According to one survey, only around 9 percent of people achieve their New Year’s resolutions, even though around a third of us attempt them. Most of our resolutions revolve around improving physical and mental health, which are important life changes that can have a positive impact on the lives we live.
So this year, instead of just giving up on the important changes that might improve the quality of your life, why not tweak them according to science to make them more achievable?
Why We Can Fail at New Year’s Resolutions
Part of the reason that we fail to keep our resolutions is because they aren’t that well thought out. We tend to choose drastic, rigid goals that don’t have enough flexibility and would be difficult to add into our daily lives, says Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and author of the book Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend. She adds that we also tend to fear failure, which makes us even more rigid.
“When we have even one slip up as we’re rewiring our brains to create new habits, we feel like failures and tend to give up,” says Manly.
One way to make healthier, more sustainable resolutions is to realize that we’re all imperfect and that we will make mistakes, but the goal is to transition into healthier habits. Choose resolutions that are more realistic and reachable because small steps are always better than no steps.
Read More: How to Improve Your Mental Health
Creating More Achievable Resolutions
We’re more likely to achieve goals that add in something rather than take something away, according to a December 2020 article published in the journal PLOS One.
“One of the main findings in our study was that among participants with approach-oriented goals, there was a statistically significant higher ratio of successful resolvers compared to those with avoidance-oriented goals,” says Martin Oscarsson, lead study author and a PhD Student at Stockholm University.
Approach-oriented goals allow us to do more of something, for example, adding in yoga or running, rather than avoidance-oriented goals, which involve avoiding an activity like drinking less, stopping smoking, or avoiding fried foods.
Read more: Healthy Habits Take More Than 21 Days To Form, but They’re Worth It in the End
Goal Strategies
Another strategy is to use an approach-oriented goal to achieve an avoidance-oriented goal. For example, if you want to drink less, add in a yoga class during your happy hour, or if you want to eat healthier meals during the day, add meal planning to your Sunday routine so that you have healthy meals at the ready when you’re busy during the work week.
“If you want to stress less, consider what you would do more of if you were less stressed,” says Oscarsson. “Maybe you would spend more time with your family, read more, or choose another hobby to reduce stress.”
Or if you want to quit smoking, you’re not just missing the nicotine, you’re missing the breaks that you took during the workday or the social aspect of smoking. This means that when you’re planning on achieving a goal, you need to look for ways to replace what’s missing from your life, like taking a walk during your smoke break or calling a friend to replace those missed social interactions.
If you’re going to stop something, you have to have something to replace it with, which means spending more time planning and thinking about the New Year’s resolutions you hope to achieve.
While Oscarsson says that Americans are the most likely to make resolutions, it’s a global phenomenon that largely revolves around health goals. Millions of people resolve to make positive changes at the beginning of each year, and Oscarsson says, “Finding ways to increase their likelihood of success is a good thing.”
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Sara Novak is a science journalist based in South Carolina. In addition to writing for Discover, her work appears in Scientific American, Popular Science, New Scientist, Sierra Magazine, Astronomy Magazine, and many more. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. She’s also a candidate for a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University, (expected graduation 2023).
