Three steps to victory in keeping your New Year’s Resolutions

You want to lose weight. Learn to meditate. Get out of debt. Eat more leafy greens. Call your mom more often. 

But you’re afraid to really try, because of all the times you’ve tried before and failed. I meet plenty of people who refuse to make New Year’s resolutions for this reason: New Year’s resolutions can be a source of failure, year after year.

It doesn’t have to be this way! This post is your quickstart guide to setting a New Year’s Resolution that will stick. For a more comprehensive, science-based manual for changing your habits, get my free eBook here.

We fail to change our habits because our human brains crave routine and resist change. But it’s very discouraging to try to do things differently, only to find ourselves falling back into old patterns.

Having failed in the past is stressful—and it’s even more stressful when we opt for self-flagellation in the face of our setbacks or lapses. We think that if we’re really hard on ourselves, we’ll be less likely to make the same mistake again, or that we’ll motivate ourselves towards better performance in the future. Admitting our failings does not need to come with commensurate self-criticism, however.

Why? Because self-criticism doesn’t work. It doesn’t actually motivate us. Instead, self-criticism is associated with reduced motivation and diminished future improvement.

Self-compassion—being warm and supportive towards ourselves, and actively soothing ourselves—does help when we fall short of our intentions or our goals. It leads to less anxiety, less depression, and greater peace of mind. Most importantly, it makes us feel more motivated to make the improvements we need. Here are three steps to achieve your resolutions for change.

1. Forgive yourself

The first step to making lasting change is to forgive yourself for having failed in the past. It’s okay; it’s normal, even. You did the best you could with the skills you had. Take a deep breath and soothe yourself like you might a good friend: Use kind, reassuring words to ease yourself out of a stress response. Remind yourself that few people are successful the first time they try to change their routines. Explain to your good-friend-self that feeling bad about your behavior will not increase your future success.

2. Aim for an inherently rewarding target

Why do we so often fail at our attempts to change?

One reason is that we tend to set goals and pick resolutions that are inherently unrewarding. The goals we pick necessitate relentless hard work or remind us of our mortality in a way that makes us feel small instead of grateful.

The second step, therefore, is to set the right resolution, whether that’s a big audacious goal, a new habit you’d like to get into, or a bad habit you’d like to break.

To begin, let’s start with your desired outcome. It’s okay to be a little vague here; we’ll get more specific as we proceed. For example, you might want to:

• Lose weight
• Get in shape or establish an exercise habit
• Spend more time with your friends

It’s important to figure out WHY you want to do this thing that you haven’t been doing so far. You might have a whole laundry list of reasons for wanting to do what you want to do, and that’s great. But right now, I want you to think of the single most compelling way that you’ll benefit from achieving your goal.

Chances are, you’ve come up with a super logical reason for, say, losing weight or exercising, like that it will lower your blood pressure.

Here’s the thing: even though we all like to think of ourselves as rational people, logic doesn’t motivate us nearly as much as our emotions do. Why? Because we approach what feels good and avoid what feels bad.

This means that we tend to stick with behavior changes for longer when we aim for something that feels good.  Doing something because we feel like we should do it doesn’t feel good. It feels like we’re being forced. It’s stressful, and stress makes us seek comfort, often in the very form of behavior that we are trying to avoid (think potato chips and Netflix binges).

So, ask yourself how, in your heart of hearts, do you want to feel? Identify a WHY for your resolution that will motivate you over the long haul.

Let’s think this through together.

Maybe you want to lose weight, for example, and so you plan to cut baked goods out of your diet, which happen to be your favorite foods. How will that make you feel?

At first, you might feel great, because you’ve just made a healthy decision for yourself. But if you don’t cheat on your diet, you’ll likely soon feel deprived. And if you do begin to cheat on your diet, you’ll probably feel anxious and guilty. Both of these feeling states are unmotivating and uncomfortable, which will make it easy for you to ditch your diet.

But maybe the reason that you want to lose weight is so that you feel healthy and strong. Feeling stronger and healthier are very motivating feeling-states, which will make it much easier for you to keep your new habit.

With this in mind, rethink your goal or resolution: restate it for yourself in terms of how you want to feel. For example:

• I forbid myself to eat [delicious] baked goods could become → “I want to feel healthy and strong.”
• I have to get more sleep could become → “I want to feel well-rested and energetic.”
• I should spend more time with friends could become → “I want to feel loving and connected.”

3. Refine your resolution

What actions and behaviors have led you to feel what you want to feel in the past?

Maybe you tend to feel well-rested and energetic when you go to bed before 10 pm. Perhaps you tend to feel healthy and strong when you go for a hike. Maybe you feel loving and connected when you spend time one-on-one with your sister.

The important thing here is that it is something that you already have experience with; we human beings tend to be truly terrible at predicting how something will make us feel. But we do well to use our own experience to predict how we’ll feel in the future.

Here’s an example of how we frequently go wrong: say I’d like to feel stronger this upcoming year. This calls for a get-in-shape habit. So, what would be a good way for me to get in shape? Let’s see…I could train for a marathon! Fun! Ambitious! But before I start researching destination marathons (because why not make it a vacation, too?), I’ll do well to stop myself and ask: How do I feel when I’m training for a long run? Here’s my own honest answer: I tend to feel burdened by the time commitment. And arthritic in my left hip. And soul-sinking dread before each run.

Can we make a pact right now that we won’t make New Year’s Resolutions that are going to make us feel burdened, arthritic, and filled with dread? On the other hand, I can think of two activities that DO make me feel stronger:

• taking long hikes with my dog and
• high-intensity exercise classes where I sweat a lot.

Your “why” for your goal needs to be a rewarding feeling that you experience when you are doing your resolution, or at the very least, immediately after you do it. A daily hike must genuinely make you feel energized, for example, if that is the feeling you are after.

From here, refine your resolution one more time. Make sure that your resolution reflects a really specific behavior, so that you know if you are succeeding or not. For example, resolve to take three hikes per week after work on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays instead of resolving to “go for more hikes.”

Finally, do a little reality check. Setting unrealistic resolutions is a sure path to failure. If it’s just not realistic for you to, say, leave work an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays so that you can do your hike, please don’t make that your resolution. Or if you live in Maine and you know that it just isn’t realistic to hike in a snowstorm, please go back and find another behavior that reliably makes you feel the way you want to feel.

That’s it! If you are now aiming for a target that is specific, realistic, and inherently rewarding (because you know it is going to make you feel good) you are good to go!

If you’d like more tips — perhaps for how to make your resolution into an automatic habit, or for what to do if you feel stuck — I hope you’ll check out my free eBook here.

This is a tricky time of year: We’re often tired and triggered and hopped up on sugar. Even when we really love the holidays, they can be brutal. It’s a time of unrealistically high expectations. Money gets a little tight. And many of us come into close contact with the most challenging people in our lives. Others are bound to disappoint us, and we will often disappoint ourselves and other people. 

(A reminder: Although it doesn’t feel right, it’s totally normal to be more reactive around your immediate family than you are with your friends. Our parents, spouses, and siblings know where our buttons are and how to push them, because in many cases, they installed them.)

This is also a time when we want to be our best selves. We want to be generous and loving and patient. We want to end the year by resolving to do even better next year. 

To boost follow-through on these good intentions, we need to feel safe and secure. When we are stressed, our brain tries to rescue us by activating our dopamine systems. A dopamine rush makes temptations more tempting. Think of this as your brain pushing you toward a comfort item . . . Like an extra glass of wine instead of a reasonable bedtime. Or the entire breadbasket. Or an extra little something in your Amazon cart.

As Kelly McGonigal, author of The Willpower Instinct, writes, “Stress points us in the wrong direction, away from clear-headed wisdom toward our least-helpful instincts.” When we’re relaxed, we’ll choose the locally grown organic apple, the earlier bedtime, the stairs instead of the elevator. We’ll respond to a difficult relative with love and compassion. 

And when we’re stressed? Personally, I have a weakness for tortilla chips and spicy queso.

So instead of turning to social media and Christmas cookies and booze to soothe our rattled nerves, this is the time to preemptively comfort ourselves in healthy ways. Fortunately, positive emotions like compassion and gratitude act as powerful brakes on our stress response — and as such, are truly comforting. 

The takeaway: When we start to get stressed or tired, we can schedule a quick walk or call with a friend, reflect on what we are grateful for, or let ourselves take a little nap. Perhaps we need to seek out a hug or watch a funny YouTube video. These things may seem small — or even luxurious — but they enable us to be the people that we intend to be.

* * * * * 

This post is an excerpt from my latest eBook, How to Set a Resolution that Sticks: Establishing New Habits & Achieving Your Goals. If you are interested in learning more about how to be your best self in this new decade, I hope you will download it. It’s free!

Do you have a stressed-out teenager? You aren’t alone! A recent survey by the American Psychological Association found that fewer than half of teenagers today would rate their mental health as “excellent” or “very good.” And it doesn’t seem to get better as they get older; more than 90 percent of today’s 18 to 21-year-olds experienced at least one physical or emotional symptom due to stress in the past month (this is very high compared to other adults). 

Today’s teenagers aren’t just stressed about what’s going on at home or at school or in their own lives—they’re also stressed about the world they are living in. For example, three quarters say they are stressed about mass and school shootings. More than half feel stressed about the current political climate, and more than two-thirds feel significantly stressed about our nation’s future. About 60 percent are worried about the rise in suicide rates, about climate change and global warming, and about the separation and deportation of immigrant and migrant families. The list goes on and on and on.

It’s no wonder that our teens are suffering. Fortunately, there is a lot that we can do for our stressed-out teens. Here are seven steps for helping teens cope from my free eBook, How to Help Teens Deal with Stress (download the full guide here).

Step 1: Confront the Stress.

The most important thing to do when a teen is anxious or suffering is to help them confront the stressor or worry rather than avoid it. Why? Because avoidance fuels anxiety.

Step 2: Ask them to describe the difficult circumstance.

Have them simply give you the facts of the hard place they are in, and in response, show genuine curiosity about their experience. You are not trying to take away their pain. The goal is for them to feel seen and heard by you. 

Step 3. Help them identify how they are feeling in response to the circumstance. 

This is the “name it to tame it” technique, and research shows that when we label our emotions, we are better able to integrate them. 

Step 4. Ask them about the source of their stress.

We can encourage them to look for what might be new or changing in their lives. Similarly, we can help them look for sources of unpredictability or to identify ways that they feel threatened. And we can ask them about the things in their lives that feel out of their control.

Step 5. Encourage them to classify their type of stress.

In addition to searching for sources of stress, it can be helpful for teens to classify the particular strain of stress they are experiencing. Is it related to a negative life event? Is it the result of cumulative day-to-day difficulties that are beyond the teen’s control? Or is it a daily hassle?

Step 6. Help them see that their stress can be helpful.

Stress is healthy and helpful when it creates enough tension and strain to foster growth.

Step 7. Practice acceptance.

When we accept the reality of a difficult or scary situation and our limited control, it allows our kids to do the same. Importantly, acceptance also frees them up to move forward, rather than remaining paralyzed by difficulty and fear. 

Want the whole guide to helping
teens who are struggling? It’s free

Download Here

On some level, our society has come to believe that our economy depends on a gift-giving extravaganza and that the holidays wouldn’t be the holidays without all the gifts. But meaningful traditions are the things that our children remember, and, importantly, it is our traditions and holiday rituals that actually bring lasting happiness.

What traditions do you remember from your childhood?

Like Lateefah Simon, I believe deeply in the sanctity of opportunity. I also believe in Tipping Point, and the opportunity that this amazing organization is creating. On this #GivingTuesday, I hope you will join me in fighting poverty by making a donation to Tipping Point Community.

Pre-ordering The New Adolescence is another way to give to Tipping Point. Order it for yourself, your friends, your adult children — anyone in your life that you know is interested in what is happening to adolescents today. I am donating 100% of my pre-order profits to Tipping Point Community. Learn more or pre-order here.

Located here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tipping Point is dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty in families. Tipping Point identifies and invests in the most effective anti-poverty solutions by funding a portfolio of poverty-fighting organizations. Tipping Point’s board covers 100% of operating costs, so every dollar donated goes where it’s needed most.