How Guilt Undermines Your January Resolutions

A professor of mine used to remark, ”The perfectly scientific life is impossible to lead.” You will sometimes fail to follow guidelines for good health. You will feel too tired to exercise, and you may be right. You can be so tired that you are more likely to have an accident or injure yourself. Or you may be in a situation where there is little healthful food available, and you don’t like what is available. So you indulge in the delicious stuff that is available. And then you feel guilty.

Use guilt judiciously. If the guilt you are feeling forces you to re-think your schedule, your priorities, even your values, and then to change your behavior, your response to this emotion is constructive.

But let’s say you skip breakfast and eat a bag of potato chips, or miss your regularly scheduled exercise time. You may feel so guilty that you say to yourself, “Oh, what’s the use. I just don’t have any self-discipline.” So you throw your program away and eat badly for the rest of the day, or assume that you can’t exercise at all that day, since you missed your regular time.

Guilt can be fatiguing. It can narrow your thinking so you believe you have no other choices. It can make you feel so bad that you give up your quest for better habits. Notice that you made a mistake and why, then forgive yourself and get back on track. You can start to eat more healthily at lunch, and you may be able to get in a quick walk in the evening.

And often our unconscious thinking goes like this: “I’m not____ (fill in the blank: exercising enough, eating wisely, getting enough sleep), and I feel like a bad person. But I know I’m not completely bad, because at least I feel guilty about it!” This idea that a “good” person will feel guilty allows us to keep making the same mistakes over and over because we have exempted ourselves from believing we are really bad. And guilt often drives us into performing the stressful action over again.

This misuse of guilt is stressful and draining. Use guilt well as a motivator to do better, or give it up.