BEAUTY + WELLNESS
ife is short, and we frequently reprimand
WRITTEN BY
ourselves for the goals we fail to meet. All the
Lauren Koleszar
while, we envy the manner our peers handle their six college classes, four jobs, two
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
Emily Williams
side hustles, and the three parties they went to in one weekend. Being alive in the twenty-first century means being profitable, useful and maximized. It’s no
Learning the difference between setting a goal and forming a habit can change the course of your semester and help you achieve your dreams faster than any New Year’s resolution.
wonder we’re here, setting goals at the start of every new semester, month and week because any kind of beginning strikes us as a restart option that will give us a chance to improve and accomplish more than the last time we tried setting goals for ourselves. Inevitably, we fall into the same tragic cycle: goal-setting, high expectations, inconsistency, lack of motivation, and ultimately failure, until we reach disappointment and discouragement. The problem isn’t us. It’s the glittering high expectations lacking a realistic plan, something with which we are so familiar that we don’t even think to question it. In the days of COVID-19, perhaps you’ve half-heartedly watched videos on preparing for online school, setting a morning routine, and staying motivated while stuck at home. At the hearts of some of these pop self-help videos is a methodology that offers a realistic system through which goals become attainable—in other words, the practice of forming habits. The difference between forming habits versus setting goals seems mediocre, but when put into practice, the difference between these two efforts toward self-improvement is enormous.
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A goal is the desired end result, but a habit is a repetitive behavior that initially requires conscious effort to form until it becomes a natural pattern of behavior. Think of it this way: you can set a goal to form healthy habits, but don’t make a habit out of setting goals. Human beings rely on repetitive behavior (i.e. habits) about 40% of the time over the course of a day. These habits are thoughts and actions that have become so familiar to the brain that enacting them has become a subconscious process. This also explains why bad habits are so difficult to break—because most of the time, these are things we do without thinking about it. In fact, studies show that the average person commits to break a habit ten times without success. We must recognize that we often set out to break a bad habit by setting a goal to do so. This goal represents the desirable destination that we become obsessed with, and in a romantic sort of tunnel vision, we do two very dangerous things: 1) underestimate the time and energy it will take to achieve this goal, and 2) overestimate the consistency we expect ourselves to maintain while working toward this goal. One of
