New Year's Goals
Good Intentions, Poor Implementation
Most New Year's resolutions fail by January 19th. Learn how to establish new habits successfully and achieve your goals long-term.
New Year's Goals
Most New Year's resolutions fail by January 19th. Learn how to establish new habits successfully and achieve your goals long-term.
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Did you make a resolution at the new year (once again) to exercise more, lose weight, spend less time in front of the TV, or finally tackle a long-delayed project? You're not alone! Many people see the new year as a fresh start — New Year, New Me, as the saying goes.
Yet often, good resolutions fade away quickly. The fitness app Strava analyzed about 800 million activities in 2019 and found that 80% of fitness resolutions fail by January 19th. Strava aptly named this day "Quitters Day."
To help your resolutions survive beyond January 19th, let's explore how to build new habits effectively.
Neuroplasticity is the key term when establishing new habits, such as taking a walk after lunch each day. Neuroplasticity refers to your brain's ability to structurally and functionally adapt to change. This means your brain can form new connections between nerve cells (synapses), strengthen or weaken existing connections, and even reorganize certain areas.
The goal here is automaticity—using as little mental energy as possible. We experience this with learning an instrument or driving: in driving school, our heads were spinning with clutching, shifting, and steering. A year later, we're blasting music and chatting with friends while heading to the next town party. That's automaticity.
To stick with the driving analogy: the neural pathways in your brain required to execute an action can be a crumbling, winding country road—or a freshly paved, three-lane highway.
Reaching for your smartphone out of boredom, heading straight to the couch after dinner, grabbing a chocolate bar at the supermarket—all of these can be highways. Habits we don't really think about. Our brain simply cruises mindlessly down the highway.
It's far less eager to tackle a shabby, winding country road that demands concentration. This includes habits not yet established, like taking a walk after meals, going to exercise twice a week after work, or reaching for vegetables at the supermarket.
Neuroplasticity is like a road-construction company: even the neglected country road can be developed into a respectable road with some effort and patience—one that your brain might eventually prefer over the big highway, which no one has maintained in the meantime and is gradually deteriorating.
Reshaping the road requires machinery and tools. In our brain, these are neurotransmitters like dopamine. Dopamine is especially important in the early stages of learning new habits, where it promotes behavior reinforcement in the striatum, a specific brain region. It gives us the motivation to want to change at all and makes us feel good when we're working toward our goal.
Human behavior is extremely complex, and many factors influence whether we actually implement—or fail to implement—our New Year's resolutions. Let's look at the most common pitfalls.
Too vague or incorrect framing
How we word our resolutions also influences success. According to psychology professor Per Carlbring, approach-oriented goals ("I eat fruit and vegetables daily") are more effective with about 60% success rate compared to avoidance-oriented ones ("I don't eat sweets"), which only reach 47% (1).
Vague resolutions often fail too. Instead of "exercise more," set concrete, measurable goals like "go to the gym 2x per week." Writing down your resolutions—on paper or on your phone—is also more effective than just keeping them in your head.
All or nothing, no intermediate goals
Humans tend to think in black-and-white terms. We usually set goals that are far too ambitious. When we don't achieve them right away, we're disappointed and give up (see also our Instagram post on the "What-The-Hell Effect"). We underestimate the cumulative effect of small actions.
Instead of frustratedly giving up because you can't jog 3 hours a week as planned, try smaller goals—maybe one hour? Even just 30 minutes of jogging per week adds up to 26 hours in a year! That's better than zero, right?
Not enough patience
It can take a long time before an activity becomes a new routine and stops feeling difficult, instead becoming second nature. One study found that depending on the person, it can take between 18 and 254 days for a new habit to become automated. The average was 66 days (2).
So keep pushing your willpower a bit longer if it still feels hard after 3 weeks to make eggs for breakfast instead of jam bread. Until you reach automaticity, you can work with small rewards to keep your dopamine levels high.
The wrong environment
Create an environment that supports your resolutions! Spending your lunch break with smokers makes quitting smoking harder. If you want to scroll less, put your phone out of sight.
Makes sense, right? Also get support: friends or your partner can take on the challenge with you so you can motivate each other!
Strong emotional associations
Particularly difficult are resolutions to cut out pleasure substances like caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, or sugar. Willpower alone often isn't enough because emotional associations and sometimes physical dependencies are at play. Habits like smoking or stress eating are often directly linked to situations or feelings like sadness, stress, or social events.
Mindfulness and self-reflection can help identify the underlying triggers and create new associations to reprogram your reward system. Here's an example: You're stressed and automatically reach for a bar of chocolate (or a cigarette, a glass of wine, etc.).
Become aware that what you actually need right now is the feeling of relaxation, not the substance itself. You can get that feeling through a short breathing meditation, a hug, or a walk, for example.
We wish you much success in implementing your New Year's resolutions, and we're curious whether our tips help!
Sources
Oscarsson M, Carlbring P, Andersson G, Rozental A. A large-scale experiment on New Year's resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals. PLoS ONE. 9. December 2020;15(12):e0234097.
Lally P, van Jaarsveld CHM, Potts HWW, Wardle J. How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. Eur J Soc Psychol. 2010;40(6):998–1009.
