1 Dec 2025

No More New Years Resolutions

Osvaldo Nuñez

It’s that time of year again when people start to talk about New Years Resolutions, but this year at True Health we’re swearing them off: and we think you should too. Here’s why.

Resolutions (Almost) Never Work

The truth is, a New Year’s resolution is a poor tool for changing behavior. We know this, from a widely cited study that shows a full 88% of people give up on their New Years resolution within the first two weeks.¹ It’s really not a matter of commitment or willpower, or an inability to change, but that resolutions set people up to fail.

The entire premise of a resolution is a commitment to do something, but that’s as far as the practice goes. There’s no follow-up, no tools to put it into practice, and often no end in sight. As the old adage goes, failing to plan is planning to fail, and that’s the position resolutions put people in.

Trade Resolutions for Goals & Plans

Fortunately at True Health, we have an alternative for 2026: a simple, sustainable way to create behavior change that sticks, and helps you actually make progress in 2026. Rather than focusing on the end result you want, our approach has you directing your time and energy on developing a plan that will help you succeed.

Try it for yourself this month, and see what you can accomplish in 2026.

Step 1: Take Stock of 2025

Before you set a goal for 2026, take a minute to reflect back on how you’re feeling this month and over the course of the year. What went well, and what didn’t go so well? Is there anything that’s been bothering you, or that’s been a consistent theme over the year that you want to change? These powerful motivators will help guide you to a goal you want to set in the coming year.

Step 2: Set a SMART Goal

Based on your reflection, choose one thing that you want to accomplish in the coming year and get very specific on the details. The best goals are “SMART”, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timed. You should know exactly what you want to accomplish, have a way of proving you succeeded, be active in the pursuit (not waiting on something), take real life into account, and not last indefinitely. Setting a goal with these five attributes will help to increase your odds of reaching it.

Step 3: Break Down the Steps

This is where our approach starts to really diverge from resolutions. Once you’ve got a goal, sit down and write out all the steps that you will need to take to accomplish it. Pick skills you will have to learn, help you’ll need to enlist, and set milestones along the way. For instance, to run a 10K, you’ll first need to be able to run a 5K. That’s an excellent benchmark.

Step 4: Schedule Your Plan

Time is one of the most common barriers to achieving our goals. We either get busy and can’t devote attention to them, or we simply lose track and forget to make progress. In other words, a goal without a plan is just a dream. So once you have all your steps identified, schedule them out on your calendar. Know exactly when you’re going to be working on each step, and protect that space in your schedule.

Step 5: Identify Barriers & Strategies to Overcome

In the pursuit of any goal, it’s inevitable that obstacles will come up. (Remember that part of SMART goals about being realistic?) To keep from getting derailed when they do, sit down and think about all the barriers that can come up to achieving your goal, and develop a plan to overcome each. What will you do when you get sick? How will you adapt when you have a deadline and have to work longer hours? Coming up with a plan for when things don’t go right is the best way to prevent the inevitable from interrupting your progress.

Step 6: Tell the Right People

The last step toward achieving your goal is creating some accountability: but it’s important to be specific with who you share your goal with. A much-cited study from 2009 showed that making goals public serves as a kind of psychological reward that prevents people from actually following through. But a later set of studies discovered that there is a boost in commitment, as long as you share your goal with people you look up. So find someone you admire and don’t want to let down to share you goal with, and maybe keep it to yourself outside of that.

Get Started With Support

With these six steps, you’re going to be better equipped to set goals that will make a difference in your life in 2026, and to actually follow through on them. Our comprehensive care team is always here to support you as you work toward your goals, whether it’s with the mental side through therapy and mental health support, the lifestyle part through health coaching, or the physical through personal training and physical therapy.

We can’t wait to hear what you accomplish this year, and we look forward to sharing a healthier 2026 with you all.