The Most Effective Way to Design New Year’s Resolutions, According to Experts
Give one of these key goals your laser focus
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I get so ambitious at this time of year. A fresh new calendar! A clean slate! This is the year I’m going to organize my personal finances, take care of all those niggling tasks I’ve been putting off, and grow my business. And that’s not all! I’ll eat more vegetables! I’ll sleep better! I’ll practice gratitude!
That’s the wrong way to go about making changes, says Kara Loewentheil, master certified coach, and host of the mental health podcast, UnF*ck Your Brain. “When you focus on changing too many things about yourself, you’ll get overwhelmed deciding which one matters the most, is most important, or should get your focus at any given time,” she says.
For every resolution, you need to have a plan. You’re going to be changing something about yourself, so you’ll need to take different actions than you used to. “If you try to do too many at once, you are setting yourself up for decision fatigue,” Loewentheil says. With decision fatigue, you have so many decisions to make that you struggle to make good ones.
“If you resolve to walk every day, change your eating habits, meditate, journal for an hour, and go to bed at 10 p.m., you will have to make so many new decisions that you’ll likely experience decision fatigue before you even leave the house in the morning,” she says.
And decision fatigue can lead you to throw up your hands and make poor decisions later in the day that conflict with your goals. This includes tasks like ordering takeout, pouring yourself another glass of wine, or skipping your run.
Here’s a Better Way to Introduce Change
Loewentheil says to pick one goal. “Limiting ourselves to one goal actually helps us get sh*t done. Having too many options leads to choice overload and decision fatigue, which translate into (you guessed it!) broken resolutions,” she says.
When you focus on one goal instead of a bunch of them, you can plan out how you’re going to implement it and how you’re going to tackle setbacks. “Limiting yourself to one resolution can be a powerful act of self-love and self-regard,” she says.
