How to Follow Through on Your New Year's Resolution

A new year is the perfect time to shed old, bad habits and pick up new healthy ones, which is why many people make “resolutions” at the start of the new year. Resolutions can vary from working out more, to eating healthier, to spending less money, to spending more time with family. However, one thing all resolutions have in common, is that they’re hard to keep.

According to one survey, an average of 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by the second week of February. However, that isn’t how it has to be. We’ve prepared several tips to help you keep to your resolution, starting with how to pick a good resolution.

7 Tips to Finding a Resolution You Can Keep

Choose something that motivates you. It may seem obvious, but it’s easier to keep a resolution you are excited about than one you are forcing yourself into simply because you believe you should.
Try something different. The trick to following through on a resolution is believing you can. If you attempt the same resolution every year without success, your memory of past failures can influence your ability to keep your resolution this time around as well.
Make it specific. When resolutions are too vague, there’s no way to chart your progress, and that makes it easier to slip in meeting your goal. Rather than say “I want to get in shape,” say, “I want to lose 15 pounds,” or “I want to complete in a marathon in six months’ time.”
Plan it out in reasonable steps. Resolutions that are too daunting or difficult to accomplish can make anyone balk. Instead, break it out into steps. For example, if you want to stop smoking, instead of trying to quit cold turkey, create a plan to gradually smoke less. Instead of a pack a day, try to make each pack last two days, then a week, and so on.
Don’t try to do too much at once. We all likely have many ways we’d like to improve ourselves, but if we are trying to eat healthier, spend less, exercise more, learn a new language, and call our parents more often on top of our usual activities, we can become stretched too thin. Concentrate your efforts on a single goal.
Tell people what you are doing. When your friends and family know what you are trying to accomplish, they can help hold you accountable, keep you from slipping, and act as your biggest cheerleaders at succeeding at your goals.
Reward successes, and don’t punish failures. If you slip up, it’s not worth beating yourself up over, and it’s definitely not a reason to give up on completing your resolution altogether. This is true whether you slipped up once, twice, five times, or even more. Get back on that horse!

Rewarding yourself for meeting partial goals can also keep your motivation high – just make sure your self-rewards don’t contradict your goal. For example, if your plan was to lose 15 pounds in three months (5 pounds per month), if you successfully lost five pounds by the end of the first month, reward yourself with some of that new fitness gear you’ve been eyeing rather than with a cheat day.

About Us

Joye Law Firm is a personal injury law firm dedicated to helping victims of accidents across South Carolina, whether they were harmed in an auto wreck, at work, in a fall, by a healthcare professional, or in any other accident caused by someone else’s negligence.

It’s an unfortunate fact that many injury victims often find their insurance will refuse to pay all or even any of their medical expenses after an accident that wasn’t their fault. We’re here to tell you that you deserve compensation not just for your medical bills, but also for any paychecks you missed while recovering and for your pain and suffering, and we want to make sure you get it.