5 Ways to Beat the Odds and Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions by Using Mindfulness
The New Year brings with it a fresh wave of energy, excitement, and hope. We create and journal about our goals and envision our new future. And when the clock hits midnight, we anticipate our fresh start.
But if you’ve set New Year’s resolutions in the past just to see them disappear into the sunset a few weeks into the New Year, you’re not alone.
According to studies, 80% of New Year’s resolutions are dropped by mid-February. So how can you beat the odds and actually keep your New Year’s resolutions in 2022?
While looking back at what worked (and didn’t work) the previous year, we figure out what we need to focus on in the upcoming year. Reflecting on your personal growth can help you set intentions and goals so you can enter the New Year with less stress and more peace and joy.
In this article, we’ll examine the power of mindfulness and how to create positive habits consistently. Embark on a transformative journey with our "Journal for New Beginnings," a PDF fillable guide designed to accompany you through times of transition.
Commit to your future self with a strong “why” first
We often set resolutions for one of these two reasons:
We have a bad habit that is holding us back in our personal life, health, relationships, or career OR
We’re ready to usher in something new, which requires us to get past our comfort zones as we embrace a higher vision of our life.
In either case, there’s some level of effort required to make the necessary changes. Whether it means getting up earlier to work out or spending more time on a business or creative endeavor, transforming your life requires bringing more mindfulness to your daily thoughts and behaviors.
To stay motivated, you have to understand the reason that’s driving you to make a change in the first place. Once you have a decisive “why” driving your resolution, the next step is creating the small daily steps that will get you there. The tiniest behaviors you take each day to push the needle forward can add up to significant transformations over the course of a year. This is the power of habits.
How does mindfulness rewire your brain to make it easier to keep New Year’s resolutions?
Successfully sticking to resolutions requires consistency. If you don’t make a habit of doing the things you need to do, “life” will always seem to get in the way. But why does it feel so hard to be consistent in doing what you know will help you be happier and healthier in the long run?
It all comes down to your biological wiring.
When creating a new habit, your brain has to replace the neural wiring of your old habit. If you’ve done something or thought a certain way every day for years, the associated actions or thought patterns are literally etched into your neural networks.
The more you repeat an action, the more significance your brain assigns to it. It starts to memorize the behavior or thought pattern, so it becomes easier for your body to perform the same action – or for your mind to think the same thought – next time.
This is where mindfulness helps with positive habit creation. Mindfulness allows you to get into the space between your brain’s memorized reactions (the easy negative habits) and your true intention (the more difficult but beneficial habits) so you can act in line with what you want.
While breaking bad habits and creating new ones takes time and effort, it’s something that, thanks to mindfulness, we all have the power to do! So here are 5 tips to make this easier.
1. Focus your efforts on one area at a time
If you set too many resolutions, it’s easy to get discouraged and not stick to any of them. Rather than making ten resolutions, decide to only set one or two resolutions that will really move you closer to where you want to be.
All parts of your life need to work well to feel a greater sense of balance. Yet we often struggle in certain areas more than others. These drain our energy, leaving little time to focus on everything else that’s important to us.
If you could wave a magic wand and transform only one area of your life, what would it be? Some questions you can ask yourself to determine which area to focus on include:
What area of your life is most holding you back from performing well in other areas?
Where are you currently struggling most?
Where do you have to keep directing your energy?
Whether your overarching theme for the future year is health, career, or relationships, decide where you want to channel your energy and stick to it.
2. Set realistic expectations that keep you excited
One of the main reasons many people break their resolutions is because of unrealistic expectations. While it’s important to aim high, you don’t want to feel so overwhelmed that you scare yourself out of taking any action.
When you decide on which resolutions to set, it’s key to find just the right balance. Don’t set goals that are so high that you don’t believe you can reach them. On the other hand, don’t set goals that are so easy that they won’t help you grow.
This is where it’s vital to break bigger goals down into smaller, more doable ones.
For your goal to be right, it needs to challenge you slightly while still feeling reasonable. Expecting yourself to be able to run a marathon next summer if you’ve never done a 5k is unrealistic. However, deciding to do a 5k in six months if you’re a beginning runner could be just the right level of challenge to keep you motivated.
And when you’re working on mental habits like practicing mindfulness, you should also have smaller and more manageable goals. Take meditation, for example. If you haven’t done much meditation, don’t expect to complete a day-long meditation right off the bat.
Here are some guided meditations for you to practice with.
“Most people overestimate what they can do in a year, and they underestimate what they can do in two or three decades.” - Tony Robbins
3. Keep the mindful momentum going with a gateway habit
Have you ever started on a task you didn’t feel like doing only to lose yourself in it a few minutes later? Maybe you were putting off cleaning out your closet. You decided to just get through your sock drawer and ended up actually finishing the whole closet instead!
Once you take even a small step towards a more difficult task, you build the momentum that helps you finish it. When it comes to sticking to your New Year’s resolutions, the idea is to create tiny habits that feel easy so you’re more likely to do the “bigger” habits that will have a true impact. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, calls these tiny habits gateway habits.
Instead of telling yourself that you’ll spend an hour in the gym or eliminate all sweets, start small. Commit to the actions that will help you get the momentum going. Make it a habit to always put on your workout clothes right after you get up. Or commit to only going to the gym for 10 minutes after work. You may find that when you get there, you’ll want to stay until you’ve done the sets you came there to do. Practicing mindfulness will help you move past the initial discomfort of doing the work needed to get you to your ultimate goal and drive your growth.
4. Track your success and celebrate small wins
Because the actions that we need to take daily can seem small, it can be easy to brush them off as unimportant. But when you track your progress over time and become mindful of the power of the little things, you start to see how they add up. This will help you succeed with even larger habits.
Running one extra mile every week doesn’t seem like much. But when you add it up, that’s four extra miles a month. Saving $100 a month might not feel like it makes a difference until you realize that it’s $1200 per year.
If you want to keep these little habits going, create a spreadsheet or download a habit tracker so you can celebrate the steps along the way to your goals. Doing this provides your brain with a boost of dopamine which motivates you to keep going even if things get tough.
5. Have an accountability buddy
There’s a reason why top athletes have trainers or why coaching is so popular nowadays. Having someone else hold you accountable for your goals makes you more likely to stick to them.
How much more likely? According to the American Society of Training and Development, having specific accountability dates with your accountability partner increases your chances of completing a goal by 95%.
Don’t underestimate the power of being accountable to another person. Chat with friends or find an online group of other people committed to the same or similar goal as you. Take the initiative and create an accountability group or partnership. You’ll feel not only the joy of sticking to your New Year’s resolutions but also the fulfillment of helping another person become a better version of themselves!
How to change your habits with mindfulness
Creating successful habits – whether physical or mental – starts in your mind first. When you practice mindfulness, you get into your mind’s operating system. Recognizing how your mind works is the key to changing any negative habitual tendencies at the root level.
You can, for example, reduce stress by noticing your mind’s habitual tendency to worry. Or cultivate courage by seeing your mind’s tendency to doubt yourself. Or become a better communicator by observing your mind’s hesitation to express your truth more fully.
As you feel your mind’s resistance to doing something, mindfulness creates the space from which you can choose to override that resistance. Mindfulness helps you deal with uncomfortable feelings or sensations without escaping them.
This skill comes in super handy when you’re trying to do an extra push-up or run another mile. You become more in tune with whether you’re truly pushing your body’s limits or if you simply have to override the mind’s desire to remain in a comfort zone.
Practicing mindfulness can be the gateway habit that helps you make all other healthy habits easier. If you’re ready to start the New Year strong, check out your personalized Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program here to learn how you can create a happier and healthier version of you!
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