Writing this article as the year is coming to an end I am thinking that it's likely most of us are considering the year ahead and whether we will make any New Year's resolutions. Resolutions are personal and individual to each of us, but there is often a common theme. Popular promises to ourselves on New Year's Eve include to give up smoking, lose weight, stop biting our nails, exercise more or find a better job. These are all very positive things to do which should only add value and happiness to our lives. But despite this knowledge we still manage to break our resolutions . .

It may be a regular pattern for you each year. Towards the end of the year or on New Year's Eve itself you make these promises to yourself that you plan to stick to throughout the coming year. But then 5 minutes after Big Ben has chimed, or perhaps sometime in the first week of January, or if you're lucky a couple of months into the year, all the well intended resolutions have been well and truly broken. Consequently we feel we have let ourselves down and we feel even more disappointed than we did before we made the resolutions. So why are resolutions so difficult to keep, and oh-so-easy to break?

Many of the resolutions we make are habits that we want to give up, for the sake of our health, well being or bank balance. However if it was just a 'habit' it would be easy to teach ourselves new habits. So why is it that the habit of eating salads isn't quite as easy to maintain as the habit of eating chocolate? The reason could be because most habits are actually addictions which are harder to break because we have become reliant on doing (or not doing) something. We often have an emotional attachment to our habit or addiction which makes it that much more difficult to break free from. For example, do you comfort eat? Smoke to give you confidence? Or bite your nails to calm you down? No wonder it is such a wrench to give up these emotional crutches - where would you be without them?

I expect that previously you have used willpower to help you keep your New Year's resolutions, but once the willpower weakens they are easily broken. Willpower is hard work; it takes a lot of effort and concentration, and if you lapse for one second the willpower collapses and your habit will be back in full force. Also willpower isn't any fun is it? How much do you enjoy saying "No I mustn't have that cream cake, I'm being good" while inside you really, really want it! Wouldn't it be a relief if habits and addictions were easy to break with no willpower required. Well this is how EFT works.

If you use EFT on your New Year's resolutions you will be able to dissolve any emotional attachments and issues surrounding the habits, and then you will want to keep the resolutions rather than feeling you have to. If we take the examples of losing weight and stopping smoking - these are both very positive commitments to make to ourselves, our bodies and our general health. Our natural instinct to help us survive would be to not smoke and to not overeat. So how can we find the issues that are stopping us from keeping our resolutions?

Have a look at your resolutions and ask yourself what the benefits would be to you to not keep them. If you want to stop smoking, what is the benefit to you to stay as a smoker? Will it mean that you feel more confident when you are in a bar? That you will fit in with your circle of friends? You can find these hidden benefits in any habit or addiction that you are finding hard to break, in fact any resolution that requires willpower.

At the start I mentioned that you may have a resolution to find a new and better job. If you have been meaning to do this for years but are still stuck in the same job that you don't enjoy and pays poorly, ask yourself why you have stayed. There must be some hidden benefit or else you would have moved on years ago. These are the kind of issues that you can work on with EFT to ensure that this year is the year that you do keep your resolutions and promises to yourself. Imagine how you will feel this time next year if you can look back to 12 months of success rather than failure, health rather than illness, and happiness instead of misery. This is why we all make resolutions, to improve our lives in some way, and you can see how it can be within your reach with a little help from EFT.