Resolved: These Tips Can Help You With Resolutions

What advice would you give on setting resolutions for the new year and for keeping them?

It is important to create "positive" resolutions, meaning you need to have a focus on what you are going to do rather than on what you're not going to do. The human brain is optimized for action. Resolutions like "I'm going to stop checking my phone so often" or "I'm going to stop drinking alcohol" are difficult to keep because they focus on inaction rather than action. Instead, it is important to reframe those resolutions around actions. What specific actions will you take to achieve the goal so that you ultimately check your phone less often or don't drink in situations in which you used to.

Second, create specific intentions to perform actions at particular times that will lead to the desired outcome. If you want to get more physically fit, for example, be specific about what days and times you'll exercise, what kind of exercise you will do, where you will do it, and with whom. Only when you get specific will you begin to see the tradeoffs you have to take to succeed and to articulate all the particulars of what you have to do in order to make a change in your behavior.

Are there any tactics we can use to help ensure we stick to our resolutions? How can we stay motivated in June or July?

The aim of any good New Year's resolution is to develop a set of habits that will ultimately sustain the long-term benefit of the change in behavior. Once new behaviors have been turned into successful habits, they can often continue without a lot of strong motivation.

That said, there are a few things to do to help these behaviors stay energized:

• Engage with a friend or colleague to bring some social support and peer pressure to bear on maintaining the behavior.
• Find activities you enjoy doing to help you sustain the behavior. For example, if you are trying to stay fit, find activities that you enjoy doing as a central part of your workout routine.
• Hold yourself accountable publicly to some of your goals.

Why do we view the new year as this opportunity to start fresh?

Key milestones in life are a great time to mentally take a step back from your day-to-day routine and evaluate how life is going more abstractly. Some of those milestones are individual (like a round-number birthday or an anniversary of your graduation from college). Culturally, New Year's Day marks another milestone that we often use to make these evaluations of how life is going. These moments are good times to think broadly about whether you are achieving your goals and whether your are satisfied with your life.

Should we launch into new resolutions in January, right out the gate, or is there a better time of year to actually start?

Because it takes a lot of work to plan new routines and figure out how to work them into your life, I recommend taking a month or two to plan before actually launching into the new behaviors. In fact, I have argued that people ought to make a resolution on New Year's Day, then take about two months to plan, get accountability partners, and think about new schedules. Then, we should have a second holiday to launch these resolutions on March 4^th. (Get it? March forth!)

Do you have any New Year's resolutions?

I am pretty happy with where my life is right now, so I don't have any resolutions this year. But, on my birthday seven years ago, I was feeling bad about my physical condition, so I worked on getting back in shape and ultimately lost 45 pounds and got back into shape to run half marathons.

Any other advice for 2025?

If you do make a New Year's resolution, be at least as compassionate to yourself as you would be to a friend trying to change behavior. Often, when you make a resolution, you get very down on yourself if you have a bad day. But every real attempt at behavior change is two steps forward and one step back. It is what you do on the days when you take a step back that really matters. If you had a friend working to change their behavior, you would encourage them to stick to it if they had a bad day. You should give the same grace to yourself.

Want help staying on track? Download Markman's Smart Change journal workbook.

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