How to Make Your New Year’s Resolution Stick

Y our local gym is one way you can tell a new year has just begun. At the start of each year, fitness centers fill up with New Year’s resolutioners who are convinced that 2023 . . . er, 2024 . . . er, 2025 will be when they finally get in shape. By one estimate, 12 percent of gym memberships begin in January.

Exercise isn’t the only way people try to better themselves when a new calendar sets in. A 2023 survey found that one-third of U.S. adults had committed to a New Year’s resolution for last year. They professed a variety of goals: reading more, saving money, traveling, eating better. But I have some bad news about resolutions: Most people quit them. Another survey found that nearly a third had done so by the end of January (a significant portion doesn’t even make it past the second Friday of the month). Almost an additional two-thirds don’t endure February. Only a handful make it to year’s end.

Perhaps the modern, secular New Year’s resolution falls short of the Lenten penitence, its spiritual, premodern successor, in its capacity to motivate genuine life alteration. But that doesn’t mean that all resolutions must end in failure. My own record on annual amelioration is far from perfect. Yet my own experiences, backed up by science — capitalizing it is so 2020 — suggest a few useful ways to make it likelier that you actually stick to your chosen resolution.

First, start gradually. As a big-picture thinker prone to long-term speculation, I have littered the shoals of my goals with endeavors I tried to do too much of too quickly, overwhelming myself in the process. What starts as an understandable attempt to imagine the endgame can, for me, quickly morph into an envisioning of the whole that becomes intimidating. To combat this requires thinking about smaller steps in the interim, which can add up to the desired end.

As a committed runner, I have certain goals for the year, but I am not letting the fact that I recently took a deliberate break and now have very low mileage make those later goals seem unattainable. This “small wins” framework keeps me grounded and thinking in the moment while not foreclosing the possibility of greater achievements later on. Those longer-term goals do still matter, however. Research has found that setting them provides both short-term focus and motivation and long-term satisfaction. Even using yourself as a benchmark can work.

But incremental beginnings oriented toward specific ends can run aground on the day’s detritus. Which is why an important additional step to take is to eliminate as many obstacles as possible between you and achieving your goal. To return to the running example: If you find your determination flagging, laying out your outfit for the next morning the night before can serve not only as a symbolic reminder of what you’re trying to do; it can also reduce the “friction” that the weary mind and body could otherwise employ to generate excuses to remain in that nice, comfy bed. Designating a fixed and regular period for achieving your goal also helps.

Another inducement to New Year’s resolve is to reward yourself. Research has shown that activities with relatively quick gratification — results, even of a smaller kind, perceptible early on — can produce self-sustaining momentum. Rewards can come in many forms. Ideally, you want to habituate yourself to the point that the activity itself is a kind of reward — or, at least, something you feel incomplete or guilty without (as running has become for me). But if other “treats” are necessary, they can be useful, too — so long as you don’t overdo them to the point that they negate whatever it is you have resolved to do.

All of this presumes an inner, self-directed core on which you must ultimately rely. But you don’t have to do everything alone. In fact, a great way to keep yourself accountable is to externalize accountability. That might mean creating actual stakes in your goals, such as putting money down to register for a race sometime later in the year. It could also mean going about resolutions with friends. This is another proven method to increase the likelihood of achieving goals, as my own time with teammates attests. Group-based accountability can falter, of course, if the whole group gives up. But it can also encourage shared success and generate common joys.

The deck is truly stacked against those who set New Year’s resolutions. Even your local gym might be in on it. The business model of some gyms can depend on the kind of customer who doesn’t come in much but signs up and remains committed out of vague pleasantries associated with the facility and the idea of one day using it to its full potential. And if we are what we repeatedly do, then changing anything about ourselves will grate against what we have been (though not forever). Some setbacks are inevitable. But the spirals of self-doubt into which they can lead are not. Challenges provide excellent thrills, especially when the odds are against you. Proving doubters and statistics wrong, as part of the lifelong quest to become a better person, may be the best reward of all. If you don’t, well . . . there’s always next year.