New Year's resolutions do not always fail

The idea is that a resolution is over before it starts. The date means nothing, and the promise fades with the holidays.

Believing that can make it hard to try at all. Why start something everyone says will fail?

Researchers signed up 1,066 adults from the general public in the last week of December. Each person wrote their own resolution.

People were split at random into three groups. One got little extra help. One named a person to support them and had monthly check-ins. One got that plus advice on setting goals.

Each resolution was also sorted by its kind of goal. An approach goal aims toward something. An avoidance goal aims to stop or avoid something.

Through the year, people rated their own success. The last rating came at twelve months.

A year later, 55% of those who answered said they were keeping their resolution. That is more than half.

Approach goals did better. Of people with approach goals, 58.9% counted themselves successful. Of people with avoidance goals, 47.1% did.

The group with some support did best. The group with the most support did no better than the group with the least.

People chose to join, so they may have been more driven than most. The authors say this themselves.

Success was self-rated, and nobody checked the behavior itself. The study did not test The Archivist Method.

Many goals about a pattern are avoidance goals: stop apologizing, stop snapping, stop quitting. In this study, goals aimed toward something did better. The study was about resolutions, not patterns.

Behavioral Interception is the practice of catching an automatic pattern as it begins, intercepting its usual response, and practicing a different action until it becomes more natural.

A different action is something to move toward. Start with the body signal, the first physical sign in your chest, throat or jaw. Catch it, name the pattern, and take the action you chose.