Here’s Why You’ve Already Bailed On Your New Year's Resolutions, And Here’s What You Can Do About It

New Year's resolutions are often like a hurricane, they are intense, filled with great anticipation, and  before you know it, are in the rearview mirror. With it being early March already, statistics show that 64% of people have quit their New Year's resolutions by the end of the first month of the year. Even worse, less than 10% of people even stick with their resolutions for the long haul, further evidence that our good intentions at the turn of the calendar are often no more than, well, intentions. 

Of course, this is problematic because modern society has surrounded us with a near endless list of unhelpful habits to choose from. This makes habit change and habit formation more necessary than ever. From needing to lose a few pounds, cutting back on alcohol consumption, reducing screentime, or wanting to read more, our new years resolutions are almost always to our benefit if followed through on. This makes it all the more frustrating when we abandon our resolutions.

Why Are We So Bad At Sticking To Goals?

There are many factors that influence why we often are unable to stick to our resolutions. Oftentimes, we are setting unrealistic goals, or goals that are not adequately measurable. Additionally, we struggle to stick with things that do not provide instant gratification, which something like attempting to lose weight does not. People also often get caught in dichotomous thinking, meaning that if we have failed to engage in goal aligned behavior once, we get discouraged, thinking that we’ve “failed” and abandon ship rather than allowing it to be a blip in the radar. These are just a few factors that clients commonly report as issues for drifting away from their goals. 

So, What Can We Do About It?

Usually, the focus here is on setting more specific, achievable, and measurable goals. And while that focus is warranted, it often overlooks the power of learning how to improve our habits. The thing about developing positive habits is that is more of a “skill” deficit, than a “will” deficit, meaning that by learning better habit formation and development, we cease to need to try and get by on willpower alone, which research tells us is often fruitless anyways. With that said, here are three habit tools that can help you stick to changes that you're trying to make.

Point and Call

Point and call is an overly simple yet effective way to evoke habit change by activating multiple senses, and there are a couple of ways that you can use this. The main component is to bring attention to a given action by saying it out loud to yourself (pro tip, be as specific as possible). An example of this might be “I am going to get my keys and drive my car (how you will engage in behavior) to the gym (specific location), and train my upper body for 40 minutes (specific behavior) in order to build muscle and improve my fitness (reason the behavior is important).” One could also use this to curb a specific behavior. If you wished to doomscroll less (who can relate?), a person could say “I am going to set a timer on my phone for 5 minutes. I will scroll during those 5 minutes, and then when the timer goes off, I will put my phone in another room so that I can watch a show/spend time with my partner/read a book without distractions.” While it seems silly, this really works. In both Japan and New York City, public transportation systems have reduced errors and fatalities drastically by adopting pieces of this approach.

Habit Stacking

Another useful tool for building new habits is through the process of habit stacking. This is done by initiating the formation of a new habit by engaging in it directly before or after an established habit. For example, if you wanted to begin reading 10 pages per day, you would attempt to start doing that after something you already do daily, such as brushing your teeth. This is effective because it gives you a predictable, established window in which you can create time to engage in your desired habit. Another example of this in practice is walking for 15 minutes after eating lunch-which would have some bonus benefits!

Self-Binding

This one will be familiar to addiction specialists, and is most effective in mitigating a behavior that one wishes to no longer engage in. The idea of self-binding is to create an environment that makes engaging in an undesired behavior or accessing an undesired substance, food, cigarettes, etc. difficult. The more restrictive we can make it to access that bag of potato chips, beer, or whatever other habit we’re trying to kick, the better off we are. Here are a couple examples of this in practice. If you are trying to eliminate eating sweets, don’t allow yourself to keep any of them in your house or apartment. This doesn’t mean it is impossible for you to eat sweets, it just becomes much harder to access. Instead of simply walking to the pantry to get your dessert of choice, you’d have to carry out multiple steps (get in your car, drive to the store, spend money, etc.), giving yourself several more opportunities to think twice about eating the sweets. If you want to play less video games, put your actual game console in a closet when you are not using it. That way, anytime you would like to use it, you must go through the hassle of getting it out of the closet and plugging it in.

Since our brains are wired to go for the quick fix, we are essentially using that knowledge against ourselves to make it harder to access the thing that we know we should not access when self-binding. 

For a deeper understanding of the science behind habit formation, I’d highly recommend reading Atomic Habits, by James Clear, which I will link in the article.

What habit tool will you implement into your life?

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/max-sturm-howell-mi/1150307

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