'False hope syndrome': why we'll quit our New Year's resolutions this weekend | Juli Fraga

There's a scientific reason why resolutions are broken - we need to understand that in order to be smarter about making goals for ourselves

The promise of starting anew in January gives us all hope to try to be better versions of ourselves. However, 25% of us who made resolutions lose steam just seven days later - right about now. If that's you, then you should know there is no harm in adjusting your goals. It's better than not meeting them at all.

It turns out that there's a scientific reason why we repeatedly make and break resolutions. Social science researchers have named this tendency "False Hope Syndrome": because we believe self-change is easy, we set high expectations that aren't realistic.