If you want to know how to keep New Year’s resolutions, this article is for you.
January 1 is the easy part. You’re rested, the planner is new, and the person who wrote “gym four times a week” feels like the real you. Then comes a grey Tuesday in week three. The alarm goes off, the plan looks like it was written by a stranger, and the snooze button wins.
You’re in very large company. How large depends on who asks, and the numbers are worth a quick look:
| Survey (fieldwork) | Who was asked | Share planning a 2026 resolution |
|---|---|---|
| YouGov, Dec 9–11, 2025 | 1,104 US adult citizens | 31% |
| Talker Research for Talkspace, Nov 5–10, 2025 | 2,000 US adults online | 38% |
| Accelerant Research, published Jan 2026 | 500+ US panel members | about 3 in 5 |
| American Psychiatric Association Healthy Minds Poll, Jan 2026 | US adults | 82% (at least one) |
That spread tells you more about question wording than about people. Asking “will you make a resolution?” catches a different crowd than “do you plan any resolution at all?” One detail from the APA poll stuck with me, though: 30% of respondents listed keeping their resolutions among the things making them anxious about the year ahead.
So let’s lower the anxiety and raise the odds. Below are 15 ways to keep your resolution, each tied to research you can check, plus a section on what to do when you slip. You will slip. That part is normal.
1. Pick one or two resolutions, not six
The Talker Research survey for Talkspace (November 2025, 2,000 Americans) found that people setting goals for 2026 planned six resolutions on average. The favorites were saving more money (45%), exercising more (45%) and improving physical health (41%).
Six is a lot. Each new habit needs a slot in your day, some attention, and a bit of energy at the moment you’d rather do anything else, and all six are drawing on the same tired evening. When they collide, it’s rarely one goal that quietly loses. More often the whole set collapses together, because missing three of them makes the other three feel pointless.
Dorie Clark, an executive education professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, made a similar point to the Australian HR Institute (article first published January 2023, updated January 2025). She usually advises people to carry no more than three goals in any six-month stretch. I’d go lower for a first attempt. If money is on your list, our guide on how to reduce financial stress is a good companion to a savings goal.
Your move: write down every resolution you’re considering, then cross out all but the one or two you’d be proudest of next December.
2. Phrase it as something to start, not something to stop
This one comes from the largest experiment on New Year’s resolutions so far. Martin Oscarsson, Per Carlbring, Gerhard Andersson and Alexander Rozental at Stockholm University recruited 1,066 people in the last week of December 2016 and followed them monthly for a year. Their results appeared in PLOS ONE in December 2020.
Two findings matter here. First, 55% of those who answered at the one-year mark considered themselves successful, which is far better than the gloomy figures you see online. Second, people with “approach” goals (start running, cook at home) did better than people with “avoidance” goals (stop snacking, drink less): 58.9% versus 47.1%.
A likely reason is simple. “Stop” leaves a gap where the old behavior used to be, and gaps get filled by whatever is easiest. “Start” gives you something to do in that exact moment. Keep the limits in mind: success was self-reported, the sample was Swedish, and nobody has run a bigger replication since. If your resolution is about eating, our piece on how to have a healthy relationship with food uses the same add-rather-than-ban spirit.
Start small: rewrite every “stop” or “less” resolution as a “start” sentence. “Stop eating junk at night” becomes “keep fruit and yoghurt ready for 9 p.m.”
3. Don’t squeeze every goal into a SMART box
You’ve probably been told your resolution must be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound. Christian Swann disagrees, at least for many people. He’s an associate professor of psychology at Southern Cross University in Australia who studies goal-setting, and in an essay for Psyche he argues that the acronym, coined by a management consultant in 1981, was never built on psychological theory.
His view is more nuanced than “SMART is bad.” Specific goals tend to help when you already know how to do the task, and in that case he says to aim high rather than “realistic.” Beginners are different. His team has found that rigid targets can make less-active people feel more pressure and less pleasure while exercising, and how exercise feels is a decent predictor of whether you keep doing it. Swann and colleagues laid out the critique in Health Psychology Review in 2023, and a 2025 conceptual review in the same journal, co-authored by Ollie Williamson of Leeds Beckett University, defined an alternative called “open goals.” These are exploratory: “see how many steps you can do this week.” The evidence for them is still early.
This is a growth question as much as a planning one, and it ties into how you develop your personality over time.
Here’s a simple way in: if you’re new to the activity, set a learning or open goal (“try three beginner classes and see which I like”). If you’re experienced, go specific and make it a stretch.
4. Decide when and where with an if-then plan
Motivation tells you what you want. It says nothing about when you’ll do it, and that gap is where resolutions go missing.
An if-then plan closes it. “If it’s 7 a.m. on a weekday, then I’ll walk for 20 minutes before I open my laptop.” Psychologists call this an implementation intention, and it has a big evidence base. In the 642-test meta-analysis by Paschal Sheeran, Olivia Listrom and Peter Gollwitzer, published in the European Review of Social Psychology in January 2025, these plans improved behavior, thinking and emotional outcomes, with effect sizes between d = .27 and d = .66. In plain terms, that’s a small-to-moderate boost in some areas and a solid one in others.
The details are the useful part. Effects were larger when the plan was written in a genuine if-then format, when people were highly motivated to begin with, and when they rehearsed the plan. One caution: pooled results from published studies can run a little high, since null findings tend to stay in file drawers. Treat the numbers as a guide, not a promise. If planning tends to dissolve into delay for you, our guide on how to stop procrastinating pairs well with this.
Next time you set a resolution, finish this sentence and say it out loud twice: “If it’s [time and place], then I will [specific action].”
5. Hook the new habit onto something you already do
Think of a habit like a path across a lawn. Walk across once and the grass springs back. Walk the same line, from the same gate, every day, and a track appears. Wander a different route each time and you never get a path at all.
The comparison holds in one important way: consistency of context matters as much as effort. It breaks down elsewhere. Brains aren’t lawns, some behaviors never become fully effortless, and a path doesn’t care whether you enjoyed the walk.
The research backs the “same gate” part. In their December 2024 review of habit studies, Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia found that how often you repeat a behavior, when you do it, and whether you chose it yourself all shaped how strong the habit became. Morning routines and self-selected habits tended to come out stronger. These patterns come from comparing studies, so they show association, not a guaranteed cause. For ideas on what to build, see our list of good habits to have in life.
Pick one thing you already do every morning without thinking (coffee, brushing your teeth, unlocking the front door) and attach your new behavior to the moment right after it.
6. Give it two months or more, not 21 days
The 21-day rule is everywhere, including in plenty of resolution advice. The data don’t support it.
The same review by Singh, Murphy, Maher and Smith, published in Healthcare in December 2024, pooled 20 studies with 2,601 adults. Only four reported how long habit formation actually took. In those, median times ranged from 59 to 66 days, average times from 106 to 154 days, and individuals ranged from 4 days to 335. That gap between median and mean matters: a few very slow cases pull the average up, so “about two months” is the typical experience, while “four or five months” is what you should be ready for.
There are real limits. Four studies is a thin base, most of the included studies had a high risk of bias, and the behaviors were things like flossing, drinking water and eating better. Still, the 2024 habit-formation review from the University of South Australia is the most thorough summary I found, and its message is kind: if week three still feels like effort, you’re on schedule.
Test it this week: put a calendar note on day 66 that says “check-in, not deadline.”
7. Make the hard thing more fun right now
Most resolutions have a timing problem. The cost arrives today and the payoff arrives months later. Your brain weighs today more heavily, so the couch wins.
Temptation bundling flips that by attaching a pleasure to the task itself. In a field experiment published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2020, Erika Kirgios, Katherine Milkman, Angela Duckworth and colleagues worked with 6,792 members of a US gym chain in a four-week exercise program. Some got an audiobook plus encouragement to listen only at the gym, some got the audiobook alone, and some got neither. Getting an audiobook increased gym visits, and the explicit “only listen while you exercise” advice added a modest extra lift, with benefits tracked up to 17 weeks later. Coverage at the time put the gain for bundlers at 10% to 14% higher odds of a weekly workout compared with people who had no book.
It’s not magic. The effect was modest and it worked best for people who actually wanted what they were given. But it’s cheap, and it targets the exact moment of decision. If the activity itself can become absorbing, even better; our guide to entering the flow state covers that side.
A quick experiment: choose one podcast or series you’re dying to continue, and allow it only during your resolution activity.
8. Join something bigger than your own willpower
Dry January is one of the best-documented organized resolutions anywhere, which makes it a useful case to study.
The UK charity Alcohol Change UK launched the challenge in 2013 with roughly 4,000 participants. By its own polling, about 8 million people in the UK attempted a full 31 days without alcohol in January 2025, with another 8.8 million cutting down, and 17.5 million said in December 2025 that they planned an alcohol-free January 2026. Those are survey estimates of intention and attempts, not verified completions, so treat them as scale, not proof.
What makes the case useful is the structure around the goal. Participants get the Try Dry app, which tracks units, calories and money saved, along with daily coaching emails and an online community. The charity cites University of Sussex research from 2020 showing that people using the app or emails were twice as likely to complete an alcohol-free month as those going it alone. Earlier surveys led by psychologist Richard de Visser found 2018 participants still drinking less that August, reporting roughly one extra dry day a week. The caveat: these are self-reports, and responses fell from 2,821 at sign-up to 816 by August, so the people who stayed in the study may be the ones it worked for.
The broader lesson is that you don’t have to build the scaffolding yourself. A club, a class or an app community does a lot of the remembering for you, and it helps to have a few social skills for showing up to the first session.
Give it a go: find an existing challenge, club or group for your resolution and sign up before January 1.
9. Track it somewhere you can’t ignore
What gets written down gets done more often. That’s roughly the finding of a meta-analysis by Benjamin Harkin, Thomas Webb and colleagues from the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds and North Carolina, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2016. Across 138 randomized studies with 19,951 participants, interventions that prompted people to monitor their progress improved goal attainment, with an average effect of d = 0.40.
Two moderators are worth copying. Monitoring helped more when progress was physically recorded and when it was reported to someone or made public. And what you track matters. Harkin’s point, in the American Psychological Association’s release, was that monitoring your eating changes your diet, while monitoring your weight changes your weight. Pick the measure that matches the change you actually want.
The study is a decade old, which breaks my usual recency rule, but I haven’t found a newer synthesis of its size, and it remains the reference point in this area. For systems that make tracking automatic, borrow a few ideas from our guide on how to be more organized at work.
Your move: decide whether you’ll log the behavior or the result, then put the log where you’ll see it daily, like a wall calendar by the kettle.
10. Make the good choice the easy choice
Here’s how friction works, step by step. Every behavior has a cost in steps, seconds and decisions. When you’re tired or distracted, you drift toward whatever costs least. So if your running shoes are in a cupboard upstairs, the morning run now needs three extra decisions, and each one is a chance for “not today” to win. Put the shoes by the door and you’ve removed those chances. Reverse it for habits you’re cutting: hide the biscuits on the top shelf, log out of the app, and the unwanted option suddenly needs effort.
To be clear about the evidence, this is a mechanism, not a single tested law. The general principle that effort shapes choice is well supported, but no study has tested your hallway.
Public health experts now think along the same lines. When the World Health Organization published new global inactivity figures in June 2024, Dr Fiona Bull, head of its physical activity unit, argued that getting people moving takes more than urging individual lifestyle change. It needs environments that make activity easier and safer, in ways people enjoy. Your home is the environment you control. Your phone is part of it, which is why digital minimalism helps with so many resolutions.
Tonight, add one step between you and the thing you’re cutting, and remove one step from the thing you’re adding.
11. Plan, remind, reward, and never miss twice
In December 2021, Katy Milkman of the Wharton School and a large team published a megastudy in Nature. More than 60,000 members of a US gym chain were assigned to dozens of four-week programs designed by 30 scientists from 15 universities, all built on a base of planning, reminders and small rewards.
The numbers are sobering and useful at once. Forty-five percent of the programs significantly increased weekly gym visits during the four weeks. Only 8% produced changes that were still measurable after the program ended, and Milkman noted that when support was removed, people kept only about 30% of their new habits. The top program was revealing: it paid small rewards per visit and added a bonus for coming back after a single missed workout. Milkman’s takeaway was that one missed day is easy to recover from, while two in a row makes getting back on track much harder.
That’s a concrete rule you can borrow. It also explains why so many resolutions die in February: the support of January fades and nobody replaces it. Our guide on dealing with procrastination and laziness has more on rebuilding momentum.
One small step: adopt “never two misses in a row” as your only rule, and give yourself a small treat specifically for the comeback session.
12. Use fresh starts all year, not just in January
Why does January 1 feel so powerful? Follow the chain. A date that stands out (a new year, a birthday, a Monday) draws a line through time. That line makes your past slip-ups feel like they belong to an old chapter and an old you. With the failures filed away, you start thinking about your life in bigger terms, and big-picture thinking makes ambitious goals feel worth starting.
Researchers have watched this happen in real data. Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis showed in Management Science in 2014 that Google searches for “diet,” gym visits and commitments to pursue goals all rise after these landmarks, including the start of a new week, month, semester, a birthday or a holiday. Much of that evidence is archival and correlational, but follow-up experiments found that simply describing a day as a new beginning made people more willing to start on it. The research is more than a decade old; I’ve kept it because it’s the original work that established the effect.
The practical upside is big. You don’t get one fresh start a year. You get dozens. Use them to ditch the things holding you back whenever the calendar hands you a reason.
Pick your next three restart dates right now (the first Monday in February, your birthday, the first day of spring) and put them in your calendar.
13. Aim health resolutions at a sensible benchmark
Exercise is the single most common resolution in the YouGov poll, named by 25% of Americans. So it helps to know what “enough” actually looks like.
The latest global estimates, published by WHO researchers and academic colleagues in The Lancet Global Health in June 2024 and covering 2022, found that 31% of adults worldwide, about 1.8 billion people, didn’t meet recommended activity levels. That share rose by about five percentage points from 2010 and is projected to reach 35% by 2030. Inactivity was more common in women (34%) than men (29%), and in the Americas it was 36%.
The benchmark itself is modest: WHO recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity a week. That’s just over 20 minutes of brisk walking a day. No marathon required. This is also where item 3 and this one meet. If you’re starting from zero, treat 150 minutes as a direction, not a pass-or-fail line, and if you have a health condition, check with your doctor before ramping up.
Do this now: add up the minutes you actually moved last week, honestly, then set your January target somewhere between that number and 150.
14. Book a mid-January check-in before you need it
“Motivation waxes and wanes,” says Hengchen Dai, now an associate professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, in the Australian HR Institute piece updated in January 2025. Her advice is refreshingly realistic: the boost you get from a new year is likely to fade within about two weeks, so use that window for one-off commitments that keep working after the feeling is gone. Sign up for the course. Pay for the block of classes. Book the appointment you keep forgetting.
Company data shows that same third-week slump. Strava, the fitness app, once analyzed more than 108 million US activities and named January 17, 2019, “Quitter’s Day,” the date its users were most likely to give up a fitness resolution; the following year it pointed to January 19. That’s old, unreviewed company data, so I use it only as an illustration of the timing, not as proof.
When that dip arrives, it’s tempting to decide you’ve blown the whole year. You haven’t, and learning how to stop catastrophizing helps you see that a bad week is just a bad week.
Before January 1, book one thing your future self can’t easily cancel, and set a calendar check-in for January 15.
15. Build in emergency skip days
All-or-nothing goals have a nasty failure mode. Miss once, and the goal is technically broken, so why keep going?
Marissa Sharif of the Wharton School and Suzanne Shu of UCLA Anderson tested a fix. In five studies published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in 2021, people whose goals included “emergency reserves” (go to the gym 7 days a week, with 2 emergency skip days) were more likely to keep going after a failure than people with an equivalent 5-day goal or a rigid 7-day goal. One of the studies was a month-long step challenge with more than 270 students and staff. The researchers’ explanation: the reserves turn a slip into “using a reserve,” which still feels like progress, while the small guilt of spending one keeps you from using them casually.
The evidence has limits. A 2023 master’s thesis at Utrecht University, with only 28 participants, found no effect for a vegetarian meal goal. That’s a tiny, unpublished study, but it’s a reminder this isn’t universal.
Say you’re aiming to read every night. Picture writing it as “read 31 nights in January, with 4 emergency passes.” On the night your train is two hours late, you spend a pass, and the streak survives.
A quick experiment: rewrite your resolution with a small, named number of emergency passes per month, and log each one you use.
What to do when you slip
First, expect it. Katy Milkman put it bluntly in 2020 coverage of her research: “goal failure is the norm.” The skill isn’t avoiding slips. It’s how fast you come back.
How you talk to yourself afterward matters. Charlotte Hagerman and colleagues at Drexel University’s WELL Center followed 140 adults in a group weight-loss program, who answered smartphone surveys several times a day. In their study, published in the journal Appetite in late 2023, responding to a dietary lapse with self-compassion was linked to a greater sense of control over eating and exercise in the hours afterward. It didn’t predict fewer lapses the same day, and the design was observational, so it shows a link rather than proof of cause. Still, the harsh inner voice isn’t the motivator it pretends to be. If yours gets loud, our guide on how to stop hating yourself is worth a read.
Watch out for the “I’ll restart on Monday” trap. In a 2020 paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Minjung Koo, Hengchen Dai, Ke Michael Mai and Camilla Song found that people already working on a goal tended to slack off when a fresh-start date was coming up, assuming they’d catch up later. Fresh starts are great for beginning; they’re a poor excuse for pausing. The same paper found a fix: reminding people of the everyday things they consistently do for their goal weakened the slacking.
So, when you slip: name it without drama, use a reserve if you built one in (item 15), and make the very next opportunity non-negotiable, because two misses is where things unravel (item 11). If the slip came on a rough day, it can help to turn the bad day around before you judge the whole plan.
Conclusion
Most kept resolutions rest on a few quiet systems rather than heroic willpower: one or two goals, a start-shaped sentence, an if-then plan, a log you can see, and permission to miss a day without quitting. None of these are dramatic. That’s why they work when motivation doesn’t.
Pick two ideas from this list today, not fifteen, and set them up before the year turns. Then come back to the rest in February, your next fresh start. For more practical, research-backed guides, browse our self-improvement section.
