Study Shows Women Make New Year Resolutions While Men Keep Them

Sitting here and thinking about my personal results of the year 2008 I could hardly avoid thinking about what my New Year’s resolution should be now that we are approaching the year 2009. Pondering this idea I stumbled upon results of an interesting survey about people’s behavior when it comes to New Year’s resolutions.

The study was carried out by Dorthy.com back in November and included polling more than 2,000 people over 18 in the US to see how people make promises before the New Year and how they keep such promises (or break them – which happens more frequently, in fact). Dorthy.com is a site that is intended to help people find motivations to achieve their goals – whatever the goals are – so it is just natural that they wanted to know how often our New Year’s resolutions actually turn into reality.

To me the most interesting discovery of the survey was that while women in general are more likely to make New Year’s resolutions (74% of women versus 58% of men), they are less likely to actually keep them (14% versus 22% of men) which must prove that we tend to promise way more than we are actually able to do (taking a look at my to-do list will easily prove this as well, I have to admit). All in all, the gap between the number of people making resolutions on the New Year’s eve and those keeping them always or at least often is huge – 66% versus 17%. At that all the proponents of web 2.0 and online tools should be pretty happy as 33% of people said they used online tools like search engines or social networks to help turn dreams into reality.

When it comes to things that prevent us from turning our dreams into reality, the major one is lack of money (mentioned by 36% of people) with the second important factor being lack of time and/or motivation (14%). I believe that because of the world financial crisis it will only get worse with more and more people finding themselves unable to turn their dreams into reality since money is such an important factor.

But I think the conclusion is quite obvious here: it will be better to avoid dreams and wishes related to money as it is hard to predict what will happen to one’s income next year. But resolutions like jogging every day or quitting smoking sound like perfectly reasonable ones as such things cost virtually nothing and will no doubt be useful for one’s health as well.

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