Making, and then breaking, our New Year’s resolutions is a time-honoured seasonal ritual. So what do we need to do to ensure that our resolutions stick in 2024? Abi Millar asks the experts about a better approach to behavioural change.

‘New Year, New You’, may be more of a marketing strategy than a philosophy to live by. But it’s a hard piece of messaging to shake. At the start of every year, the question re-emerges: which of your bad habits will you put to bed this year, and which good habits will take their place?

We’re encouraged to imagine a new, improved version of ourselves – a kind of Self 2.0 – who goes to the gym every day, never maxes out their credit card, and carefully eats a single biscuit before placing the packet out of reach.

As the cliched trajectory goes, we may keep these resolutions for a while. But by the end of January, motivation starts to wane. The running kit languishes at the back of the wardrobe. We open a bottle of wine on a weeknight. We eat a second biscuit, then a third and a fourth and a fifth. According to a 2016 study, 41% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, but only 9% of those feel they are successful in keeping them. Another study, involving 2,000 British adults, found that people tend to give up on new behaviours after just seven weeks.

This poses the question – if our resolutions are doomed to fail, why do we bother with them in the first place? Is there a way we can use our New Year’s momentum as a genuine spur to change, or must the early weeks of the year be forever characterised by defeat?

Why willpower won’t cut it

Dr Ayelet Fishbach, a social psychologist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and author of Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation, maintains success is possible. “The data we have on New Year’s resolutions suggests most people drop them within two to three months, but that a significant proportion of the population is still pursuing them by November,” she says.

The interesting question for Fishbach, and other researchers in this field, is what makes these people different from the rest of us. A simple answer might be that they have more willpower, that they’re blessed with an unusual strength of mind and ability to tough it out. That’s not surprising: when you’re doing Dry January and nursing a non-alcoholic beer, it can feel like a test of your inner mettle. However, the picture that’s emerging from social research is a little more nuanced than that.

Dr Torsten Martiny-Huenger, an associate professor at the department of psychology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, remarks that the concept of ‘willpower’ has influenced the research community for decades.

“It was perceived as a strength that individuals possess to varying degrees. It was also assumed to be a limited resource that can become drained when using it,” he says. “However, more and more evidence has been presented that is incompatible with this idea.”

The obvious counterpoint is that, when you talk to people who do maintain healthy habits, they often don’t perceive them as being challenging. Take running as an example. Most newbie runners, lacing up their trainers on 1^st January, would describe their experience as unpleasant, a battle of mind over matter. But once the habit becomes entrenched, it’s a different story. Few habitual runners would claim to be sustained by willpower alone. They love running, and rarely feel like they have to force it.  

“The people who keep their resolutions are the ones who have found an intrinsic motivation to pursue their goals,” says Fishbach. “They’re doing it because they’ve found some enjoyment or satisfaction in the process.”

Eloise Skinner, an author and psychotherapist, agrees. “Instead of setting ourselves up for a fight to achieve what we want by force, we can look at resolutions from a different angle: how can we set up our environment, behaviour and habits in a way that supports the outcomes we want?” she says.

Pick the right kind of goal

When it comes to keeping a New Year’s resolution, the first step is to make sure it’s the right one for you. If you feel utterly paralysed by the thought of it, then take that as a red flag. “Let’s say you want to start swimming,” says Fishbach. “Is that going to be fun for you? If you have a job and young children at home, is it feasible for you to go to the swimming pool?”

Skinner thinks it’s important to set a habit that aligns with your sense of identity. That means, if you’re taking up a new habit or dropping an old one, you can analyse your behaviour from the perspective of the person you’d like to be.

“Allowing your identity to shift into the position of the person who would uphold a certain behaviour or habit – a gym-goer, or a healthy eater, or an early riser – can provide a great foundation on which to build and maintain new resolutions,” she says.

Danny Zane, a therapist and counsellor at Therapy North London, says you need to think about your ‘why’. What is your motivation? How will it change your life? What role might it play in boosting your wellbeing? “If the goal that has been set is clear, specific, and actually achievable, it is more likely to stick as a resolution,” he says.

Specificity is key here. While you might want to get fitter, ‘getting fitter’ is a nebulous goal, with no clear way of motivating yourself or monitoring progress. A better resolution would be something with a built-in target, let’s say ‘running a 30-minute 5K by spring’.

One 2017 study, which looked at nearly ten million marathon runners, found that people were 1.4 times more likely to finish a marathon in 3:59 than 4:01. The dream of running a four-hour marathon (as opposed to just ‘being a better runner’) was a huge motivating factor that drove them to perform their best.

Persist through discomfort

Once you know what you want to accomplish, take heart: the scientific consensus is that you can absolutely teach an old dog new tricks. Neuroscience shows that every time you repeat a behaviour, you’re strengthening the associated neural pathways, increasing the likelihood that you’ll perform that behaviour again.

To adopt a slightly tenuous metaphor, doing something habitually is like following a well-worn path through a forest. It’s the easiest thing in the world to retrace your steps. Forging a new path, by contrast, can be challenging – you might need to hack through bushes, clear back obstacles, ford streams. Your goal is to persist through the difficulty until it’s no longer difficult, which might take a couple of months or more. At the end of this period, the behaviour has become a habit and the new path is itself well worn.

“It’s important to recognise that it’s going to feel uncomfortable initially,” says Fishbach. “That’s a sign that it’s working and that you’re changing. The discomfort is temporary, and eventually it’s going to feel great.”

Consider your environment

In the meantime, there are certain ‘hacks’ you can use to keep the discomfort at a manageable level. Martiny-Huenger has been researching the role of ‘situational cues’ in forming beneficial habits – which essentially means something in the environment that triggers you to perform that behaviour. If you walk past the off-license on your way home from work, that might be your cue for buying alcohol. If you keep a fruit basket on your kitchen table, that might be your cue for eating fruit. 

“The problem with new intentions is that the behaviours required to accomplish the intention are not systematically linked to relevant cues – or the relevant cues still have links to the undesired old habits,” says Martiny-Huenger. “However, new beneficial links can be achieved.”

One way to do that is through ‘if-then action planning’, in which you think about what your cues will look like ahead of time, and plan how you’re going to respond. For example, ‘if I walk past the off-license, then I’ll keep on walking,’ or ‘if someone offers me a second drink, then I’ll say no thanks’.

Another strategy is to restructure your physical environment. If resolution is to eat less chocolate, then make sure the chocolate isn’t in eye-shot – put it on a high shelf you can’t reach. If it’s to start your day with a run, prepare your kit the night before and place it by the side of your bed.

“The advice is to take the effect your environment has on you seriously. Failure is not a personal weakness – it merely indicates that one is not using appropriate strategies,” Martiny-Huenger says.

The journey, not the destination

Zane suggests ensuring you have a strong support network in place, celebrating every win no matter how small, and taking a long-term outlook as opposed to chasing immediate results. If you’re trying to quit a more negative behaviour (let’s say drinking alcohol), it might be useful to look a little deeper into the psychological mechanisms underlying it, and if necessary seek professional help. 

“If you can recognise when and where you drink too much, then you must start avoiding these situations,” he says. “Stress could be a trigger, so when you are feeling stressed or anxious, try some mindful breathing exercises, or perhaps do some exercise to help remove your stress.”

Patience and consistency are key here. While our culture tends to valorise an all-or-nothing approach, being too rigid in your goals can mean setting yourself up for failure. In other words, slowly reducing the bad habit may be easier than suddenly stopping, and it’s important to give ourselves grace when we fall off track.

“Forget about willpower, forget about punishing yourself or scolding yourself – can you find a way of doing it that’s enjoyable and which fits around your other goals?” says Fishbach. “What predicts performance is how excited you are about the journey, not how much you value the destination.”

That’s quite different from the way that most of us approach our New Year’s resolutions. Even the word ‘resolution’ evokes a kind of dogged steely-mindedness, which for most people isn’t a recipe for long-term success. What’s required is something softer, smarter, and altogether more strategic – a path to making lasting lifestyle changes this year and into the next. 

This article appears in the Dec-Feb 2024 edition of Overseas