Tips for Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions

If you're like many people, your New Year's resolution may be health-related. Maybe you want to lose weight, start exercising, or reduce the levels of stress in your life. Regardless of your goal, there are some techniques you can use to help you be successful in modifying your behavior.

Choose to adopt a new good behavior rather than trying to shake an engrained bad habit. In studies on behavior change, people were more willing to do something they know is right than to give up something they know is wrong.

Choose resolutions that you've been thinking about for some time. You'll be more successful than people who came up with their resolutions at the last minute (say, on New Year's Eve, for example).

Only make one or two resolutions. Any more than that and you're just setting yourself up for failure.

Make a list if the reasons why you want to change your behavior. Keep this list handy as motivation to stay on course.

Make a list of the barriers that might get in the way of your keeping your resolution and establish contingency plans.

Get support. Surround yourself with people and situations that encourage you in good behaviors. Find a friend who has a similar goal and encourage each other as you make changes in your lives. Enlist the support of your family.

Pay attention to your thinking and try to counter negative ideas like "I'll never succeed" with positive thoughts, like "Today, I made some progress."

Reward yourself for little successes along the way.

Remember, your resolutions are promises to yourself. Respect yourself and do your best to keep those promises. Take the process of behavior change one day at a time. If you can do just a little bit to get yourself going, you'll start to feel the positive effects of the change, which can lead to healthy habits that will last a lifetime.

Every year it’s the same thing - make a list of resolutions that you're determined to keep.

If you're like most people, however, by February the only thing you end up keeping is the list!

On average, only about 20% of us are able to keep our New Year's resolutions. But don't let those statistics get you down.

By following these tips you'll be better equipped to fall into the successful 20% category this year.



The information provided here is not intended to take the place of medical advice. For more information, contact your health professional.