New Year’s Resolutions: A Look into the Psychology of Habit Formation

As 2024 comes to a close and, for many, 2025 feels like a fresh start from a long year, many of us take to establishing New Year’s Resolutions as a way of catalyzing personal growth and accountability. Despite the absence of tangible change that takes place due to the year turning, many view January 1st as an important “temporal landmark”. An article by Dai and colleagues on this “fresh start effect” essentially describes a temporal landmark as any arbitrary point in time or milestone that symbolizes the passage of a period of time1. This might look like anything from the end of a semester, the end of a financial quarter, the beginning of a month, to the new year, maybe the most obvious temporal landmark. At these break points in time, it is thought that self-reflective and aspirational, goal-focused behaviors increase1. Interestingly, the majority of people who make New Year’s Resolutions are young adults, with around half setting resolutions, and the practice is increasingly abandoned with age2. Within this group, the vast majority of resolutions made target health and finances2. If you are someone who consistently makes resolutions around this time of year, it may be useful to reflect on the nature of resolutions you have made in the past few years, attempting to understand which types of resolutions have successfully turned into habits that are enjoyable for you to maintain. This article offers insight into the psychology behind New Year’s resolutions and habit-formation in general, along with providing some evidence-based strategies for improving your odds of success. 

The right mindset and the right resolutions

One of the most pivotal techniques to maintain your resolution is to pursue the right ones from the outset and focus on mindset shifts to prime yourself for behavior change. According to one longitudinal study, successful resolvers supported their plans by setting up a system for accountability, self-reward to reinforce engaging in the behavior you resolved to do, and stimulus control, which involves limiting exposure to stimuli in your daily life that might impede your habit formation3. The reverse can also be true for stimulus control, working to embed certain cues in daily life that might encourage the habit. If taking vitamins every morning was the goal, this could take the shape of putting a weekly pill box on your nightstand with a glass of water to provide an external cue to prompt the action of taking vitamins. If the taste and feeling of swallowing pills was a negative stimulus that was a barrier to consistently taking vitamins, preparing yourself by investing in the gummy versions, for example, could be one way of applying stimulus control to support acquiring new habits. 

Managing expectations around resolutions can also be a key mindset shift. While many might view success and failure with their goals as all-or-nothing, it is important to note that lapses are natural and should be expected, as evidenced by the 53% of successful resolvers experiencing at least one “slip” across the two year timeline of the above study3. Being able to identify your unique predictors and recover from lapses is, then, much more important to long-term 

success than avoiding them altogether. According to this study, the key factors that led to lapses in these participants were a reported lack of personal control, excessive stress, and negative emotions3. Since it becomes more likely to pause on a habit, managing periods of high stress and difficult emotions, which can be a difficult task to tackle individually, is a key supplement to habit maintenance. Personal control might sound a lot like willpower or simply “sticking to it”, but it can take the shape of concrete actions, such as progress tracking and

self-monitoring emotions while pursuing the resolution. Some people find it helpful to keep a log of how their resolution behavior has been making them feel and how committed they feel to it, so they can continuously self-reflect and adjust how they are implementing their goal. 

The nature of your resolution also matters. One large-scale study has found that approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals. This means that phrasing and planning your goals from the perspective of approaching or strengthening something is more effective than formulating goals to stop something or avoid an action4. For example, since diet is a common subject for New Year’s resolutions, creating a goal to approach nutritional choices with the goal of increasing fiber intake may be more effective than cutting out all refined, low-fiber carbohydrates. 

Although a new year might feel like the perfect opportunity to make overarching lifestyle changes and completely rewrite your daily routine, reflecting on past goals and choosing something attainable and specific to focus on may be more sustainable in the long-run. 

Another way of conceptualizing this might be asking yourself what you feel capable of doing even on low-motivation, sluggish days, since the initial energy from a new year may wear off. Picking something that you have a strong, consistent “why” for may provide deeper fulfillment from your resolution, adding to the likelihood that it continues5. For example, reading for twenty minutes every night might be an attainable goal for me, but if I don’t feel as if I’m gaining anything from the content of the book I’m reading and there is no deeper reward I feel from it, it may be challenging to continue the resolution. 

Ways to improve your odds of making resolutions stick

1. Talk about your goals: While it might seem less intimidating to pursue your goals privately, the executive functioning that drives the ability to set, plan, and achieve goals is often fostered through social connections. Sharing your goals with others makes it easier to reward yourself on your progress, find accountability partners, and conceptualize your success as a collective win.
2. Bridging the intention-action gap:The transtheoretical model of behavior change tells us that forming new habits is hardly ever linear, instead people may transition in and out of stages. With New Year’s resolutions specifically, many of us may spend more time in the contemplation stage, where we recognize an issue that needs to be improved but there is a lingering ambivalence to change, or in the preparation stage, where no concrete action has been completed but there have been substantial efforts to prepare for the habit (e.g. buying healthier groceries, identifying gummy vitamin options)7. It can be easy to get stuck at this point and hesitate to actually take action, which is where social contracts with accountability partners can be especially critical.

3. Bundle your habits: Take some time to take stock of the healthy habits you do routinely engage with. It might be that you are very consistent with making breakfast every morning. Imagine how your new resolution could be embedded within routines that you are confident you will complete on a daily basis8. If engaging in gratitude journaling more is your resolution for 2025, you might consider bundling the two routines and journaling while you eat your breakfast. Increasing the association between new and old habits may make you more willing to start and commit to something new.

For more information about specific literature geared toward many common resolutions, from quitting smoking to limiting procrastination, this resource9 provides peer-reviewed journal articles to read that may help you better understand the psychology behind specific habits.