New Year's Resolutions (And Why They Fail) + 11 Tips to Make Them Stick

The Determination & the Shame

New Year's resolutions. We all know the mixed feelings - the determination and optimism accompanying a fresh start and grand life goals, as well as the shame of giving up this "new year, new me" idea. This rattles all sorts of skeletons in our disorganized closets (that were supposed to get organized under the last New Year's resolution but famously crashed and burned by day 4, showcasing our, at best, marginal housekeeping skills). But these words - New Years resolution - also echo something beautiful each time the old year draws to an end – hope. Hope that we can do better, be better, thrive, and evolve into our better selves, rather than just merely surviving life's ups and downs of a single round around the sun.

The Most Important Midnight of the Year

The psychologically most important midnight of the year - triggered by the symbolic “T-10” countdown and ripe for resolutions -  wipes the slate clean, bringing hope of a better life. We don’t need this glittery and champagne-d affair to change. We can set new life goals on a rainy February Tuesday while sitting in the dark because we’ve forgotten to pay yet another electricity bill, or on a sticky July day - questioning our life choices after a particularly brave experiment with some street sushi. We can change at any time, but it doesn’t hurt to surf the collective energy wave of new beginnings to fortify our New Year's resolutions. This is the power of ritual, and it might hold some benefit for making us stick to our goals for the new year.  

Why Are We So Bad at Sticking to Resolutions?

What do New Year's resolution statistics teach us? That 80% of all 2025 goals will have failed just months in, imploding back into old comfortable habits. 

Why do we fail to make our lives better? Do we choose to suffer? Maybe. Are we auto-destructive? Perhaps. Are we just disorganized and lacking actionable steps? Probably. The truth is that we are human and we have a nature. A nature that served us well enough to survive as modern humans for about 300,000 years. But, this nature also thrives on creating habits as a matter of conserving energy, and a New Year's resolution is, by definition, an uncomfortable breaking of a habit. We need habits to automate some actions, and we literally turn a blind eye to parts of daily life to save brain computing power for things that matter and can be potentially dangerous - the new, unexpected, and unexplored. If everything were important all the time – we’d go bonkers faster than that perfect tea-sipping temperature turns Polar. We need habits to survive and to sustain mental health, but they can just as easily turn bad, and a New Year's resolution appears as a sort of self-course-correcting mechanism.   

Habits are far less expensive to the brain – the body’s largest energy consumer in proportion to its mass - than change in any form, including New Year's resolutions. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University (oh snap, Mr. Robert), believes that there is an underlying biological explanation behind every human action. Just remember a time when you had to change due to external circumstances – a move, a job change, or an unfamiliar city... This period of intense shift drained you, even if your daily life remained pretty much the same. It’s not you. It is nature itself we’re fighting here, adapting to the new in an area of life we had already categorized as safe, stable, and unchanging.  

Change is difficult, and it takes time. Adaptation includes rewiring the brain. We intuitively understand this energy drain and passionately resist change unless not changing is immediately life-threatening. A lot of 2025 New Year’s resolutions concern improving health, well-being, and quality of life. 

We all want a better life for ourselves and know what we should do. So, why don’t we just listen to our own good advice? Simple - the punishment for not changing or not sticking to the resolutions is too far removed; plus, every time you repeat an action, it becomes more of an automated habit.  

Look at the Micro Habits

So, good news! It is not a deep personality flaw that makes you unable to stick to a resolution. Change is a large task involving changing our brain structures and transforming our nature. Our New Year's resolution will fail just because we haven’t defined the steps to get where we want to go. We've made this change a big, ill-defined blob whose lack of clear margins will make it easier not to see when we start failing, and maybe that's what we secretly want. 

Falling off our New Year's resolution wagon is not due to a lack of willpower. We fail because we don’t look low enough – to the micro habits and processes in daily life, and we don’t recognize the moments that trigger us to take the easy way out and just do the same old, comfortable thing we’ve done a million times before. We slip right in like into a well-worn behavioral glove. We fail because we try to see the end goal without specifying the steps in between or what will be a measuring post of progress. We leave New Year's resolutions vague; we don’t determine the why-s behind the desire to change a particular aspect of life… Therefore, failing to stick to something we deem as valuable is a failure of processes, not personalities, and processes can be revised and reinvented.  

11 Tips to Make Your 2024 New Year's Resolutions Stick

Some semblance of discipline is the meta-rule here, and it will not be insulted by taking a number.

1. Start small. 

We presume New Year's resolutions and change have to be one huge bridge-burning festival to dramatically mark the transition into the whole "new year, new me" thing. Two weeks into January, that token gesture of de-junking the pantry is forgotten, and we've scavenged the only bag of crisps that survived the junkecide. Start small. We can't change everything at once. You'll not become a keto masterchef in a matter of days, nor is this necessary. The next time you're out grocery shopping, don't put crisps in the cart. This is doable. This is a start.

2. Switch habits. 

Have you noticed how easy it is to backslide after initially sticking to a New Year's resolution? This is because the old habit we wanted gone doesn't actually disappear. It just gets replaced by a new one that needs to be repeated long enough, so it takes root as a long-term behavior change. We can rarely just stop doing something without allocating that particular time, impulse, and/or dopamine hit to something else.

3. Start with "Why".  

As suggested by the writings of Simon Sinek, in the context of how good leaders initiate change - we can apply the method of starting from the right reasons in making a New Year's resolution. When the going gets tough - and it will - we'll need our "Why" to pull us through because the "Why" justifies the suffering or inconvenience of the change. Or, if you're so inclined, use the "Why" as a reminder of a place you're terrified of if the old habit continues. The negativity bias is very strong in humans, and imagining the worst-case scenario of stagnation might be a more powerful driving force for a lot of people. 

4. Be humble. 

We live in a "Go big or go home" culture, and we unconsciously pick up the grandiose expectations for ourselves along the way. In such a flamboyant social circumstance, it is not easy to admit how laughably small the first steps have to be for us to be willing to stick to them. It is embarrassing to confess to oneself how deep we have to dig for a tiny improvement, but we start where we are and do what we can with what we have. 

5. Focus on things you do daily first. 

As Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, and author, suggests, if you wish to change your life and current circumstances, transforming a few small everyday habits will be more valuable in a year than changing a big thing you occasionally do. Why? Because what we do every day takes up a disproportionately large part of our lives. 

Bonus: Success in sticking to the little things will give us motivation to expand our efforts – now with the confidence we have earned and can trust ourselves with.

6. Be patient. 

Just like Mr. Mercury, most of the time, we too “want it all, and want it now!” and New Year's resolutions are no exception. But it doesn't work like that. There is a learning curve. There will be mistakes. Adopt a mindset of someone willing to be taught (and helped). Be okay with a larger timeframe. Imagine what just one evening of disciplined care for the body a week will do in a year. That’s 52 days you were kind to yourself. Imagine just staying calm as your buttons get pushed. Would you be a different sister, mother, daughter, brother, or boss?

7. Don’t beat yourself up. 

So what if we sometimes bite off a bit more than we can chew with a New Year's Resolution? Spit some out and take a smaller bite. Be forgiving to yourself as you’re going through the transformation. There will be good days and bad days and life will throw curve balls we just couldn’t have predicted while making the plan. Respect the process. Do as the Borg do – adapt. Resistance – to the fickle nature of reality – is futile.

8. Plan the time and place. 

Put your time where your mouth is. For a greater chance of a New Year's resolution success, it would be wise to determine not only WHAT we want to change but WHEN and WHERE the steps will take place. Replace the nonspecific “I’ll walk more” with the pinpointed – “I’ll take a walk after lunch every day.” This has more power, and the action is tied to another thing we do daily.

9. Get support. 

Find your sista’ from another (or the same) mista’ and share the details of your new year, new me plan. Make a deal for them to check in and see if you kept your word. It’s weird, but it works - we’d rather not disappoint someone else, feel shame due to lame excuses, or lie to someone we care about, but we have no problem lying to ourselves. Or, you can create a penalty clause if you respond to punishment better.

10. Have fun. 

Seriously. We forget to have fun. The New Year's resolution is not a prison of our own design. We can find something beautiful in a new habit or way of doing things that bring us joy. For example, eating healthier is not a boring, lonely, wilted salad leaf you need to force down your throat. Just explore the cornucopia of recipes out there you’ve never tried. Food is the creativity you can taste.

11. Get back on the wagon. 

You fell off. So what? No reason for woe-is-me. The thing won’t go on without you. It is YOUR freaking wagon. Learn from this, find what the trigger was, and climb back on. Even riding into a sunset blinds us sometimes, and our behinds can get numb on the rough wagon seats. Bring a cushion and stop to stretch your legs from time to time.   

No matter how small and insignificant the New Year's resolution may seem to the observer, we can be proud of ourselves for every single step forward. Anyone who doesn't acknowledge the difficulty of uprooting habits to plant new, better ones is either lying or oblivious to their own shortcomings and doomed to stagnation. 

From all of us at MYSA, we hope we will all be kinder to ourselves. We hope for enough sense to admit when we don't know and when we need to break things down… or just take a break. We hope you'll choose small improvements and that yearning for a better life always stays here, giving us something to aim at. Happy transitions! See you on the flip side.