A simple trick to making New Year's Resolutions stick

You’ve probably heard about how most people don’t end up sticking to their New Year’s Resolutions. They buy gym memberships in January, go a handful of times and then stop bothering. Or they decide to eat more healthily, that lasts about a week, and then they revert back to their default state.

A few years ago, I discovered a fun and easy way to make New Year’s Resolutions more likely to stick. And that’s simply to start them a week early.

The problem with New Year’s Resolutions is that we give them far too much weighting in our collective culture. It feels a ‘big deal’ to make a vow to ourselves that we’ll do this ‘big’ thing from January 1st and keep it up for the whole year.

If however, we start on 23rd December, it feels like less of a big deal and more like a simple change we could really have made whenever we wanted.

This has helped me stick to a few different resolutions over the years, although admittedly I’ve still got plenty that have fallen by the wayside.

PS: If you're reading this not-in-the-New-Year-period then you can really start your New Year's Resolutions whenever you want :) Why wait until the end of the year to make a change?

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