Bouncing Back From New Year's Failures

Feb. 2, 2009— -- It's February now, and to those who have broken their New Year's resolutions, psychologists say surprise, surprise.

Research shows that a majority of us fail at our noble cause to quit smoking, or to go to the gym, or to save money within weeks of Jan. 1.

Take, for example, smoking. "Think about 100 people who got up on New Year's Day and quit smoking," said Dr. Douglas Jorenby, professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.

"If you check in with those 100 people, assuming they stopped cold turkey, only about five of them would be nonsmokers at the end of 2009," he said. Take 100 people trying to quit with counseling and smoking aids, and Jorenby said about 20 people will successfully quit in a year.

But not to despair, health experts say there are clear red flags to a doomed resolution, and that often the most successful reformers are the ones who have already failed several times before.

One way to gauge whether a resolution is doomed would be to look for the so-called "False Hope Syndrome," as described by Janet Polivy, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, Mississauga.

"False hope is based on unrealistic expectations," said Polivy. "People expect that their change will be very fast, that it will be easy, that it will be huge and that it will have all kinds of fantastic benefits on every aspect of their lives."

Not that Polivy is against hope, but she found in research that false hope has the opposite effect on people's goals.

"It doesn't lead people to achieve at least part of their goals, it ends their goals," she said. "When people's expectations are unrealistic, even when they're actually succeeding -- exercising more than they were but not going to the gym every day -- they give up."

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Just to dash people's false hopes further, Polivy has found in her research that there is a group of chronic "false hopers" in the population.