From Goals to Habits: 6 Expert Tips to Make New Year's Resolutions Stick
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DURHAM, N.C. — The New Year is a time to reset, refresh and revive goals that may have fallen to the wayside in the previous year. Yet, most New Year’s resolutions fail. There’s even a day to recognize the downfall of our annual intentions — Quitter’s Day — observed on the second Friday of January.
John Mitchell, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, shares six tips to help keep your New Year’s resolutions on track.
Think big but start small.
New Year’s resolutions typically involve starting new habits. It’s okay to think big about what you want, but start off with small steps. There might be a lot of distance between how often you’re doing that behavior now and how often you want to be doing it in the future. For example, if your resolution is to run a 5K and you currently don’t run, start off running short distances at first and then build up the distance you run over time.
Don’t wait for motivation.
Sometimes people think they have to wait to feel motivated before they start something difficult. In this scenario, it’s hard to start if you don’t feel a certain way, and we cannot manufacture our feelings that well. As a result, we wait and wait and wait until the feeling comes. Instead, we should change the order. Rather than waiting for the feeling and then acting, we act and then see if the feeling follows. One common practice is called “touch the task” for things that we may avoid that we don’t feel motivated about. Touching the task means engaging in the initial steps of the behavior. For example, if you’re goal is to read a long book, touching the task might be opening up to page 1 and reading the first paragraph. We often find when you touch the task, that gives you momentum.
Plan for setbacks.
Barriers happen when we’re trying to do new things. Remind yourself that it’s common for starting something new to feel challenging — that’s part of the process. Setbacks are normal. For example, you may miss a day when you planned to workout. Rather than buying into the thought that your workout plan is ruined or doomed, remind yourself that setbacks happen, it’s okay they happen, and you can make a plan to recover. Progress is full of ups and downs.
Connect your behavior to your values.
Remember that behavior change isn’t just about the behavior, but something bigger that has personal meaning. This has to do with your values — why this behavior change is important to you. Values are like lighthouses: they give us guidance. A resolution might be important to you because it touches on a value like living a healthy life, having better relationships, or growing as a person.
Make it enjoyable!
People don’t like to do things they don’t enjoy. Sometimes we neglect this when setting resolutions. Find ways to celebrate small wins. Pair up with a friend to encourage each other. There are lots of ways to set yourself up to establish a new behavioral routine and enjoy it!
Keep resetting your intentions.
Tips alone won’t do it! We may set ourselves up for success by modifying our environment to be more likely to engage in a new behavior — like sleeping in your running clothes so you’re dressed for your morning run when you wake up — or do all the other things self-help books recommend when we’re trying to establish new behavioral routines with resolutions. Remember that all the advice in the world won’t get you to do it. It’s about pivoting again and again to reset our intention to a resolution.