I will brief about an experiment that was conducted by Nobel Prize biologist Niko Tinbergen on hyper stimulation. In some bird nests he introduced plastic eggs with the own eggs of the bird. The plastic ones were bigger and brighter than the normal EGGS. Surprisingly, some bird s neglected their eggs in favor of the oversized fakes. So, I believe it’s in our instinct to get hyper stimulated. In other words, we all want our lives to be larger than life, which means we tend to believe the unrealistic and don’t accept the ordinary. Moreover, we want to quick fix the problem.
What is the take home message? Don’t be unrealistic and fall prey to unreasonable goals. Accept that the easy way out may not be the way out; Easy will not fetch you great results. Thinking and doing things easily may not mean being efficient. Several times they mean being lazy.
Lastly, on the other side of the coin, don’t further complicate your goal by trying to change too many habits. Thinking hastily might be disastrous.