It’s January 2, 2020. Have you broken your New Year’s resolutions yet?

I’d bet about half the people who make resolutions don’t even make it to Day 3. And that’s absolutely fine as long as they don’t give up or feel badly about themselves at this point.

For me, I start thinking about things I want to change or do better in December. I give a couple of them a try throughout the month. For Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, I try to keep them in mind just a bit, which helps to curb the excesses that normally happen at this time of year.

January for me is all about “practicing” resolutions in the form of habit-making behavior. For simple ones that don’t require much cognitive load, I’ll try to do them every day but don’t punish myself if I miss every now and again. That worked well for the habit of making my bed every morning, and now it’s hard to *not* make my bed.

For the more complicated ones that require my body to cooperate, I’m much more lax about the process. I’ll do them for a couple of days and then probably miss a couple. Then I’ll up it to a few more consecutive days. About 3 weeks into this process, I’m usually ready to go for it every day. By the beginning of February, I’m in full-swing.

My philosophy on making lasting changes is to keep the changes as small as possible on a day-to-day basis.

This is especially helpful during and after the holiday season. Most of us eat and drink too much in December. It seems our bodies quickly adapt to too much of anything. Trying to completely reverse course to nearly nothing to eat and drink on exactly January 1 is next to impossible because our bodies go into panic mode almost immediately. If you haven’t noticed, your body will almost always win over whatever will power you thought you’d saved up by not using it during December.

But if we just ease back to normal eating and drinking and then try to do a little less over the course of 30 days, our bodies don’t panic. We don’t have to do battle with our evolutionary instincts. Our bodies will agree to work with us instead.

Once we’re rolling at the end of January and into February, it’s simple to keep going at that point. And I promise you, what you can accomplish over the course of 11 months is far more powerful than what you can do just in January.

If you find this helpful or have any questions about it, feel free to leave a comment.