Successful New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year!

Research at University of Scranton shows 75% of people who make New Year’s Resolutions maintain them past the first week and by six months it’s 46%.  However those who make resolutions are 10 times more likely to reach their goals than others who don’t.  Improving health tends to be the top resolution:  weight loss, exercise, eating better, drinking less alcohol and quitting smoking.

Instead of setting yourself up for failure, it’s important to make realistic and achievable goals.  You don’t need one more thing to beat yourself up about.

Set Realistic & Achievable Goals (SMART):

• Specific:  Be clear and unambiguous.  Sometimes it’s helpful to answer the 5 W Questions of what, why, who, where, and when.
• Measurable:  Set measurable outcomes. Make sure to know whether you’re making progress and the goal is attained.
• Attainable:  Ask yourself, is it realistic & achievable for you to accomplish?
• Relevant:  Ask yourself, is it important to you and in alignment with your core values?
• Time-bound:  Having a specific time-frame for your goal helps to keep things in focus & have some accountability for it. Is this a one time goals or something you want to sustain & maintain for a longer period of time?​

Stages of Change

Next, it’s helpful to understand the Stages of Change and to know what stage you’re at:

• The Stages of Change model was invented in the 1980’s and has been used to determine someone’s level of readiness to make healthy behavioral changes in their lives and help people get closer to doing so.
• Pre-contemplation (Not Ready):  may not realize change is necessary and underestimate the pros for changing versus and overestimate the cons
• Contemplation (Getting Ready):  person is interested in changing a behavior within the next 6 months but feel ambivalent about doing so and have self-doubt ~ they may see the pros versus cons of changing as being pretty equal at this point
• Preparation (Ready):  stage where someone is ready to make the change in the next 30 days and start to take steps toward doing so, including telling people they want to
• Action:  This stage of change is where we need plenty of encouragement and reinforcement to create new healthy behaviors.  This can last up until 6 months or so.
• Maintenance:  This is where a new healthy behavior is now habituated and the work here is about relapse-prevention and using healthier behaviors to self-soothe instead of old unhealthy ways of coping with stress

Additional Recommendations:

• Sometimes we need to go from pre-contemplation to contemplation to preparation stages of change before we take action but if you’re ready and committing to taking action, do it now or take it off your to do list for the immediate future.
• It’s all about taking successive approximations towards a goal (taking action on micro-goals along the way)
• Frame in positive way (instead of looking at it a restricting something, see it as adding to your life in some way)
• Avoid temptation and know your triggers, especially when you’re vulnerable.  There’s a 12 Step acronym that we should HALT when we’re Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired.
• Don’t wait until you’re “motivated” because that may never come.  Sometimes in the process of taking action we become more motivated because we see in the moment that we can affect change in our lives.

Manage Stress Level for Optimal Performance

​Lastly, in order to accomplish our New Year’s Resolutions, it’s important to Manage our Stress-Levels:

• Stress or “arousal”, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.
• A law, named the Yerkes-Dodson Law (developed in 1908) shows with a bell curve, that too little or too much stress can decrease our performance.
• We need a moderate amount of stress/arousal to create peak performance, and to reach our goals.