The Question

Maybe this question is a little too broad but to put it simply, there are so many things that I know I should be doing; things I actually plan and intend to do and in the end I just don’t. I feel like I’m failing all the time because I continue to fail at the little things. I tell myself that I’m going to eat better, go to sleep earlier, waste less time on my phone, exercise, call my mother, spend more meaningful and less distracted time with my kids, or concentrate better in my davening. There are so many things that I need to be better at but I just don’t do any of them.

Here’s a specific example. I know I need to exercise, so I set an alarm every morning at 6, 30 minutes earlier than I need to get up. Every evening I go to sleep with the intention of waking up and going for a run, and every morning I snooze my alarm three times and wake up in a rush. I feel like if I really wanted to exercise (or fill in the blank for any of those other goals) I would have already. Sometimes I feel like I’m just a failure.

The Answer

Preamble

You may have failed to achieve your goals and you may have failed to achieve your goals a hundred times over. Those are failures. The minute you call yourself a failure you’ve given up. If you are a failure then there is no longer a point in trying. Your first task is to tell that voice inside your head to “shut up” and make space for the voice of reason and critical thinking.

Narrow the Scope

My first impression reading your letter is that you have a lot of lofty, well-meaning goals. These are goals that many people share with you. However, if you set yourself too many goals, even if you think they are things that everyone else is already doing and you’re miles behind, you’re likely biting off more than you can chew. You’re setting yourself up for failure. Setting an unrealistic goal increases the chances of continued failure and heightened feelings of despair, decreased energy and depleting motivation. Pick one thing to work on.

Make It Measurable and Within Reach

We lose when we measure success and failure as a binary. Black and white thinking discourages stepwise growth. If your definition of success is an hour-long strenuous workout five times a week, ditching your iPhone, or never eating a carb again, you’re likely going to be stuck in the failure column. Even if you pick a more modest label of success (exercising three times a week for 30 minutes) it’s important to move away from the black and white thinking so that you can earn successes along the way.

Break down whatever your goal is into smaller, stepwise parts and start with the easiest chunk. Encouraging even the tiniest step in the right direction increases motivation and further progress. Allow yourself to “celebrate” the small wins along the path: putting on exercise clothes, eating four cookies instead of five, texting your mom instead of calling, etc. Yes, these small steps are not “enough” but they are necessary to get to the next level, and certainly better than nothing.

Plan

Setting yourself a goal with no real plan is pretty much paying lip service to your guilty conscience. It’s like lying to yourself that you’ll do something later, knowing full well you’re only saying this to feel less bad about not doing it now. If there is something you want to do you must have a clear method of achieving that goal. You took the first step by setting your alarm for 6 a.m., but did you go to sleep earlier the night before? Did you prepare your workout clothes? Did you plan out where you would run? Did you check the weather to see if you’d even be able to run?

Plan for Everything to Go Wrong

Let’s say you’ve planned everything out perfectly; there’s still one other thing you need to prepare for: apathy. I truly believe that when you wrote this letter you really wanted to achieve those goals. I don’t believe that “If you really wanted it you would have done it already.”

Sometimes when you are looking directly at a challenging task the instant gratification of avoidance is more attractive than the delayed feeling of disappointment. This is where a lot of failure happens: failing to plan for one’s own avoidance. It’s always easier in the moment to snooze the alarm and go back to sleep, to start your diet tomorrow, to say that you really don’t need to use “screen time” to limit your internet use.

Your job is to prepare for that iteration of yourself. Maybe you need to move your alarm to the other side of the room; create accountability by committing out loud to another person; forcing yourself to state the “wrong” decision aloud to encourage your conscience to step in; or writing down the reasons for your goals and putting them in a highly visible place to remind your avoidant side. Think about what you would need to do, hear or see in that avoidant, willful state and make sure that it’s ready for you when your alarm goes off. Think about everything that has gone wrong at that last moment, right before you veered off course, and set up the guardrails to stay on track.

If you’d like to anonymously submit a question, visit www.eastside-cbt.com/blog.

Dr. Lamm is a clinical psychologist, and director of East Side CBT, a psychology group practice located in Manhattan and Bergen County. He can be reached at [email protected] or eastside-cbt.com