Why your New Year’s resolutions are slipping (and how to fix it)

By Mike Heslin

If you feel like your New Year’s resolutions have a shorter shelf life than recent British Prime Ministers, you’re not alone; research suggests that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by February.  

The good news is, it’s not too late! If you understand why your resolutions are slipping, you can get back on track and join the 20% who make real, lasting changes. 

A New Year’s resolution – and any goal, really – is a statement of intention. Combining that intention with motivation (again, remember that first week in January) is one way to drive behavior change. The problem is, motivation takes a lot of energy, and we have lots of different things competing for our energy. If you’re a human being, your level of motivation changes over time. Hands up if this looks familiar: 

Source: Successful Arhci Student

You need something stronger than motivation. You need context. When it comes to driving behavior change, context eats motivation for breakfast.

Saying “I’ll go to the gym 3 times a week” is setting yourself up for failure. As time goes on and you pass the peak of your motivation curve, you revert to the default behaviors you’re used to. Remember, you filled your days up just fine before you ever made that resolution. To make a new behavior stick, you need to make it your new default. That’s why habit building is so important for long term behavior change: it’s how you set new default behaviors, so you don’t need to rely on motivation and conscious effort.

Saying “I’ll go to the gym after I drop off the kids at school on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday” places your resolution in the context of the life you’re living. In other words, something you’re already doing becomes the cue that triggers the new habit you want to build. Repeating your new behavior (going to the gym) after your cue (dropping the kids off) is how you create a new default behavior. A new habit. Lasting behavior change.

Pro tip: To make your cue even stronger, you can reinforce it with an explicit reminder to do your new behavior at the planned time. A classic example is tying a string around your finger. In our New Year’s resolution example, you might set a calendar reminder for the time when you know you’ll be finishing drop-off.

So, if you find your resolutions slipping, don’t despair. Stop relying solely on motivation, integrate context and repetition to build your new habits, and make your resolutions stick.