How to make your New Year’s resolution stick in 2025

Issue #86: Making your New Year's Resolution stick in 2025

Read Time: 14 minutes

Good morning, 66.1ers.
This week's Saturday issue is my best attempt at equipping you with the tools you need to make 2025 the year you stick to your New Year's resolution.
Enjoy.

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A quick refresher for anyone who's new to the newsletter: 66.1 is the average health span (years lived without a serious disease) in the US. We're here to extend that.

In case you missed it:
Wednesday's issue of 66.1

In this week's issue of 66.1:

A deep dive into how you can set a challenging New Year's resolution and successfully implement it in your life.

-The power of connecting your goals to the "bigger picture"
-Why you should actually do less, not more, if you want to reach your goals
-Why simply stopping an unhealthy behavior isn't the best approach to improving your health

Image courtesy of MD Anderson Cancer Center

Background

There’s a lot of talk this time of year about New Year’s Resolutions. And 80% of New Year’s Resolutions are health-focused: losing the weight, hitting the gym, sticking to a clean eating plan.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably set more than your fair share of New Year’s Resolutions. And I’m willing to bet that not all of them have panned out as you hoped. Whether it’s one of the common health goals from above, a financial goal, or something else entirely, connecting the dots between setting a resolution and actually making it happen is a real challenge.

In this issue of 66.1, we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of making your Resolution stick this year. It’s a topic I work on with my health coaching clients on a daily basis, and my goal today is to share some of the insights I’ve learned from my work as a Mayo Clinic Health and Wellness Coach so you can make 2025 the year you finally stick with your resolution.

And if you’re not the type to set a New Year’s resolution, just remember that this framework works well for setting and achieving health goals no matter the time of year.

Let's get started.

5 strategies for implementing your New Year's resolution

1. Tie it to the big picture

Usually, you know what you need to know to build your health. The hard part is sticking to the daily habits and behaviors that slowly but surely build your health. The most successful clients I’ve worked with as a health coach succeed in losing weight, building their strength, and cleaning up their diet not because they have an exceedingly strong will.

Rather, the key to lasting behavior change is to get abundantly clear on exactly how changing your behavior will positively impact your life. For example, maybe you know you need to start eating clean. That’s a start, but we need to go deeper if we want to make this new behavior stick. What is it about eating clean, healthy foods that is so important?

How will eating clean positively impact your life? Your relationships, your longevity, the memories you’re able to accrue?

Let’s say you’re like Sarah (not her real name), one of my health coaching clients. She’s in her late 50s and recognized that her current dietary habits aren’t going to set her up for a healthy life in her 70s and 80s. She had made a concerted effort to clean up her diet in the past, but it simply hasn’t stuck.

After an extended conversation about how cleaning up her diet could lead to weight loss, which would lead to decreased joint pain and increased mobility, together we realized that nutrition was the key to unlocking a life of freedom for Sarah. Without the extra weight, Sarah could garden, bake, and preserve garden vegetables like she used to, resuming her previously active lifestyle.

Now, when Sarah wakes up at 5 AM to go to her day job as a teacher, she has this future vision of life as it could be pulling her out of bed, toward the oatmeal and berries and away from the unhealthy snacks she used to eat. It’s this connection between the day-to-day struggle to maintain healthy behavior and the big-picture desired outcome that’s the secret sauce to maintaining consistency with your New Year’s resolution.

Image courtesy of Hand in Hand Parenting

2. Think big, act small

If your goal is to lose 20 pounds this year, that’s going to require a series of changes that will occur over the course of months. It’s not about going gangbusters and hitting the gym for 90 minutes every day while subsisting on kale smoothies. It’s about finding small changes you can implement with as little friction as possible to ensure their sustainability over the long term.

With the nutrition example from above, this means we’re not overhauling Sarah’s diet from the jump. Quite the opposite, actually. We’ll start with one meal, a few times per week. As we build momentum, we’ll add one more layer every couple weeks until her diet is totally different than it was 6 months ago. More to come on this in point 5…

When you’re just getting started with your New Year’s Resolution, your goal for the first month or even two should be to make the smallest amount of progress possible toward that goal, while still making progress. It’s not “go big or go home”. It’s “don’t go big so you can keep going”.

3. Focus on performance over mastery

Performance means doing something to a certain standard. Mastery means doing something and seeking to constantly improve your ability at it, independent of an outside standard. Commonly, people set performance goals. These might look like running a marathon in under 3 hours, achieving a certain belt color in martial arts, or losing a specific amount of weight. They’re valuable benchmarks when it comes to measuring progress, but they’re actually not that productive when you spend time thinking about them every day.

More effective (and less of a torment to you) is to define your desired outcome (the performance goal) and then break it down into what daily and weekly actions need to occur to make it happen (a series of mastery goals). Back to the marathon example: if you want to run a marathon fast, you’re going to have to run a lot. I’m not a marathoner, but I’ve spent enough time around runners to know that step 1 is to get out there and spend a bunch of time on your feet. Walk, run, hike–whatever it is that gets you ambulating–just keep doing it. A mastery goal in this context might look like this: “I will explore 3 new local trails in the next 2 weeks on a hike or run.” Notice that we’re not worried about speed or distance. We’re just focused on learning about a new area and using our feet to do it.

As you close in on the marathon date, it’s probably time to run a little faster and a little further. Still, though, it’s important to hold on to your goal as loosely as possible without letting go. Maybe that looks like doing one timed run every week so you know you’re making the progress required. But timing your runs every day is likely to have a discouraging effect because you’re bound to have an “off” day–a run when you’re not at your best–and this discouragement can quickly result in a decline in performance.

When it comes to big goals, there’s nothing wrong with pursuing a particular standard. The key is to define your performance goal and then bury it in your closet, revisiting it only as often as you need to make sure you’re still on track. On a daily (and even weekly) basis, you’ll be far more effective if you focus on mastery goals to build toward your performance goal.

4. Approach over avoidance

Again, an example is helpful here: you might know there’s a certain behavior or habit that’s holding you back. Let’s say you have a dessert habit you’d like to get rid of. You might set a goal to “Stop eating dessert” or “only eat dessert once a week”. But relying on willpower to stop engaging with dessert, especially since your friends and family are probably continuing to eat it, is a fool’s errand. Your abstinence might last for a few days, even a few weeks, but eventually, you’re likely to revert to your old ways.

Not to worry, though. There’s an alternative approach that’s more effective and less difficult. Rather than leaving a void where your dessert used to happen, let’s replace it. Maybe you start by having a protein shake instead of a cookie. You’ve gone from a whole lot of sugar and very little protein to an extra 20g of protein and a big drop in sugar consumption. (Side note: this is my favorite protein powder if you’re looking to get started here)

While replacing an unhealthy habit with an alternative may not be the most perfect approach, it is a huge step in the right direction. And it’s much more likely to stick, because you’re replacing your old behavior rather than leaving a void and allowing it the chance to slip back into your life.

5. Make it SMART

Following the SMART goal-setting framework will help you tackle your big goals over the course of months and years, and your smaller goals over the course of days and weeks. Here’s the outline:

S: Specific (What exactly are you going to change?)
M: Measurable (Add a number to it–how often will you do the new behavior?)
A: Attainable (Is it challenging, yet realistic?)
R: Relevant (Is this goal aligned with the big-picture change you wish to make?)
T: Time-bound (How often or for how long will you engage in the new behavior?)

Revisiting the example from above with Sarah, one of her recent goals read like this: “I will eat oatmeal and berries for breakfast 4x/week for the next 2 weeks.” A busy commuter, Sarah often found herself eating unhealthy snacks on her way to work because it was all she had time for. Given Sarah’s busy schedule and previous struggles with implementing this change, we chose a challenging frequency but did not pursue a daily habit. A month out, she’s now eating a healthy breakfast 4 days per week and a healthy snack 3 days per week, with a nominal amount of time spent preparing these healthy foods. Compared to when we started working together, this is 7 eating windows every week in which clean, natural food has replaced something from the gas station.

As you look ahead to 2025, just remember: harder doesn’t mean better when it comes to building healthy habits. When it comes to behavior change, the easiest changes to implement are the most likely to stick. Start small, focus on approach over avoidance, and performance over mastery. These are easier approaches than trying to brute-force your way to success with raw willpower. Science has also shown us that they are more effective approaches to behavior change.

And, hey–it’s my hope that this issue is enough to get you up and running as you tackle your New Year’s Resolution–but if you’re interested in 1:1 support as you build your health in 2025, reply to this email with your answer to this question: If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about your health, what would you change?

That’s all for this Saturday.
Happy New Year.

Have fun out there.

Marcus

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Why 66.1?
66.1 is the average health span (years lived without a serious disease) in the US, as of the start of this newsletter publication.
We're here to extend that.