How To Make New Year’s Resolutions – A Therapist’s Approach
2024 is here and so is the season of New Year’s resolutions. These goals are often associated with lofty personal expectations that fizzle out over the course of a few weeks. Some resolutions only last a few days or hours! They frequently become jokes are even expected to fail from the start. However, I’d like you to know that it’s possible to create a sustainable change in your life this year. Year long goals are not simple tasks, and there’s much to consider when making them. It starts with a question to ask yourself.
Are you trying to change what you do, or are you trying to change who you are?
A Healthy Motivation
Why we do what we do is the starting point of change. Let’s imagine you have some unhealthy habits that you would like to break. Self-criticism and self-contempt often accompany these habits. Not just critique of what you do, but who you are. You might call yourself “lazy” or “dramatic.” If you seek to change these core views of yourself, then your motivation is likely to focus on not being “bad” anymore. Thus your New Year’s resolution is not grounded in a positive or building direction, but a negative and self-containing one. Healthy motivations for New Year’s resolutions do not come from attempting to reshape negative views of your personality, but from a desire to grow or build in a positive direction, to achieve a feeling.
Effective motivations for changing habits come from the desire for positive emotions. Even if it is the absence of negative experiences, then the reward is the experience of feeling better! This could be feeling more mentally healthy, more physically healthy, or feeling healthier in your relationships. Your motivations for this year, the feelings you want to constantly feel by 2025, become your MISSIONS for the year. These are not your goals yet, but are achieved by your goals. So for this year’s resolutions, I want you to choose at least 3 MISSIONS, three feelings and general experiences you want to have by the end of the year. Along with this, start a journal of ranking this feeling once a day, from 1-10, with 1 being the least and 10 being the most. Then, we start to focus on your OBJECTIVES.
Objectives are Your Methods
OBJECTIVES are essentially goals stacked together to achieve a MISSION. These are the actionable steps you can measure to know you are making your way towards your MISSION. For example, if your MISSION is to feel better physically, what are some goals to help you get there? What experiences have you personally had or what actions have others done to feel physically healthy? Then, pick three OBJECTIVES that would fulfill that MISSION, and make sure that these are actionable. That means you don’t try to do too much or too little, but the frequency you know you can attempt. For example, exercising every day might not be reasonable, but every other day or at least four times a week might work. Thus, your OBJECTIVE is to exercise four times a week. Then, you can make new objectives with a different frequency, such as going to the pool once a month or getting a massage every three months. Your methods must be manageable for your OBJECTIVES to fulfill your mission. Even then, how you treat your achievements is as important as achieving them at all.
How to Treat Successes
At some point you may have heard of the psychology term “conditioning.” It means making sure a behavior occurs again by how you treat the outcome of that behavior. For the sake of OBJECTIVES, it means either rewarding yourself or taking away a stressor. Either of these approaches to your successes reinforce yourself into being more likely to repeat it! For example, if a coach feels their team has done well in practice, they may decide to reward them with praise and affirming words. Alternatively, if the team typically ends practice with running laps, the coach can take away those laps today for their good behavior. Then, those athletes are more likely to continue behaving well due to how their positive actions were treated. if you don’t plan on reinforcing your own behavior, then they may take longer to complete or feel ineffective altogether. However, if your purpose for changing your habits means enough to you, you can use this structure to make that happen. Then again, not everything goes according to plan, and it’s important to know what to do when that happens.
How to Treat “Failures”
It’s easier to celebrate your actions when you succeed, but what happens if you don’t? If you miss two days at the gym, or fall short even a little bit, you may be inclined to give up. When it comes to completing your objectives, I’ll use another sports metaphor. In the car racing sport of Forumla 1, there are no playoffs, Super Bowl or championship. The winner for each year is determined by total season points. You accumulate these by how you do in each race. You also don’t have to win a race to earn points, but you must get into the top places. In essence, it’s about consistent attempts to make it not only to first, but in the top group.
If we treated “failure” like this, it would feel much easier because there’s always another race, another week, another day to try again. When your objectives briefly dip, then it’s worth recognizing your efforts do not end with one mistake. However, if you do notice a trend maybe it’s worth modifying an objective rather than abandoning it altogether. Also, you can replace it with another that fits your life better. In the end, there is also supposed to be an immediate purpose in your choice of OBJECTIVE. If you hate reading, making yourself read won’t make you like it anymore. You may struggle to do something, but even difficult tasks in what you enjoy are still enjoyable. Exercise does not feel fantastic, but if it’s an OBJECTIVE that contributes to your MISSION of feeling physically healthier, then it’s worth it. Your missions are not supposed to be easy, but difficult, achievable, sustainable, and fulfilling.
All Together Now
Identify 3 MISSIONS (How you want to feel)
Keep a journal and rank these from 1-10 every day
Plan three OBJECTIVES for each mission (including how frequently you will do them)
Plan on rewarding yourself for achieving your objectives
Persist through or restructure your objectives if you lapse on an objective
Remember!
You’re changing habits, NOT your personality or self-worth.
Your motivations/MISSIONS should center around what you want to feel daily!
Your OBJECTIVES should be reasonable and actionable yet effective and fulfilling.
Even your small achievements are worth reinforcing, this is what makes your resolutions sustainable.
