1. Start with Specific Goals A New Year's resolution can be really generic, like the intention to think more positively or eat more healthfully.
Your New Year's Resolutions In a is to lose weight, eat healthier and/or stop smoking. Let's take a look at how you can turn your New Year's Resolutions into habits.
You might think that these resolutions sound like something that should be easy to fulfill, but for many people they're just not. Why? In order to make a resolution stick it needs to become a habit.
If we think about in general, some of the strongest drivers for the formation of habits are rewards and punishments - and that is exactly what the following tip is all about.
The way addiction works is that when you get a reward, that leads to more reward. When you get a punishment, that leads to more punishment.
But there's also a catch: what we want to do with our rewards and punishments is different from what's happening at the biological level. The problem is that we, for example, don't know that we're getting all those rewards and punishments. We just think we are.
The solution: setting up a system of rewards and punishments that helps you avoid the natural tendency of one or the other to take over when you want to change something. Your reward systems should be based on how much you've accomplished, how long it took until you completed your goal (and therefore how rewarding it was), and so on... {context}
But it's also important that you have a system of punishment. And this is where things get interesting. There's two kinds of punishments: positive and negative. Positive punishment is when you think "I hate this" or "I'm so bad". This kind of punishment is the most common, because we hate the idea that we're not achieving our goals. Negative punishment would be anything like not being allowed to go out, having to wear your ugly sweater, being grounded or having a child...Habits}
Start with Specific Goals
A New Year's resolution can be really generic, like the intention to think more positively or eat more healthfully. But, when it comes to making it happen, you need specific, measurable goals. For example, eating healthier could mean setting a goal of cooking two paleo meals and two Mediterranean meals per week. This way, you can go right into action and avoid getting hung up day-to-day on how you'll get there.
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