5 Tips to Make Your New Year’s Resolution Stick

How to keep up with your New Year’s Resolution when you want to give up

Keeping your New Year’s Resolution can be quite the feat. It can be easy to lose your motivation, especially when life gets busy. But, according to Discover Happy Habits, 75% of people are still successful at keeping their New Year’s Resolution after one week. Lucky for you, we have tips for staying in that 75% and going beyond the second week of January.

1. Schedule it

Prioritize your New Year’s Resolution by penciling it in on your calendar. After all, the best way to find the time to do something is to make the time to do it. So set aside time for your New Year’s Resolution each day. You can write it on your calendar, pair it with a specific daily activity or add a reminder to your phone. You can choose any way to remind yourself. Make sure you carve out the time to work on your resolution, and when that time comes, don’t hit the snooze button; you must force yourself to get up and do it.

2. Make it a habit

Along with scheduling time for your resolution, you must put in the effort to make it a habit. A habit can be defined as a regular practice that you can’t give up. Strive every day to make your resolution into a habit. It will take a lot of determination to continuously work towards your goal. Still, you must keep pushing towards it until you don’t have to think about it or remind yourself you will automatically do it.

3. Make your goal measurable

Having a goal and working towards it is one thing, but you need to look at your work and track your progress to know where you’re going and where you’ve been. Make sure you can visually track your progress. For example, if you want to eat healthier, count how many times you make a healthy food choice daily. This way, you can track how often you are achieving your goal and determine if you need to make any changes to your destination. You may have chosen a goal that is too large, but if you can track your progress, you will know if you aren’t able to reach your goal and can adjust it to fit your needs.

4. Learn from your mistakes

No one is perfect, and you will likely hit a few bumps in the road as you try to reach your goal. But making a mistake doesn’t mean you have to give up. On the contrary, mistakes are perfect learning opportunities. When you slip up, think about what happened that might have caused that slip-up. For example, if you missed a day of exercising, consider why. Were you tired from work? Did you have an extra event to go to? After you’ve analyzed what happened, you can address the problem and create a solution to prevent it from happening in the future. For example, if you’re tired from work, make a refreshing smoothie before exercising to get that extra energy boost. Or, if you have an additional event on a day you work out, plan to work out at a different time or day.

5. Remember: Change takes time

Regardless of your chosen resolution, remember that it will take time to see your desired change. If your goal is to lose weight, think about how long it took you to gain that weight. You didn’t gain 30 pounds overnight, so you can’t expect to lose it overnight. 

James Clear, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits, says, “[it will] take you anywhere from two months to eight months to build a new behavior into your life.” This is a long time to set in a habit, but I’m not saying this to discourage you. In fact, it’s instead the opposite. Keep in mind that it takes a long time to make a habit when you’re working towards your resolution, so keep pushing through.