Let’s be honest; New Year’s Resolutions are hard. Not only do we feel the pressure to choose a radical improvement in our life every January 1st, but we also often end up choosing the resolutions that are the hardest to do. Often, we resolve to make huge changes, like cutting out unhealthy foods or starting to exercise, learn the guitar, or other similarly lofty goals that are just difficult to do, period. Therefore, we fail. We give up, we get busy, life starts to take us in different directions. And that is okay; we are meant to fail. Failure is a learning experience from which we grow. However, we also want to win, and well-earned and deserved success is the best feeling in the world. Winning is important, too. In order to succeed in our resolutions as we kick them off this New Year, let’s discuss some ideas about how to better execute those goals we have in mind for the upcoming year.

I’m sure I wasn’t alone with my goal for 2023—I resolved to lose weight. I didn’t care too much about the number on the scale, or so I thought; I just wanted to have more energy, strengthen my endurance, improve heart health, and enjoy all those other great benefits of living a healthy life that people talk about. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. I went to the gym a few times, ate less overall, and was feeling good about myself—until a couple of weeks in.

In truth, there isn’t a super dramatic reason for my failure. I got busy and didn’t have time to go to the gym once, and the habit broke. I kept finding excuses to skip the gym because, as I rationalized it, I had broken the streak, so what was one more? I started to miss the easy, convenient, and delicious food so easily available from food delivery apps like DoorDash or UberEATS. I stepped on my bathroom scale to see no impressive, encouraging results, so I simply stopped bothering. I realized that I did, in fact, have a lot of anxiety about the number on the scale that had begun to bother me immensely, despite my previous nonchalant opinions about weight. So, I haven’t met my goal from 2023, even as I brainstorm and plan my Resolutions for 2024. But that’s okay, this article is partially a dissection of some of the problems of the entire tradition, and partially informative on real ways to make sure those goals are actually upheld this time around.

It’s not an easy feat to stick with your New Year’s Resolutions. Forbes Health found that, on average, people only hold onto their resolution for 3.74 months. That is way less time than most people would want to admit; everyone wants to improve their life, but the difficulty with implementing and sticking to difficult changes in life shows some of the problems New Year’s Resolutions face.

First off, we need to collectively pick more achievable goals. Meaningful change is slow, and only happens a little at a time. According to UC Davis Health, biting off more than we can chew is a recipe for becoming discouraged and giving up wholesale on the goal in mind. Using myself as an example, I wanted to lose weight. Originally, I didn’t care about the actual number of pounds I lost, but once I was actually pursuing that goal, I rapidly began to put all the value of my progress on what my scale told me that morning. Resolving to lose fifty pounds in a year, from a standstill, is out of reach for me, because that required way too big a change to my lifestyle in order to be sustainable. I became really bored with celery and a treadmill, and setbacks such as my inevitable visits to the drive-through further made me feel like a failure, and led to a decline in my effort towards the overarching goal of being a healthier human being.

Discouragement, broken self-esteem, and failure are not the goals when people make New Year’s Resolutions. In order to better go about improvements, Forbes Health offered a helpful bit of advice. In their study on New Year’s Resolutions, they noticed an increased success-rate when people focused on action-based resolutions instead of cutting something out, called avoidance-based resolutions. Going back to the example of me trying to lose weight, avoiding fast food or denying myself leisure because “I could be working out” is going to be significantly more difficult than finding more engaging, action-oriented ways to lose weight, such as exercises and healthy foods I actually enjoy. I can’t avoid the convenience of fast food all the time, so I need to get in the habit of controlling portion sizes to minimize the inevitable, and wean myself back as much as I can. Additionally, the goal number (fifty pounds) is overly ambitious, starting from the bottom, and puts too much pressure on me. It isn’t a sustainable health regimen; when I am always diving straight for the large goal, it devalues the little victories here and there, because I’ll feel like I’m not doing enough.

That being said, it’s okay to fail when setting these goals. In fact, it’s exceedingly normal. Failure is a part of the process, but it should never be the quitting stage. Don’t feel ashamed of that, because the vast majority of people did and will continue to fail. It’s a unifying experience to want to be better every day than you were before. However, New Year’s Resolutions don’t seem to be the way to success in this endeavor.

If only six percent (according to Forbes Health) of people are actually sticking with their New Year’s Resolutions, then something is clearly wrong with how we are approaching the issue. We often approach our New Year’s Resolutions, like I did, with an abstract goal in mind. Being healthier is great in theory, but doesn’t directly encourage action. How do I go about being healthier? How do I measure how healthy I am? This led to a lot of problems for me down the line. Being clear and concise in your New Year’s Resolutions is an effective way to avoid those pitfalls. If I want to be healthier, but need a clearer goal, maybe I resolve to go to the gym twice a week for at least an hour, or whatever I am physically capable of doing. With this in mind, how are you going to clarify and plan out how to achieve your goals? If you break things down into manageable pieces and stick with those pieces like glue, you will see results that will hopefully match your expectations.

Speaking of expectations, the higher we put our expectations on the success of these resolutions, the more easily we are discouraged when our reality doesn’t match up. As a society, we love to be instantly gratified—getting quick results gives us a huge, quick, and easy sense of pride. However, it is rarely that easy with New Year’s Resolutions. I walked away from the gym because I wasn’t shedding pounds in the first few weeks, and therefore denied myself the weight loss that could have been achieved if I had stuck with it for the long term, despite the lack of instant gratification.

Forming good habits can be challenging because of the difficulty we have with doing tasks that aren’t quick and satisfying. One technique to circumvent this problem is to set aside time for your task, and nothing else. If you have to “make” time for your resolution (in my example, working out), you’re already getting in the way of yourself. Setting aside an hour a day, an hour a week, or whatever the case may be, to do nothing but your task is the key to forming good habits and succeeding. Additionally, sitting around when you know you should be doing something is a great motivator. If you don’t have anything else you could or need to do, you are more likely to devote that time to your resolution. Early on, this was how I got myself to work out. I set aside the time (11:00 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday) to go to the gym for an hour. When I was putting off going to the gym, I felt a sense of awkwardness and anxiety, like I was forgetting to do something, until I felt better by going to the gym.

The problem with New Year’s Resolutions is not that they are inherently bad for you; far from it, in fact. They are a great tool for personal growth, if used effectively. They give us an outlet for addressing and fixing some of the most sensitive problems in our life. However, we as a society misuse this tool, missing the opportunities it offers. With lofty, unachievable goals mixed with our penchant for discouragement when results are less than speedy, we take every setback to heart, and give up too soon. We need to learn good habit-forming techniques in order to keep doing what may feel like a dissatisfying task. We need to learn to break down our overarching goals in life to more manageable pieces, and to never give up. The only true failure when making and carrying out New Year’s Resolutions is to give up halfway.