The Guide To Actually Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions

Find a Partner

Recruiting a friend or work buddy to help hold you accountable is one of the best ways to ensure you’ll stick to a resolution. No matter the goal, from running a marathon to reading more books, having a partner will increase your feelings of responsibility as well as your success.

Make It Visible

Keeping a goal in visible sight of you is psychologically proven to help you reach a goal. Why? By making it physically present in your main space, – your apartment – you will literally give it room to remind you of what you’re working toward. Even if it’s just a Post-it on your bathroom mirror, keeping the goal present in your everyday life will help keep you on track.

Create Small Goals

When you start the year with a gigantic goal like “conquer the world” or “cure a disease,” you’re most likely setting yourself up for failure. Take a few minutes to plan step-by-step tactics to meet your ultimate goal. Maybe you want to run a full, 26-mile marathon. Create small goals of incrementally longer running distances. Every week, when you can run a little farther, you’ll feel more rewarded than waiting an entire year to reach your huge goal.

Make It Easy To Accomplish Goals

Humans are lazy. It’s just in our nature. To combat this while also fulfilling your New Year’s resolutions, you have to be preemptive when it comes to effort. Instead of crawling around in the dark morning to put your running clothes on, lay them out the night before, making it virtually impossible for you to say you weren’t ready to run.

Create a Routine

To create a habit, you need to perform a task somewhere between 20 and 30 times to make it stick. This means the first month of the year will probably be the hardest part of your resolution journey. Following this, your habits catch up to your goals, making success possible. Start with making one small change a day over a month, and you’ll quickly realize you can’t go on with your day without working on your resolution.

Find an App

We’re not kidding when we say there’s an app for basically everything. It’s simple to find anything from a calorie counting app to one that helps you find people nearby to cuddle you. Yes, really. Whether your goal is becoming a professional snuggler or just keeping your house clean, there’s an app for that.

Do you know of another way to stay on track with resolutions? We’d love to hear it.