Dr Francesca Jackson-Spence is an NHS junior doctor and media medic who also runs an educational social media page. Photo / @drfrankiejs
Dr Francesca Jackson-Spence is an NHS junior doctor and media medic who also runs an educational social media page. Photo / @drfrankiejs
Telegraph health expert Dr Francesca Jackson-Spence shares how making big changes in 2025 could put you on the road to failure, and explains why she tells her patients not to bother with New Year’s resolutions.
With 2025 fast approaching, it’s natural to start reflecting on changes you’d like to make this year. It’s great this time of year motivates us to improve our lifestyle habits to benefit our health, but I don’t recommend my patients make “New Year’s resolutions” when it comes to forming healthy behaviours. Here’s why…
Statistics show New Year’s resolutions don’t work
While many of us go into January motivated and with the best intentions, statistics actually show New Year’s resolutions don’t work, with less than 10% of people actually having sustained the change by the following year.
When it comes to our health, consistency matters. Keeping up a healthy habit for a few months is unlikely to make a long-lasting impact on our health and risk of developing diseases in the future.
It’s important to make small changes that you can easily keep up with throughout the year. These small changes compound over time and can have large impacts on our future health.
For example, swapping 15 minutes of inactivity in your day (such as sitting at your desk) for some physical activity (such as brisk walking on your lunch break) can reduce the risk of developing heart disease and was shown to increase life expectancy by up to three years in a large study.
We don’t make our resolutions easy enough to set ourselves up for success. It’s better to make small adjustments to your life that compound over time and lead to sustainable, long-term changes, rather than big changes you can’t sustain.
Doing 15 minutes of brisk walking a day is much more achievable than attempting to go to the gym for an hour five times a week, which most people end up giving up on and then don’t exercise at all.
Making your health habits small and easy to stick to is key to long-term success. You can always progress the habit once it is well-established in your routine.
Setting a tonne of goals can set you up for failure. Photo / Getty
We don’t understand the psychology of changing habits
It’s important to understand the psychology behind habit formation and use it to work in your favour. Often, the resolutions we set involve making changes that nullify something harmful to us, such as going on a diet and cutting out sugary or processed foods, quitting smoking, or reducing alcohol consumption on weeknights. These things are often habits that are deeply ingrained into our routines and provide us with pleasure and enjoyment.
Simply cutting them out without finding a replacement habit is a recipe for failure. Success is more likely if the old habit you are trying to break is replaced by a new one in its place.
So if you’re trying to stop drinking a glass of wine in the evenings, you could swap it to a soft drink you enjoy sipping. Or instead of simply removing what you enjoy, you can cut down the quantity gradually.
We focus on the wrong thing
Making a big change can often make you think about it more than you would normally. So if you’re looking to lose weight in the New Year, your focus might be on cutting out the culprit foods from your diet and doing more exercise, both of which are too abstract and difficult.
Forming new habits is harder because it requires consistency. Photo / 123RF
Perhaps your new focus could be on eating more home-cooked foods, or consuming a wider range of plants each week. By increasing the amount of fibre in your diet, you would naturally be more full and satiated after a meal and less likely to reach, without realising, for the sweet treat you’re trying to cut out.
Eating a wider variety of plants has also been shown to support gut microbiome diversity, which is associated with better weight management. Here, the focus becomes what you are adding to your diet for nutrients rather than what you’re cutting out, and makes it easier to adjust to.
