How others can help you keep your New Year's Resolutions

Issue 148: Why people fail their New Year's Resolutions & how to keep yours + we share our own resolutions for 2025

With a new year on the horizon, many people are thinking about the changes they want to make in their lives. New Year's resolutions are a 4,000 year old tradition dating back to the ancient Babylonians, although they made theirs during Akitu, a 12-day religious festival in March. For many people, new year’s resolutions represent the most important things they want to accomplish.

A new year represents a new you, a chance to reinvent yourself and create a new identity. As our colleague, Dr. Katy Milkman has found, on new beginnings—dates like New Year’s Day, a birthday and even Mondays—people are extra motivated to tackle their goals because they feel like they can turn the page on past failures and create a new direction.

Do you want to save more money? Exercise more? Eat healthier? If so, you are among a majority of Americans, for whom these were three most popular New Year’s resolutions in 2024.

What were your resolutions last year? And how well did you achieve them?

Despite centuries of practice, roughly 80% of people fail to keep their resolutions by February, and a mere 9-12% stick with their resolutions for the entire year. This is a pretty dismal record—especially when you consider these are the goals we set for ourselves.

At this time of year, advice columns offer all kinds of recommendations for leveraging your willpower to meet your goals. Dream Big! Commit yourself! Give yourself a medal! (and those are just the tips from Harvard Medical School). As much as we’d like to give ourselves a medal, much of this advice fails badly.

This is why we have dedicated this column to our the secret of our own success: The power of collective control! This is why group workout settings are so effective.

We revisited our resolutions from last year to see how well we lived up to our best intentions. Yes, we wrote them in our newsletter to hold ourselves publicly accountable. Would our own knowledge of behavioral science give us an edge? Let’s dig into the results.

Our results were quite positive overall.

Dom resolved to “dabble in photography”—and succeeded. Although it’s fair to say that dabbling is a somewhat low bar. Jay set out to “say no to a lot of things” to help focus on writing. Indeed, he managed to write. A lot. He and Dominic drafted a full book proposal and a record number of new scientific papers with his students and collaborators. Yvonne wanted to write more, which she did! She also pledged to publish a long narrative essay she had written about her grandma. She managed to write it, but didn’t submit it anywhere because she felt differently about it every time she edited it.

Although we felt frustrated by our own imperfections, we did a fair bit better than most. You might be wondering: what was the secret to our success?

A couple of years ago we researched how to succeed at keeping your New Year’s Resolutions. We have updated our advice here and added several new examples to help you find a new relationship or make friends, get healthier, drop the distractions, make professional progress, and much more. At the end, we offer our own resolutions for the New Year.

Here is what you can do differently to actually stick to our resolutions:

Psychologists who study self-control have found that the best approach for achieving goals is called "situation change." This means avoiding temptation by changing your surroundings and environment, rather than relying on our rather flimsy willpower to resist it.

Situation change can involve removing tempting foods from your home if you are trying to diet, deleting social media apps if you are trying to reduce your screen time, or blocking off time on your calendar for specific goals.

Situation change also involves paying attention to your social circumstances and leveraging the influence of those around you to help achieve your goals. For example, joining a writing group can provide accountability and support for aspiring writers.

We did this ourselves when we were writing our book, “The Power of Us.” We set weekly meetings, blocking off time to write together. We met in cafés to argue over stories, studies, and turns of phrase. Working together created both social accountability and social support. In fact, we’ve started doing this again now that we are working on our next book!

This also seems to work nicely for physical activities. For instance, “Runners who had group activities in January 2022 recorded 78 percent more active time than those who ran solo.” Working out with others has at least three significant benefits: accountability, support, and community. In other words, you’ll be in better shape and build friends at the same time!

In New York City, large running groups have also become the hottest place to meet a new date. The rules of run club are simple: Singles wear black. If you’re taken, wear colors. Everyone gets some exercise, meets new people, and they often head to a bars to mingle afterwards.

This photo from USA Today was taken a few blocks from Jay’s apartment on the Hudson river.

Larger groups can create social norms that push us in the direction of our goals. For instance, we have joined book clubs and writing clubs to help us read more books and stick to our writing goals. Indeed, the social norms of these groups are an essential ingredient for collective success.

In one recent study, researchers compared whether establishing a social norm against using technology in class would help university students resist the temptation to multitask while listening to lectures. They found that students who were in a course with a clear social norm against using technology spent only about 10% of their time multitasking, compared to 24% for students who had personal resolutions not to use technology.

Social norms clearly trumped willpower!

Moreover, students in the course with a social norm against technology even reported fewer urges to use their phones or computers during class and experienced less of a need for willpower to resist temptation. We have found the same thing with cooperation: A group with the right norms makes it easier to achieve your goals.