How To Actually Stick To Your New Years Resolutions

The new year is here, it’s the time to pull out your pens and notebooks and jot down your yearly goals. New year, new you. 

Maybe you’re trying something completely new, or maybe you’re doubling down and focusing on something you’re already doing. 

Whatever it may be, it could be a complete and utter waste of time. That is if you do not find a way to stick to it. 

See, we have all set goals and challenges and failed to see them through, so what makes this year different? 

Research suggests that 80% of people quit their resolutions by January 12th and only 8% accomplish them by the end of the year. 

So, let’s talk about 3 things that will help you go all the way, and be a part of that 8%.

Self-Identity

What is self-identity? “Self-identity refers to how you identify and define yourself. Fundamentally, it answers the question: who am I?” - Life Assured

Essentially, it’s who we are, which can be defined by what we believe, what we think and what we do. 

The problem with self-identity in regard to change is that when all of our actions do not align with the person we are trying to become, it causes cognitive dissonance—a mental discomfort that arises when our thoughts and actions contradict each other. 

For example, if your New Year's resolution is to train for and run a half-marathon in August, yet, you continue to eat the things you shouldn’t, you snooze your alarm and continuously break other promises to yourself. Well, then your actions are conflicting with the identity you are trying to adopt. 

Even if you continue to run and train for the marathon, but ALL of your surrounding actions do not align with the identity of a runner, it’ll lead to cognitive dissonance, and when your brain is in this state, it’ll fight to regain some consistency.

What this looks like practically is slowly treating running like you’ve continued to treat everything else, until you eventually stop running altogether, sound familiar? 

This, I believe, is one of the major reasons people fail to create lasting change, and most likely something you’ve never previously considered.

Moving forward, be mindful of how your actions align with your self-identity. Fully committing to the person you want to become is key to lasting change.

Motivation vs Discipline

Another major roadblock on the road to lasting change is the reliance on motivation. 

Most people will see someone who works hard and achieves a lot and say ‘Wow, they are so motivated’, without realising how wrong they truly are. 

I do not want to completely dismiss motivation, as it can be a powerful tool when available, but that’s just it, motivation is hardly ever there when we need it most. 

We all know how motivating a specific Rocky cutscene can be, or a motivational video or song. But when times get tough, they are never enough to get us through.

Motivation is setting the alarm the night before, discipline is getting up the morning of. 

If you want something much more reliable, something you can control, and something that will allow you to become the person you’ve always wanted to be, you need to become disciplined.

Discipline is doing the things that you know need doing, regardless of how they make you feel. 

Think about anything that you’d like to achieve, maybe it’s climbing up in your job, maybe it’s building a business, maybe it’s creating and sustaining a healthy family, or maybe it’s finally running that half marathon. Whatever it may be, there comes a time when continuing to work towards it is the last thing you feel like doing. 

That’s when you’ll appreciate discipline, as that will be the reason you refuse to quit.

Building discipline can be done by starting small and working your way up. Begin with difficult, yet manageable tasks, soon, your discipline muscle will be much stronger, allowing you to push through difficult times and help you stay on track.

Delayed Gratification

“Delayed gratification is the ability to resist an immediate reward in favor of a more valuable reward in the future.”

The practice of delayed gratification ties quite closely to discipline, as it involves resisting temptation and practising self-control. 

However, we are not going to be discussing that part of it, we are going to be focusing on the outcomes, in other words, the gratification. 

In a world full of Uber Eats, Amazon Prime, Netflix and immediate access to dopamine from their phones, people have gotten used to getting things pretty quickly.

The problem is, when people commit to change, they expect to see results just as fast.

This is why you see so many ‘abs in 30 days’ videos.

But the reason people commit to these things to begin with is because they are hard to obtain. If they were easy to get, people wouldn’t value them. 

The keywords in the definition are ‘greater’ and ‘future’, as these are the fundamentals of delayed gratification. 

Practising delayed gratification is taking the future into account, it’s sacrificing easy and immediate pleasures to experience something better down the line.

It’s sacrificing the temptation to sleep in, to have a better, more productive day later.

It’s sacrificing the ease and comfort of skipping a workout, to become fitter and healthier later.

It’s sacrificing the temptation to procrastinate studying, to receive better grades later.

Delayed gratification is a tricky one, as it takes some time to experience its benefits. If you were to have the perfect week, meaning you woke up on time, stuck to your diet, completed every workout and studied as much as necessary, you still wouldn’t get to experience the rewards of your effort by the end of that week. 

This is why quitting things after a week or two can be so easy, if you haven’t received the reward for your efforts, the effort it takes to complete the tasks can seem utterly pointless.

As I mentioned, people have become accustomed to a life with instant rewards, meaning the path to change will be extremely unfamiliar to them as it requires consistent effort with no immediate feedback. 

To stop relying on immediate rewards and experience the benefits of delaying gratification, you should use the new discipline you have built to get you through the period between taking continuous actions and receiving the rewards.

Once you have experienced the ‘greater rewards’, you’ll start enjoying, and getting your dopamine from the work itself. This, in turn, will make it much easier to continue down the path of delaying your gratification. 

With all of this in mind, I wish you the best of luck with your 2025 endeavours.

Thank you for reading.