The Road Ahead: BONUS CONTENT

If you are anything like me, you love setting goals for the New Year, but struggle to make them stick.

Last year I said I’d stop drinking for 12 months; I lasted three weeks.

It was tough and it’s usually around now, a couple of months into the year, when the motivation starts to wear off.

So, what can we do to increase our chances of hitting our 2023 goals?

Psychologist, behavioural economist and Founder of Switch4Schools Phil Slade has spent years helping people achieve their goals.

He shared some of his wisdom, offering four top tips to stick to your new year resolutions.

1. Chunk it down

This is all about setting realistic, bite-size goals.

If it takes you too long to achieve your goal, the feeling of success may be too far away to counteract the feeling of loss of giving up a habit.

“Any change that we put our body through will result in a grieving process of that old behaviour, even if that old behaviour was something that we detest,” Mr Slade said.

“A lot of people break their new year resolutions simply because they underestimate the grief cycle and then to break them out of the grief cycle, they often go back to their behaviours because they are trying to mitigate the pain.”

Mr Slade’s advice is to set more achievable goals – to “chunk it down”.

“Rather than saying I’m not going to drink for the whole year, you just say I’m not going to drink for the next three days, and then when you hit that goal you go, ‘cool I did it’,” Mr Slade said.

“When you achieve that and hit that goal, your brain releases a little bit of dopamine which makes you feel good. That feeling of feeling good, helps propel you to the next larger goal.”

Once you complete your first smaller goal, build on it – perhaps try a week next, then a couple of weeks and so on.

2. Change your environment

If you’re tempted to indulge in an old habit, make it harder to do the very thing you’re trying to avoid.

Mr Slade said you could do this by deigning or altering your environment.

“If you’ve got a spending habit where you’re just spending too much money… then don’t go to the shops,” Mr Slade said.

“When you’re bored, don’t find yourself hanging out at the shopping centre, do something else when you’re bored. Just don’t put yourself in the environment where spending money is the most likely thing that you’re going to do.”

3. Habit stacking

If you want to pick up a new, healthy habit, or replace an old, unhealthy one, Mr Slade said try habit stacking.

Take your new habit and make it part of your daily routine by attaching it to something you already do.

For example, say you want to go for a run or exercise every morning.

“When you get out of bed, stack putting on exercise gear as part of the habit of getting up in the morning,” Mr Slade said.

4. Emotional regulation

If we fail to stick to our new year resolution, we need to pick ourselves back up, dust ourselves off and try again.

Sometimes the feeling of failure can be overwhelming, but we need to learn and use emotional intelligence to regulate just how angry or upset we feel.

Mr Slade said we could do this by boosting our emotional vocabulary.

When you feel scared, dig deeper and identify your level of scared. Are you terrified or are you just hesitant or nervous?

Mr Slade said if you were terrified, think about how you could dial it back so you were more in control.

Instead of telling yourself you’re terrified, tell yourself you’re just hesitant or nervous to calm yourself.

To help, use Decida’s 5-level Emotion Wheel. This will build your emotional vocabulary and assist you in thinking about different levels of the same emotion.

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