How do people maintain healthy New Year’s resolutions?

As the calendar flips to 2024, people around the world are crafting New Year’s resolutions, a tradition believed to have existed for thousands of years.

Perhaps the additional day in the leap year of 2024 will help us finally achieve long-elusive goals such as cutting back on drinking and smoking to getting fit.

Researchers say that the fact that we set goals is part of a universal desire to want to expand and grow.

“One of the things that makes New Year’s resolutions so invigorating is that we can sort of start anew, cast aside the expectations and the unfulfilled goals and set new ones,” says Omid Fotuhi, a social psychologist and the Director of Learning Innovation at WGU Labs.

Josh Moore, a resident of Florida, wants to be healthier this year.

He plans to “cut back on my drinking and cigar smoking. Try to save up on some money and overall try to live a better life,” said Moore.

A marketing study published in 2023 found that streaks play a crucial role in keeping people motivated, and many of them start the streaks on New Year’s Day.

Over 40 per cent of the people surveyed began their streaks on January 1st, according to the study.

“A large percentage of people, particularly in the context of running, use[d] January 1st as a date to start their streak,” said Danny Weathers, a professor and interim chair of the Department of Marketing at Clemson University in the US.

People expect streaks to become their habits, but Weathers says running a mile or learning a language is not quite like buckling your seatbelt when you get in a car.

“You don’t keep track of how long or how many days you’ve buckled your seatbelt. Compare that to behaviour like running a mile (1.6 km) a day, and a number of people have running streaks or Duolingo streaks or Wordle streaks,” said Weathers.

Weathers says streaks work efficiently for those who have a high need for structure.

“People feel pressure to keep up their streaks there. It’s a bigger goal, and people like to achieve goals. The daily behaviour is a short-term goal. Maintaining the streak is a longer-term goal. People are motivated for that reason,” said Weathers.

Not all people are equally motivated by streaks, but Weathers believes monitoring and tracking technology can help with that.

“I think most of the growth in streaks is in the online world… Marketers can send notifications if your streak is about to end. So there’s just this growth in technology that we’ve seen, and the ability to track people’s behaviour has led to a growth in streaks in the online world,” said Weathers.

Some scientists also say setting realistic goals is important for maintaining resolutions.

“For instance, they might have had a particular weight that they had when they were in high school, and they’ve hung on to that desired same weight for decades. But it’s no longer relevant to who they are,” said Fotuhi.

“It’s important to anchor them based on who you are and where you are now so that you set appropriate goals.”

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Video editor • Roselyne Min