How to Keep that New Year's Resolution

It’s that time of year when people start to decide what they want this next year to look like and how to make that happen. Do they want it to be a healthier year? A happier year? The year they’re finally going to learn German so they can take the dream trip they’ve always wanted? We make resolutions for our new year, and are often notoriously bad about keeping them. Do you want some help? I’ve got four simple steps (with some bonus material) to making and keeping your New Year's resolutions. Though it doesn’t have to be New Year specific. These steps will help you whether you turn over your new leaf in January or August:

Step One: Be Specific

When setting a goal for yourself, it’s important to be specific. Let’s look at one of the most common resolutions as an example: losing weight. It’s not enough to say you want to lose weight. You need to be specific. How much weight? What’s a healthy amount? Are you trying to go down a size or lose pounds?

Also, how are you going to lose the weight? Are you going to try eating healthier? Are you going to create an exercise regimen? Saying you’ll lose weight is one thing, but you won’t be able to do it unless you start to get specific. You need to set specific goals that you can track in order to keep yourself on track.

Bonus: Find a way to visualize your goal. Do you have a particular outfit you’re hoping to fit into again? Hang it on the outside of your closet door. Did you decide to lose 20 lbs? Make a little chart to hang in your kitchen where you can start marking off the weight as you lose it. Once you’ve gotten specific, you can give yourself a visual to help stay motivated.

Step Two: Start Small

It’s nice to have lofty goals, but it’s also easy to get discouraged or overwhelmed when aspiring to do something that feels grand. This is why it’s often helpful to break something large into smaller steps. For example, if you decide you are going to run a marathon when you haven’t taken a walk in years, you might start by going for a daily walk. Decide how long or how far you want to go daily (remember, be specific!) and hold yourself to that. As you accomplish that goal, add more time to the walk or begin to jog instead.

Bonus: Another important thing to remember in order to keep from getting discouraged when researching your goal is that people start from different places. Your goal might be to put on a piano concert for family and friends. If you haven’t touched a piano since you took lessons in adolescence, the steps you take will look different than someone who plays regularly. You might want to take out your old piano books or find a teacher who works with adults to brush up on your skills. You won’t go straight into deciding which concerto sounds best to you. And that’s okay. The point is it’s your goal and wherever you’re starting from is the right place for you.

Step Three: Consistency

This is both the hardest and most important of all the steps. There are a lot of different timelines shared online, but the most common I could find is that the median time it takes to form a habit is 66 days. For some people, depending on the habit, it can take almost a year. The important thing is to be consistent. It’s easier to form a habit by doing something daily than it is if you decide to do it three days a week. This is also why it’s important to either start small or make it an appointment (maybe set an alarm!). Make it something you can’t miss and don’t allow yourself exceptions. Once you’ve done your new behavior for long enough you’ll actually miss it if there are days you can’t manage it.

Consistency isn’t just about how often you perform your habit. It’s also about performing your habit in a similar environment or at a similar time. If you begin to use your lunch break to take a walk, you’ll begin wanting to walk on your lunch break. If you begin to purposefully add a vegetable to your dinner, you’ll begin associating dinner with eating a vegetable. Consistency can build on itself and give you a cue to continue the habit you are creating for yourself.

Bonus: The New York Times has an article about stacking your habits. This is a good way to give yourself consistency. To start an exercise habit, you might do five pushups every time you brush your teeth. If you are trying to get back into religion, say a prayer whenever you put on your seatbelt (assuming you do that while the car is in park). These are things you do every day, sometimes multiple times a day, that you can tack an additional small habit onto until they grow into their own.

Step Four: Satisfaction

The habit will eventually become its own reward, but until then it’s okay to supplement a little bit. However, you need to be careful when you do so because the supplemental reward can then become a new unintentional habit associated with the one you intentionally created. This may sound a little complicated so let me break it down with an example using all the steps we’ve talked about:

1. Jessica decides she wants to lose 20 pounds. She already eats well, but is inactive so she decides she’ll start an exercise habit.

2. Since she’s not an active person, she’s intimidated by the gym. She decides to start by taking a daily walk.

3. Jessica begins to take a walk every day on her lunch break. After her first week, however, the weather in her city turns rainy and she is unable to walk around outside. Since she works from home, she streams a light beginner workout video during lunch instead of walking on days that it rains. This allows her to stay consistent even when the weather isn’t.

Here’s where we see two potential reward avenues:

4a. Jessica promises herself she’ll buy a book she’s been thinking about if she can go the first entire week without missing a day. She does! Since the book helped keep her motivation up, she promises herself a visit to her favorite cafe if she can also exercise every day the next week. After a few weeks, Jessica has noticed her clothes are a little loser in some places and the scale has started to move slowly. She’s hitting her small goal consistently and it’s getting her to her larger goal!

4b. Jessica promises herself an extra cup of coffee (her favorite thing about her day) if she goes on her daily walk. She manages to walk or exercise every day for three weeks! However, she’s noticed now that she craves coffee whenever she goes for a walk. Pretty soon walking and coffee are linked in her mind.

See what I’m talking about? It’s part of the consistency we talked about. If you have those vegetables for dinner, pretty soon planning dinner will make you think about vegetables. Use this to your advantage when trying for form a healthy habit, but make sure you are careful when trying to reward yourself. It’s key to have some kind of reward for your habit in order to keep yourself motivated, but if you need to supplement for rewards that take a longer time to happen (like losing weight) then make sure you do it within reason.

Now go forth and resolve away! You’ve got this!