2026 is coming. It’s time to set some New Year’s resolutions that you will definitely not abandon by March. After all, this is the year you’ll get your life together.
“Typically, at the end of the year, we start to reflect on how the year went, what was good, what was bad, what we accomplished, what we didn’t accomplish, and how we want to be better next year,” says Jameca W. Cooper, PhD, board-certified counseling psychologist. “We’ve kind of washed our hands of the old year, and we’re ready to start anew with a different mindset,”
But let’s talk about that mindset for a minute. Is it actually different this time around? Be honest. Because, if you’re summoning the motivation to take another run at one or more previously failed resolutions, you may want to rework your approach. “Sometimes, when people set a resolution, it appears kind of abstract,” Dr. Cooper says. “It’s like the goal is floating out in the air, and people never really connect it to their reality.”
The thing is, we’ve heard this advice before. Set specific goals to make them real. Break them down into smaller, more manageable steps. This isn’t new information. And yet, most of us end up recycling the same resolutions we’ve set in the past, unable to gain traction with what seem like simple behavioral changes. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Truth be told, sticking to a New Year’s resolution doesn’t even have to be difficult. Seriously.
Why our resolutions fail
Most likely, your road to reading this article is paved with the shards of broken resolutions past. And that’s fine. People are generally not great at sticking to resolutions. The first step to changing that is understanding why.
“One of the main things we get wrong is that we think: If I say it’s a goal, that’s all I have to do. Once I decide to do it, of course I will push through and willpower will serve me well. But the reality is, there are all of these internal barriers to success,” says Katy Milkman, behavioral scientist at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.
According to Milkman, one of the highest hurdles to achieving our resolutions is what’s known as “present bias”—our tendency to focus more on what’s instantly gratifying and less on what’s good for us in the long run.
