Happy New Year!
To many of us, the new year welcomes the idea of having a fresh start and a clean slate. With the past year behind us, we feel like we have the opportunity to begin a new chapter in life. This can help us feel hopeful and optimistic about the year ahead of us. People often view the New Year as a perfect time to enforce positive changes in their lives, which can include setting goals, making healthy lifestyle changes, and leaving behind any challenges or disappointments from the past. The cultural tradition of making New Year’s resolutions fosters a sense of self-improvement and personal growth. The act of setting goals for the upcoming year can instill a feeling of purpose, motivation, and it can enhance overall wellbeing.
Why It’s Hard to Maintain Resolutions
As good as this sounds in theory, sticking to these resolutions is often a lot more challenging than it sounds! Have you ever struggled to maintain a goal throughout the New Year? If so, you aren’t alone! Sustaining New Year’s resolutions long-term can be difficult due to a multitude of factors, some of which include:
- Unrealistic Goals: We often fall victim to the ideology ‘New Year, New Me.’ This can lead us to aspire to redefine ourselves and completely change our routine in our day-to-day lives. Trying to implement so many changes into your daily life can lead to frustration, loss of motivation, and feelings of failure if you aren’t able to achieve all of your goals.
- Lack of Specific Planning: If our goals are too vague and lack a clear plan of action, resolutions often remain as abstract ideas. A lack of detailed planning can hinder the implementation of desired changes because we are unable to incorporate these goals into our lives in a practical way. For example, instead of setting the goal “Stop people pleasing”, it may be more helpful to set a more specific goal of “I will say no to others when I am feeling tired and burnt out.” or “I will communicate with others when I am upset or my feelings are hurt.”
- External Pressures and Stress: We never know what challenges life will throw our way! Daily life stressors, work demands, and unexpected challenges can divert attention and energy away from maintaining new habits, making it hard to stay consistent and motivated. Unforeseen setbacks may arise and without a resilient mindset, individuals might find it challenging to persevere through difficulties.
- Lack of Intrinsic Motivation: Where is your desire to change coming from? Is it something that feels fulfilling to you as a person, or do you feel societal pressure to change in order to be more palatable to others? If resolutions are driven by external pressure or societal expectations rather than genuine personal motivation, the commitment may wane over time.
- No Immediate Rewards: Many resolutions involve long-term benefits, but the absence of immediate rewards can make it challenging to stay motivated, especially if results take time to manifest. In a world full of instant gratification, it can be challenging to find the patience and dedication you need to stick to our goals without seeing immediate results.
Building sustainable lifestyle changes often requires patience, self-compassion, and the ability to adapt when faced with challenges. It’s crucial to set realistic goals, create a supportive environment, and focus on the process rather than expecting immediate, significant changes.
So how do we make practical changes in our lives to keep us on track with our goals to better our wellbeing? The answer is habits!
How to Establish Healthy Habits
The establishment of healthy habits simplifies our lives by fostering a sense of regularity and consistency. This reduces the mental effort of ensuring that we are making healthy lifestyle choices because they are already embedded in our routine. Habits can also help with time management because they allow you to prioritize and allocate your time more effectively. By automating certain activities, you have more time to focus on other tasks. Additionally, habits contribute to skill acquisition. Regular practice of a skill becomes a habit, which enhances our proficiency over time. When positive habits align with personal goals, they can lead to significant long-term achievements and improvements in both physical health and mental wellbeing.
Now you may be wondering, what exactly is a habit?
The habit loop, introduced by Charles Duhigg in “The Power of Habit,” consists of three components: cue, routine, and reward. This model has since become widely recognized and utilized in discussions about habit formation and behavior change.
The Cue is the trigger that initiates the habit. It can be a specific situation, emotional state, time of day, or any other signal. One way to make healthy habits easier to start is to make cues for them more obvious and easier to access. For example, if one of your personal goals for the new year is to do more yoga, keeping a yoga mat out in an open space might encourage you to practice more than if it was stored away under your bed.
Routine is the continuous behaviors or actions you engage in as a response to the cue. This is the actual habit you’re trying to establish. In order to make the process of starting a habit easier to maintain, consider where you could fit the new habit into your current daily routine. One tool for this is called Habit Stacking, which is a behavior change technique that involves integrating new habits into existing routines by “stacking” them on top of one another. The idea is to link a new behavior you want to adopt with a habit you already have. This method leverages the existing cue of an established habit to trigger the initiation of a new habit into your routine.
For example, if you want to develop a habit of exercising every morning and you already have a habit of making your bed, you can “stack” these habits by deciding to exercise immediately after making your bed. The completion of one habit serves as a cue for the next. This makes it easier to create and sustain new habits by associating them with previous ones.
The Reward is the positive outcome or satisfaction you gain from completing the routine. This reinforces the habit loop by associating the behavior with a positive experience. Although the satisfaction of making strides towards your goals may be enough motivation in and of itself, you also can encourage the maintenance of habits by making rewards even more appealing. Let’s stick with the exercise example to explain this one- say that you just completed your workout and you decide to treat yourself. This doesn’t have to be something that sacrifices your hard work or progress, like eating sugary food or candy. But instead, you could get into the routine of making a healthy smoothie, running a bubble bath, or watching your favorite show after completing a workout. This can help reinforce your habit of exercise by knowing that you will have the opportunity to do something that feels satisfying to you after completing it.
Understanding and manipulating these components can help with forming new habits or breaking existing ones by substituting the routine while keeping the same cue and reward. Consistency strengthens neural pathways, which makes these behaviors feel easier and more automatic. So the longer you practice a new habit, the easier it will become over time! Keep in mind that it is also okay to make mistakes or have off-days when implementing a new routine. By having self-compassion in the face of failure, this can actually make you more likely maintain your goals long term and build your self confidence.
Ask yourself, what habits would help make you feel happier, make your life easier, and give you a greater sense of purpose and fulfillment? Try using these strategies to make healthy changes to your life in the new year. You are more capable than you know and remember that your future self will thank you for making positive changes to both your physical and mental health!
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For more information about the science behind habit creation, go to Charlies Duhigg’s The Power of Habit website
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