On the first of January, you can’t move without bumping into an article about new year’s resolutions. The same cannot be said about the first of February — and that may be part of the problem. Each year begins with us in full Bridget Jones mode, resolving to turn over a new leaf. Sometimes we keep our resolutions, often we don’t. Either way, everyday life returns, and we forget all about them.
We know quite a lot about how to make resolutions work. For example, it helps to think through the day-to-day process. Resolving to “get fit” or “lose weight” is fine, but things are likely to go better if you’ve made a more specific plan: work through the Couch to 5K programme, or sign up for an exercise class, or stop drinking alcohol on week nights.
Social pressure works. If you’re hoping to go to the gym regularly, find an exercise buddy. Agree regular times to meet, and make sure you show up to support each other. This gives you a positive and a negative reason to show up: to help your friend and not to wimp out in public. Gym sessions will also be more fun.
A public commitment works too. Want to stop smoking? Find a friend who’ll bet that you can’t. Hoping to learn to run? Sign up for a charity fun run and start collecting sponsorship.
It can be motivating to seek out signs of incremental progress. Sometimes the progress is obvious — faster times, heavier dumbbells, but, often, the interim goals need to be confected. They still work.
Most importantly, people are more likely to stick to resolutions if they find the whole business enjoyable. If you’re trying to eat healthy food, get some good recipes. If you’re trying to stop checking social media on your smartphone, carry trashy novels to read instead.
Those are five good ideas for sticking to your resolutions. But did you really need me to tell you any of that? The problem is that we don’t think about such things at the turning of the year when we don our pink-tinged spectacles and jot down our unrealistic dreams for becoming a better person. For most people, the resolutions we make are unserious.
At this point it might be useful to borrow an idea from educational psychology: “self-regulated learning”. (The psychologist Barry Zimmerman described this in more poetic terms as “how students become masters of their own learning”.) Some students are thoughtful about their own educational progress: they think about their strengths and weaknesses, pay attention to their results, and adopt the right tactics to do better, studying, practising and revising as appropriate. In the jargon, they enter a “self-oriented feedback loop”. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that self-regulated learners thrive at school and college.
I promise not to subject you to the phrase “self-oriented feedback loop” again, but ponder instead the following three questions that anybody should ask themselves about their resolutions. What am I doing? How is it going? What do I need to change?
For example, let’s say your resolution is to stop drinking alcohol, and you’ve succeeded — except when you see one particular group of friends in the pub, once every few weeks. Rather than beating yourself up for failing, or shrugging and giving up, have a think. Maybe you decide it’s fine to drink if it’s only with those friends every few weeks. Modify the resolution and declare victory.
Or maybe you decide the resolution can’t be compromised. Fine. Meet your friends over coffee. Or try again, with renewed determination to drink only alcohol-free beer. The point is to think seriously about how the resolution is going and what might need to change, and this is something we rarely do.
If you find yourself flatly failing to keep a particular resolution, it’s useful to think about why. What exactly is stopping you? Is there a different angle that might work better? White-knuckle willpower hasn’t worked before (it rarely does), so what might work instead?
Which brings me back to the first of January. Katy Milkman, a behavioural scientist at the Wharton School of Business and the author of How to Change, has researched and popularised the “fresh start effect” — that we are more likely to embrace new goals on landmark dates such as the first of January or our birthday. For example, with her colleagues Hengchen Dai and Jason Riis, she found that experimental subjects with a goal were more likely to sign up to receive a motivational email reminder if told that it would arrive on “the first day of spring” rather than the same date described instead as the 20th of March.
But if the first of January is an attractive time to make a resolution, when is a good time to reflect on your old resolutions, particularly the ones that have crumbled under pressure? One possibility is to set quarterly goals — for work, fitness, fun, whatever — and to review the old goals when setting new ones at the end of the quarter. For what it’s worth, this is what I do.
That’s not for everyone. Here’s a simpler idea, then. When you write down any new year’s resolutions, write them down in your calendar on the 20th of March. Let’s call it the first day of spring, why not? On that date, take a good look at them. And then ask yourself those three simple questions. What have I actually done? How has it gone? What do I need to change?
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 31 January 2025.
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