As soon as 1 January ticks over, we commit to exercising more, quitting smoking and getting better grades.

It seems positive, so why do most people abandon their New Year’s resolutions before the month is out? Here are a few tips for making sure that your resolutions last past February.

Why wait until New Year’s Day?

You don’t need to wait for a new year before you start working harder at maths or cut down on the time you spend on Facebook.

I have a friend who is a nationally ranked long distance runner. She’s the kind of girl who thinks nothing of running 20km before work in the middle of winter, and has the medals to prove it.

If she waited for a significant moment to start training harder, she says she wouldn’t qualify for half the races she enters.

Why? Because she knows that she’d keep pushing the starting date further and further down the calendar, and never get around to training harder, or eating more spinach, or drinking less on the weekend.

She says that if you’re truly committed to making changes in your life, you need to start straight away. It’s a way of taking responsibility for what needs to change.

So, if you want to get better grades, pull out your textbooks right now – no matter what time of year it is. If you want to eat healthier, swap chips for fruit today, rather than gorging on a family sized tub of gelato and promising that you’ll start eating better next week.

If you missed your New Year’s Day deadline, don’t stress. Start today, or tomorrow. But not next week!

If you slip up, don’t give up

Have you ever thought, “Argh, I’ve eaten five chocolate bullets. That’s all my hard work ruined; I might as well eat the whole packet”?

It’s easy to feel like giving up when you’ve slipped up. But one moment of weakness (or one cigarette, or one missed gym session) doesn’t spell failure.

If you get a flat tyre while you’re driving, you don’t slash the other three tyres as well. You fix the puncture and keep on driving.  This seems like a logical answer when we talk about cars, but when we let ourselves down we tend to throw in the towel and sabotage all the hard work we’ve already done. We slash our own tyres, essentially.

Next time you slip up, or fall short of your own expectations, it’s no reason to give up – acknowledge it, but don’t let it stop you achieving your goals.

Write them down, and recruit your friends

Writing down your New Year’s resolutions means that you’re taking them seriously, and are less likely to forget that you were going to try and pick up more hours at the café over the weekends.

Stick your list of resolutions in a place you look at every day – maybe it’s on the fridge if you want to eat healthier, or on your car dashboard if you want to not get any speeding fines this year.

Get your friends on board too. If they know that you’re committed to a goal, they can help you towards reaching it (and steer you away from a late night Macca’s run when they know you’ve committed to being a vegetarian this year).

In the spirit of getting support from people around me, my New Year’s resolutions include going to the gym three times a week, not calling my ex boyfriend, and making new friends at uni.

What are yours?

Image by Krissy Mayhew from Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

By Amy B