The 7 Deadly Sins of Setting Your New Year's Resolutions

Research on New Year’s resolutions shows that 80% of them fail in the longterm. Given the difficulty of self-improvement, I find a 20% success rate encouraging, but that still means almost everyone who bothers to try doesn’t live up to their own goals. Avoiding these seven New Year’s resolution mistakes won’t guarantee you’ll succeed, but it will give you a better chance of being in that coveted 20%.

To increase your chance at succeeding in your resolution, you have to define your terms. A overly broad or fuzzy goal like “I’m going to be a healthier person” isn’t much use if you don’t define exactly how you’re going to change your behavior to make yourself healthier—so be as specific as possible with your goals. Your desired outcome might be “being fit enough to run a marathon,” but you have to start with what you can realistically achieve as a person who currently sits on the couch all day. Take small steps, not huge leaps.

This goes hand-in-hand with defining what your goals are. You have to define why you’re going to all this trouble in the first place. Write it down. Make it concrete, so when things get difficult, you can remember exactly why you’re drinking tea instead of Pepsi. The idea is to make it real and to avoid the common pitfall of making a resolution simply because it feels good, in the moment, to resolve to do something.

Research into how people develop positive habits indicates that attempts at self-restriction are difficult to maintain because people often experience them as a loss of freedom. The only way to regain your perceived “freedom” is to indulge in the behavior you’ve vowed to prohibit. Think of it as the “you can’t tell me what to do” effect. So make your resolutions positive: “I’m going to take a walk every day after lunch” is more likely to succeed than “I’m not going to take a nap after lunch.”

Addicts in recovery take this one very seriously, and so should New Year’s resolvers: To increase your chance of success, you have to make changes to your environment. It’s harder to eat healthier if you have a kitchen full of unhealthy snacks, so buy vegetables and fruits instead of Snickers bars. It’s easier to exercise more often if you surround yourself with people who exercise, so give your healthy friends a call.

It’s easy to look at your life and think, “I need to do everything differently, so starting on Jan. 1, I’m going to quit smoking, workout for two hours a day, read a novel a week, etc.” but slow down, chief. It’s better to succeed at taking a tiny step every day toward a single, defined goal than to try for a whole-life overhaul. And I’m talking tiny steps here—five pushups instead of 50, or flossing a single tooth. It’s better to add ten minutes your five-minute workout and feel good than to feel like a failure for “only” working out for 15 minutes of the 90-minute goal you’ve set.

The support of friends and family is vital to overall psychological health, but it’s particularly important when it comes to changing something about yourself. So let trusted people know what you’re trying to do and how you plan to do it so they can offer you help and keep you accountable. Bonus points if they’re going for a similar goal: A planned meeting with an exercise buddy will make it harder to blow off working out.

Relapsing is a common for many addicts in recovery, but it doesn’t mean recovery has failed. Your New Year’s resolution probably doesn’t rise to level of seriousness of a person trying to kick a drug, but the same basic principle applies. It’s all too common for people to fall short of their goal and scrap it altogether, but setbacks along the way are part of the process, not the end of it. Don’t be too hard on yourself; it’s not easy.