爲什麼新年下的決心總是實現不了？

On the first of every year, millions of Americans make a New Year’s resolution (or two or three) that they won’t keep. Why we keep making resolutions—and why they're so hard to follow.
每一年的開始，數百萬美國人制定的新年計劃（2個或者3個）都沒能堅持下去。爲什麼我們一直下決心？然而爲什麼堅持下去是如此艱難？

There's one obvious reason why most resolutions fail: We usually focus on goals or tasks that we haven’t been able to achieve over the past year. “You are making it your New Year’s goal because you keep failing at it,” says Tim Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa. The other terrible thing about New Year’s resolutions, he says, is that making them requires no action. The simple thought—the idea that we intend to lose weight or exercise more— just thinking about losing weight makes us feel good, and we don’t actually have to go out and do the tasks necessary to achieve that goal.
大部分新年決心失敗的一個最主要的原因是,我們下決心的時候往往總是關注的是那個我們在過去一年裏沒法做到的目標。“你下決心要完成這件事，是因爲總是在這件事上失敗。”渥太華卡爾頓大學心理學家 Tim Pychyl 說道。“另一個可怕的事情是，下一個新年決定不需要任何實際行動。一個簡單的想法，我們想要減肥或者多運動，我們光想想減肥就已經自我感覺良好了，所以事實上我們沒有必要出去做一些事情去實現它。”

“They make the intention now, but they don’t do anything. It’s like going to buy furniture and not having to pay anything until 2019.” says Pychyl, “That’s the selective nature of it.” He adds we would never form a New Year's resolution around tasks we like to do. We already did those things the year before, so there's nothing satisfying about pledging to keep them up. Procrastination is one of the number one reasons resolutions fail.
Tim Pychyl 說：“他們總是現在下定決心，但是又不做任何事情去實現。這就像你想買一套傢俱但是直到2019年還沒有付款一樣。這是選擇的本質。” 他補充說道，我們絕對不會下定決心去做我們喜歡做的事情。因爲那些喜歡做的事情在過去一年已經做了，因此下定決心繼續做這一件事不會讓我們感到滿足。拖延症是新年決心失敗的第一大原因。

Even as we try to overcome our resistance to our resolutions, something a little more powerful takes over in our brains: The force of habit. In simple terms, habits are connections of neurons that work together that have been beneficial to us over time. The more we execute the habitual behavior, the stronger those neuronal connections in our brains become.
即使我們竭盡所能克服我們對決心的抵抗，但是我們的頭腦中還有一個強大的力量在阻止我們去實現新年決心，這就是習慣。簡單來說，習慣就是一起協作的神經元之間的聯繫，我們一直從這些聯繫中受益。我們的生活習慣越規律，這些神經元在我們大腦中的聯繫就越強大。

Through the course of human evolution, habits have been a really good thing; they are automatic thoughts or actions that have, for example, saved us from predators.
在人類的進化過程中，習慣對我們有很大的好處，它們是我們所擁有的不需要經過思考的想法和行動，幫助我們躲避狩獵者。

By understanding what’s going on in your brain, you have a better chance at controlling it.
只有明白了人類大腦的這一機制，你才能更好地控制自己。