Struggling with New Year's resolutions? Here is a simple approach to success. Photo / 123rf
No good at resolutions? Take one step (or 10,000) at a time and find small ways to ring in big changes. Here’s how to do it.
How are your resolutions coming along? If you’re already struggling to find the motivation, or didn’t bother to make a New Year’s resolution at all, you’re in good company.
“Failure rates are astronomically high, particularly around New Year’s resolutions,” notes Dr Jo Perkins, a coaching psychologist who specialises in helping clients meet their goals.
“Usually that’s because people haven’t clearly defined a goal, they’re doing it because they ‘should’ rather than because they want to, the goal is unrealistic, or they haven’t planned how they’ll do it. People adopt an all-or-nothing mentality: eat one biscuit on their diet, then think ‘I’ve blown it’ and duck out.”
All of this is familiar to me. I’m an inveterate resolution giver-upper. A few years ago I attempted Dry January but only remembered as I sipped a cocktail on the third of the month. Another year I planned to get into running and bought myself some fancy trainers – they never even made it out of the box.
To be fair, I have succeeded in a few areas. I entered 2023 with a semi-regular gym habit, I was eating more healthily and had finished writing a novel. Still, I shied away from the language of “goals” or “resolutions”, anxious that if I admitted I was trying to work on something I’d feel embarrassed if I failed. Achievements were just one of those things. Failures were okay because I wasn’t actually trying.
Six months ago though, I happened to glance at my Fitbit stats and noticed that in the first two weeks of the month. I’d done at least 10,000 steps each day. It wasn’t planned, I’d just been busy. On a whim, I decided I’d try to keep up the streak for the rest of the month.
Still cautious of failure, I made the aim of 70,000 steps per week. That way, if I had a day where I didn’t manage 10,000 steps, I could make it up later.
I started taking a slightly longer walk during my lunch breaks, which was good for my mental health. I would occasionally go for a jog to get my step count up, and I began feeling a small sense of accomplishment if I did hit 10,000 steps.
By the end of the month, I’d achieved my goal. If I could do that with a couple of easy adjustments, what other little challenges could I give myself to tune up my life? I began picking up little goals and challenges throughout the remainder of the year. None were particularly stretching on their own, but during a six-month period, they’ve added up to a big difference.
“Goals have to map onto who you see yourself as – if you can do that then it’s not a goal, it’s behaving like the person you see yourself as,” Perkins explains. “It’s about living in a way that, over time, will make you achieve those goals.”
As we enter 2024, as a result of what I have done in the past six months, I’m feeling healthier and more accomplished than ever and beginning to see that future version of myself emerging. Here’s how I did it, and I hope it will help you achieve your goals too.
Goal 1: Lose a half a stone of fat, build muscle, develop a regular once-per-week habit
A desire to lose weight came from my impending 30th birthday. I’m a few years away from middle-aged spread, but I began to realise it would be a shame to waste my last gasp of being young(ish) feeling unhappy with my appearance.
After my step-counting success, I signed up to a virtual challenge with The Conqueror app to walk the equivalent of the length of the Great Barrier Reef. I gave myself 280 days to walk the 2117-kilometre course. I’d need to do 7km a day on average, which equates to, you guessed it, 10,000 steps.
If I wanted to get properly fit though, I’d need something more intense. In early May, I got in touch with PH7, a personal training studio near where I live in North London.
One of the studio’s co-founders, James Hutchison, got into fitness after studying his psychology degree where he became interested in the science of motivation. He created a programme involving a weekly session with personal trainer Ben, and an online course about creating and building motivation.
“It’s about building ‘intrinsic motivation’ for your goals – that is, finding an inner desire to succeed,” Hutchison explains. “Lots of people rely on extrinsic motivation – feedback from other people – but that doesn’t have long-lasting effects. I encourage people who want to get fitter to ask themselves why: why these goals? Why do these goals matter? Why is the eventual end point important to you?”
Personal training proved a great fit for me. I pay NZ$154 a week for an hour-long session, plus another $41 for a 45-minute circuit training class on Saturday mornings. Initially, I feared that would be a huge hit on my finances, so to help fund it and push myself further towards my goal, I cut out my weekly Friday night takeaway habit. I also share the PT session with my boyfriend. Aside from the financial benefit, it also gives me a workout buddy. I’m competitive, so attending with him motivates me to work harder too – where I might have dropped a set in the past if I was tired, now I’m fighting to keep up.
Between working out with my partner and having a good coach, I find myself enjoying exercise for the first time in my life. Now I had the financial obligation alongside a standing appointment, which meant I’d be wasting someone else’s time if I failed to turn up. I haven’t missed a session since I started.
I’ve always found it hard to find motivation to exercise because it takes so long to see results. To combat this, my trainer Ben reminds me to track other forms of progress, whether that be completing an extra pull-up (I’m up to eight unassisted now) or lifting a heavier bar than I could last week.
My overall goal is to eventually get a body like Spider-Man actor Tom Holland, and although that’s a way away, I can already see a difference. Getting into a twice-a-week habit, I’ve lost fat and built muscle. A fancy body scanner recently told me I’d lost 4.5kg of fat mass and gained 5.4kg in muscle. Let me tell you, seeing the outline of a pec in the mirror for the first time is hugely motivating.
Goal: Write 100 feature articles by the end of the year
I’ve never struggled for motivation professionally, but I know that the busier I am, the happier I am, so I decided to challenge myself by writing even more. In 2022, I wrote 89 articles in total, so I set myself the goal of doing more than 100 in 2023.
This was the purest of all my challenges. It’s a SMART goal: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
“SMART goals are considered the best way of setting goals because they’re concrete,” explains Dr Jessamy Hibberd, a chartered clinical psychologist and the author of The Imposter Cure. “It’s not a vague imagined thing, you’re measuring it, tracking your progress and seeing that you’re getting there. That allows you to break it down and think about the steps it’ll take.”
For me, that meant stepping up my work in every area. Not only did I have to work on writing more, but I had to develop my pitching and research skills to ensure I was finding the best ideas for stories. I had to forge new connections across the office to volunteer for work across more sections; Features, Lifestyle, Health, Travel, Recommended and more. I developed a “yes, I’ll do it” attitude to every opportunity I was presented with.
I completed my 100th feature in mid-September and by the end of 2023, I’d managed to exceed my goal by 25 articles.’
Goal: Get to bed at 11pm every night and stop doomscrolling
One of the strangest things I’ve been working on since June is improving my scores on Pokémon Sleep. You put your phone beside you on the bed as you go to sleep and the app tracks your slumber. The better you sleep, the more Pokémon you catch. Getting a consistent bedtime (important for optimising your circadian rhythm) is vital to catch ‘em all.
I fall asleep easily, but I’ve never been a consistent sleeper. For most of my 20s, my bedtime has varied wildly between 11pm and 1am – weekends are even worse. Wake-up times are also all over the place: if I’m woken at 4am then I can’t go back to sleep, or I might find myself sleeping until noon.
Strange though it sounds, the virtual rewards offered by the Pokémon app motivated me to improve my habits. “Setting up rewards along the way is a great way to motivate yourself, even if those rewards are small and perhaps insignificant,” notes Perkins.
Now I find myself rushing to make sure I’m in bed and ready to sleep by 11pm rather than sitting up in bed scrolling through social media.
I’m not perfect – Pikachu and his pals usually tell me my sleep score has plummeted over the weekends – but I’m certainly sleeping better than I was. I’ve noticed the difference in myself. I feel happier and more energised when I wake up than I’ve been in years. More importantly, I’ve completed 36.6 per cent of my Pokédex.
Thinking harder about sleep has led me to work on improving my sleep quality practically: reading books before bed rather than being on screens, not eating before bed and, well, this leads us on to the next goal…
Goal: Be more moderate and mindful
As I started paying attention to my sleep tracking, I began to see how alcohol affected my results. A single gin and tonic would result in much worse sleep, so I decided to cut down.
While I wasn’t a heavy drinker, I was a little-and-often type of person. A glass of gin after work once a week, a couple of ciders while doing the pub quiz once a week with mates and a big night powered by vodka and cranberry juice on Saturdays.
I’ve not gone teetotal. I’m just more mindful about when and why I choose to drink. Am I drinking because I want to or because everyone else is? Are the benefits of drinking worth the drawbacks? Nowadays I’m saving booze for big nights and occasions.
Some worry that drinking less will decimate their social lives, but I’m still happy to socialise with people who are drinking while I’m not, or I’ll suggest meeting friends at the cinema or over dinner instead of at the pub.
Drinking less has probably been my most abstract goal. I’m not strict with myself about it, I don’t have measurable targets to hit, but I am confident I’ve achieved it. In the past I’d have a few drinks across the week, nowadays I’m only drinking every other weekend. If I desperately want a drink, I’ll have one, but more often than not I just try to imagine myself in the future: do I need this drink to get me through the next hour? How will I feel about it in the morning? Is the former worth the latter?
“It’s important to see goals like this as a positive,” says Hibberd. “Thinking about what you’re gaining works far better than seeing it as a punishment. Focusing on how it’s giving you something, rather than taking something away, makes you likelier to stick at it.”
Goal: Finish 30 books by the end of the year
My advice for those looking to succeed in their goals for 2024 is to cheat. If you’re already doing something, tell people it was a goal all along. You get the kudos from everyone you tell, and that gives you motivation to continue doing it.
I started the year having read a slightly higher than normal number of books because my book club’s dates got messed up, resulting in lots of back-to-back sessions. Given I’d finished eight or nine by June, I figured I might as well start telling people my goal was to finish 30 novels by the end of the year. That is what I have done.
To speed up my challenge, I’ve turned to audiobooks. Instead of confining my reading to bedtime or waiting for a quiet moment, I’m doing it whenever I can: while cooking, commuting, or on my lunchtime walk.
I’ve listened to Audra McDonald reading The Iliad, Claire Danes performing The Odyssey, Stephen Fry guiding me through a PG Wodehouse collection and dozens more already. And yes, I do read proper books more too. Now that bedtimes are earlier and more consistent, I usually settle in with a good book by 10pm.
Looking back on all the goals I met last year is so gratifying – and it means that I am entering 2024 with renewed confidence. What stands out most is how easy it was – because the goals were clearly defined. Taken together, these little goals have added up to a big change in my life. In 2024 it feels like the sky’s the limit. My plan is to look into finding a literary agent to represent my novel, redouble my efforts at the gym and get that Spider-Man body. What I’ve learned is that nothing is as hard as it seems, you just have to get started.
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