Written by: Abbey Riendeau, LMHC

A new year often brings about the feelings of a fresh start. Major time landmarks tend to motivate aspirational behaviors, making the new year feel like a new beginning. It’s an opportunity to try something different, end a bad habit, start a healthy habit, or improve yourself. You may be looking to make changes psychologically, emotionally, socially, physically, or intellectually. At times, this motivating feeling can cause individuals to bite off more than they can chew when it comes to setting New Year’s resolutions. Some people may subscribe to not setting goals for the new year with the idea that nobody ever achieves them anyways. But capitalizing on the new year motivation can present a great opportunity to improve skills in willpower, determination, and discipline. One study showed that those who set goals for the New Year are ten times more likely to make a change in their behavior than people who do not set yearly goals. Another study also found that those who made New Year goals were more optimistic about their future.

Of course, it’s easier to dream of how we want to be and set goals for ourselves than it is to actually follow through on changing our behaviors and achieving those goals. In fact, many people fail to meet their New Year’s resolutions, often forgetting about them just a few weeks or a month into the new year. One study found that only 12% of people who made a New Year’s resolution felt that they achieved it. There are many potential reasons why someone may not achieve their new year goal, with one being that they don’t know how to follow through to achieve the goal. Below are some tips to help set yourself up for success in 2024 by meeting your goal for the year.

Choose a Specific Goal

When setting a goal for the New Year, it may be tempting to say you want to “be more productive” or “improve a relationship.” But what do these actually mean? These goals are so large and vague that it’s hard to identify what the goal actually entails. Avoiding vague or ambiguous goals and setting clear and concrete goals sets you up for actually achieving our goals. Specific goals communicate more clearly the behavior changes you need to make to see the changes you want. It’s also easier to plan for a more specific goal, which helps you feel less overwhelmed by changes. Additionally, when a goal is more specific, you have a way of measuring progress towards the goal.

Instead of “be more productive” consider “making daily to do lists.”
Instead of “improve physical health” consider “run a 5k”
Instead of “improve my relationship with my child” consider “spend 800 hours outside with my child”

Additionally, making your goals into approach-oriented goals instead of avoidance-oriented goals helps to increase the likelihood of keeping the goal. It’s much more motivating and fun to focus on adding something positive into your routine than it is to focus on avoiding something unhealthy. For example, rather than saying you want to cut out artificial dyes from your diet, you might make your goal to eat more whole and natural foods. Instead of setting a goal to stop spending money on alcohol, you might be more successful in setting a goal to plan free activities with friends on the weekends.

Limit Your Goal

You might have a long list of changes you hope to see in yourself in the coming year, but when you try to work on too many projects at once, often none of them get done or get done well. Choose one goal to focus your time and energy on rather than spreading yourself thin working on many goals. Focusing on one piece of the puzzle at a time can increase your success and boost your confidence in yourself as you begin to make progress towards your goal. Breaking down large goals into smaller goals helps you make reasonable progress and stay motivated as you see changes slowly come to fruition.

Put Time Into Planning

Don’t wait until the first of the year to pick your goal. It’s important to spend time thinking about which goal is most important to you to achieve and to create a plan for achieving it. Creating a plan includes identifying the steps you will need to take to achieve your goal, why you want to achieve your goal, and brainstorming ways you can keep yourself on track to meet your goal. It can be helpful to create a detailed plan of the small steps you will take to achieve the bigger, overall goal. Without creating this plan, you may quickly find yourself overwhelmed by the end result or unsure of where to start to achieve your goal. Additionally, preplanning how you might handle challenges, setbacks, or any sort of obstacle can be helpful to decrease the likelihood of giving up once things get tough.

For example, if your goal is to spend 800 hours outdoors with your child this year, you might want to consider:

How many hours per day or per week should we spend outside?
Do we want to make a set time of day or day of the week we go outside?
What kind of activities will we do outside?
Will any of these activities cost money? Will I need to save money prior?
What will we do when the weather is not ideal?
What will we do if one of us is not feeling well or doesn’t want to go outside?
What is our plan if we miss a day/week of outdoor time?
How will we track our hours outside?
How will we stay accountable to this goal?
What other barriers might come up that will make it challenging to get outside?

Start with Small Steps

Trying to take on too much too quickly or making drastic changes right away is a reason why so many New Year’s resolutions do not work. If your goal is to improve your physical health by running a 5k, it’s not a good idea to overdo it by running every single day the first week of the year, especially if you were not a regular runner before. You most likely will end up being so sore you won’t even be able to continue with your goal. Instead, start small and build your way up as your body and mind adapt to the changes. You might consider running 2-3 days a week and maybe going for a walk on the off days. Eventually, you can work your way up to running 4-5 days a week and for longer stretches at a time. Small, incremental changes make it easier to stick to new healthy habits and increase the likelihood of long-term success.

Avoid Repeating Past Failures

Another strategy for improving your chances of sticking with your New Year’s goal is to not make the same goal year after year. When you keep setting the same goal each year, your mind is already conditioned to believe you can’t do it because you didn’t do it before and your self-confidence in doing it this time is low. If you really want to attempt a previous goal again, it’s important to spend some time considering why you were not successful in reaching that goal before. Identify what strategies did not work for you and which did work for you. What prevented you from sticking to your goal in the past years? You may also consider altering your goal slightly from previous years to make it more achievable, as well as altering your approach.

Change is a Process

Unhealthy and undesired habits usually take time to develop and it will also take time to develop healthy and desired habits. You cannot expect yourself to make major changes in a matter of days, weeks, or even months when it took you much longer to develop the habit you want to change. One study found that it takes an average of 66 days of consistent behavior change to form a new habit. It’s important to be patient with yourself and understand that change is a process. Learning to enjoy the journey of change can help make the process seem less taxing or slow moving. Knowing that at some point these new behaviors will become second nature if you keep at it can help propel you forward. The point of setting a goal is not to race to the finish but to create long-term and lasting change. That’s why it’s a New Year’s goal, not a January goal! Even if you falter at times, as long as you are making progress overall, you are moving in the right direction!

Get Support

Being accountable to someone other than yourself can be a big motivator to sticking with a goal. It’s so much easier to let yourself down but it’s harder to bail on your friend who is waiting for you to show up for your scheduled run. The buddy system actually works and it can help make the process of change so much more fun. Find a like-minded friend who is committed to helping you stick to your goal by tagging along and holding you accountable. It can also be helpful to explain your goals to other people in your life, such as family and friends, so they can help you achieve your objectives and make sure they are not accidentally interfering with your goals.

Motivation and Discipline

You probably will feel very motivated at the beginning of your change journey, but that motivation does not usually stick around for the entire year. When discomfort or temptation to not stick to your goals comes up, it can be easy to give in and fall off the wagon. This is when it is important to lean on your self-discipline and remind yourself of what motivated you to begin making changes in the first place. Consider keeping a list of your reasons why in a place where you can review it easily on days when you just aren’t feeling it. Keep sources of inspiration around in your environment to keep you motivated. Keeping a resolution journal or another way to track your progress can also be motivating. This can help you recognize progress and results, especially at the beginning of your change journey. Lastly, be willing to learn and adapt. Don’t view slipups as failures, but rather as learning opportunities to identify why the slipup happened and brainstorm ways to react differently when the temptation comes up again. Your motivation throughout the journey will be fleeting but your discipline will stay with you if you let it.

Making changes can be hard! Don’t be afraid to enlist the help of a specialist or professional, whether that is a personal trainer for helping you achieve your fitness goals, a teacher for helping you achieve your educational goals, or a therapist for helping you achieve your mental health goals. If you have goals related to improving your mental health in 2024, our therapists at FIG are willing and available to help you make change and hold you accountable to your goals. Contact us today to schedule a free fifteen-minute consultation regarding individual therapy or to inquire about other services we provide.

Citation:

Health, C. (December 28, 2022). 7 tips to keep your New Year’s resolution. Cultivating-Health. https://health.ucdavis.edu/blog/cultivating-health/7-tips-to-keep-your-new-years-resolution/2022/12

How to Stick to Your New Year’s Resolutions This Year. (January 20, 2023). Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/how-to-keep-your-new-years-resolutions-2795719

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