How to Break Bad Habits and Stick to Your New Year’s Resolutions

Learn the best ways to cut out bad habits and incorporate your New Year’s resolutions and better habits for a well-rounded, happier life.

With the passing of the new year, there’s bound to be another wave of “New year, new me” posts floating around the internet. However, we’ve noticed a trend in some of the people we talk to. It seems like more and more people aren’t planning New Year’s resolutions for themselves because they “never keep up” with their resolutions. If you are someone who is thinking about giving up on New Year’s resolutions, we completely understand. The human brain is built to recognize patterns and maintain habits. So trying to change your habits and thought processes so suddenly is almost like trying to fight nature. But if there is a resolution you really want to keep up with, the work it takes to form that new habit will be worth it.

Keep reading for some of our thoughts and experiences regarding letting go of bad habits and replacing them with better ones.

How to break bad habits

Breaking bad habits is easier said than done. The human body functions almost solely on the patterns you have developed, and it can be very difficult to switch these patterns up. To make it harder, your body doesn’t recognize that bad habits are “bad,” so you’ll get the same dopamine rush after completing the habit regardless. Just know that, while it will take quite a while to break your bad habit, you can break it with enough willpower. Here are the best tips that have helped us keep our New Year’s resolutions and break our bad habits throughout the years:

1. Make a list detailing your New Year’s resolutions and place it where you can easily see it every day, or even better— where your bad habit tends to trigger. For example, if you’re trying to eat healthier, put your goal on your fridge or pantry.
2. Brainstorm how to reach your goals, what’s stopping you, your trigger for the bad habit, and why you want to reach your goal in the first place.
3. Remove anything that encourages the bad habit. If you’re trying to remove sugar from your diet, throw out or give away all of the sugary treats in your pantry and fridge.
4. Find a distraction whenever you are tempted to indulge in the bad habit. This can be as simple as going for a walk, meditating, or talking to a loved one. Anything to get your mind off of it.
5. Find a way to reward yourself for not doing the bad habit. This will slowly rewire your brain into giving you the addictive dopamine rush for doing something else rather than completing that habit.
6. Be gentle with yourself. Remember through all this that you’re human. You may slip up and that’s completely fine. It doesn’t mean that you’re doomed and will never break your bad habit. Just step back, take a breath, and keep trying.

Good habits to add to your New Year’s resolutions

Every person should strive to have at least one habit that falls into each of the following categories: creativity, physical activity, mental and emotional health, and thinking. Having one of each kind of habit/practice is going to make you feel so much more accomplished as a person and will increase your overall well-being.

Creating

Hobbies where you create something are great for your mental health and sense of accomplishment. Visual, literary, functional, and purely aesthetic are all perfectly good examples. What matters most is that you create what you enjoy creating.

• Coloring and/or drawing
• Knitting/Crocheting
• Woodworking
• DIY crafts
• Playing music

Physical Activities

Finding a hobby that lets you be physically active is very important to your overall well-being. This can be as simple as just moving your body or as complex as a full workout routine. The important thing is to do something that you enjoy so you don’t start to dread getting active. If you want to learn more about the importance of physical activity, check out our other article here.

• Yoga
• Walking
• Weightlifting
• Swimming
• Dancing

Mental and Emotional Healing

Mental health issues are on the rise, so now is a perfect time to incorporate a new hobby centered on addressing your mental and emotional well-being. These types of hobbies focus on relaxing and finding a deep connection with your inner self.

• Meditation
• Gratitude journaling
• Yoga
• Volunteering/charity work

Thinking

Keeping your brain fresh and ever-elastic is super important, especially as you age. One of the best ways to do this is to adopt habits that make you think. Some easy habits that this can include are:

• Reading
• Puzzles
• Learning a new language
• Listening to podcasts

Things to consider when starting your New Year’s resolutions

There are a few things to consider when trying to break old habits and form new ones. The most important, we think, is your mindset. More specifically, why you want to make those changes. Your first answer might be that you are doing things to look or feel better or work to prevent certain disorders. However, that’s the “what,” which is the easy part of the equation. The “why” is harder for many people to identify immediately. From personal experience, many of the problems we have faced with changing our habits came from not fully understanding our why. This was particularly true regarding whether we were changing habits because we wanted to change them or because someone else told us we should.

Internal vs. external validation

No one wants for all their hard work to go unrewarded. But where you get your validation from makes a huge difference in changing your habits. We have found that, unless we are taking on a new practice for ourselves, we have a much harder time doing it. For example, when we first tried to lower the amount of alcohol we drank, our motivations were because we were told it would make us healthier to limit how much we had. However, this didn’t really work to motivate us. We still wanted to have a nice glass of wine with dinner after a stressful day, and so eventually, we did. When we looked inward and said to ourselves, “I don’t want to drink because I don’t like the way it makes me feel,” we were able to remove it with relatively no fuss. Just because you know the right answer doesn’t mean that’s what you want to do. But when you can change your mindset from having to reach a goal to wanting to reach your goal, you won’t want to quit.

Our biggest piece of advice is to find what makes you happy. It is a lot of hard work to change your mindset and your habits. Working to better yourself might feel impossible, especially with how addictive some habits can be. But if you consistently do that hard work, the new habits will become second nature. Just remember to be patient with yourself. It won’t all happen at once, and we can certainly attest to how you will slip up here and there. Just keep your goals and why in mind, lean on your support system, and keep driving forward.

When to start your New Year’s resolutions

Now! The only thing stopping you from starting is yourself. It might be called “New Year’s resolutions,” but if you have habits that you want to break or incorporate, why wait? With habits, we’ve definitely found that the biggest hurdle is the first one. After that, it’s like pushing a sled down the hill; the right motivations and a little willpower can take you on the most exciting adventure of the season.