New Year Resolutions That Last: What the Research Says
- Resolutions fail less often than the jokes suggest: in a Swedish study published in PLOS ONE, 55% of participants considered themselves successful after a full year.
- In the same study, goals framed as starting something succeeded more often than goals framed as quitting or avoiding something, 58.9% against 47.1%.
- An older US study found that 46% of people who made a resolution were still succeeding at six months, compared with 4% of people who wanted to change but made no resolution.
- A new daily habit took an average of 66 days to become automatic in University College London research, with a range of 18 to 254 days, so expect roughly ten weeks before it feels easy.
- 1 January is one of many fresh-start dates. Mondays, the first of a month and birthdays produce the same lift in motivation, which means a poor January costs you nothing.
By the second week of January the jokes about abandoned gym memberships have already started, usually told by people who abandoned theirs. The research is kinder than the jokes. People who make resolutions do better than people who only wish, and the ones who succeed tend to have made a few specific choices about wording, timing and support.
This guide sets out what those choices are, with the numbers, and then turns them into a 12-week plan you can start on any Monday. It applies to small personal goals such as walking more, cooking at home, saving a set amount or being in bed by eleven.
It is not a substitute for professional help with alcohol, smoking, debt or an eating problem, where a GP, doctor or specialist service will do far more than a calendar.
Do New Year resolutions work at all?
Better than their reputation. In a Pew Research Center survey of 5,140 US adults, 30% said they had made at least one resolution that year, rising to 49% of 18 to 29-year-olds.
Of those, 79% had a resolution about health, exercise or diet and 61% had one about money. When asked in the third week of January, 59% said they had kept all of their resolutions so far and 13% had kept none.
Three weeks is a short test. The most quoted longer one is a study by John Norcross and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
It followed people who made a New Year resolution and a comparison group who had a problem they wanted to change but made no resolution. At six months, 46% of the resolvers were continuously successful, compared with 4% of the others.
The largest experiment to date is from Sweden. Oscarsson and colleagues recruited 1,066 members of the public in the last week of December and followed them for a year. At the end, 55% considered themselves successful in keeping their resolution.
All three studies rely on people reporting their own progress, and the Swedish volunteers signed themselves up, so they were probably keener than average. Even with that discount, "nobody keeps resolutions" is not what the data shows.
What kind of resolution is most likely to stick?
One that adds a behaviour
The headline result of the Swedish study was about wording. Participants whose resolution was approach-oriented, meaning it described something to start or do more of, had a 58.9% success rate at one year. Those with avoidance-oriented resolutions, describing something to stop or cut out, had 47.1%.
The goal underneath is often identical. The instruction you give yourself each day is different: "don't" tells you what to resist at 9pm, while "do" tells you what to go and get on with.
| Avoidance version | Approach version | First week's step |
|---|---|---|
| Stop eating rubbish in the evenings | Eat a proper dinner with two vegetables by 7.30pm on weeknights | Plan and shop for three dinners |
| Stop being so lazy | Walk for ten minutes after lunch on workdays | Put a recurring 1.10pm slot in the diary |
| Spend less | Move £50 or $60 to savings on payday, before anything else | Set up the standing order or automatic transfer |
| Stop scrolling in bed | Read a book for fifteen minutes in bed, phone charging in the hall | Buy a basic alarm clock and choose the book |
| Drink less | Keep Monday to Thursday alcohol-free, with a drink you like in the fridge | Stock the alternative before Monday |
One that somebody else knows about
The Swedish researchers split their volunteers into three groups. The first got no support beyond three follow-up questionnaires. The second received information about social support, a monthly follow-up and one email about coping with setbacks. The third got the extended version: training in setting specific, measurable, time-framed goals, interim targets and four educational emails.
The middle group did best, with 62.3% successful at a year, against 55.9% with no support and 52.5% with the full package. That last figure deserves a moment. The group given the most thorough goal-setting method, the kind found in every January planner, did no better than the group given nothing.
The authors are careful not to over-read it. A fair summary is that a nudge towards the people around you and a monthly check-in were worth more than an afternoon spent colour-coding a plan.
One, not five
Physical health was the most common resolution category in the Swedish study at 33%, followed by weight loss at 20% and eating habits at 13%. In practice many people attempt all three at once, plus a budget and a tidy house.
Each new behaviour needs a time, a place and some attention. January supplies less of that than any other month, which brings us to the calendar.
Why is January a hard month to change anything?
In the northern hemisphere, the traditional start date for self-improvement falls in the worst conditions of the year. The Met Office puts daylight on the shortest day, around 21 December, at 7 hours and 50 minutes, almost nine hours less than midsummer, and early January is not much better.
The long-term average UK winter temperature is 4.09°C. In the US, NOAA's climate normals show most of the country east of the Rockies reaching its coldest day of the year in January.
So the standard resolution asks you to begin running outdoors before work in the dark, at the coldest point of the year, in the fortnight after Christmas or the US holiday season has emptied the bank account and scrambled your sleep.
The first payday can feel a long way off. None of this makes change impossible. It does explain why a plan that would be manageable in April feels punishing in the second week of January, and why the fault may lie with the month more than with you.
Two adjustments follow. Choose January goals that suit January: indoor, cheap, early-evening things such as cooking, strength exercises in the living room, a regular bedtime or sorting finances.
Save goals that need light and warmth for a start date in March. Readers in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere in the southern hemisphere can ignore this section and enjoy their long evenings.
A later start costs nothing in motivation. Researchers at the Wharton School studied what they called the fresh start effect.
Google searches for "diet", gym visits and commitments to goals all rose after temporal landmarks, and the landmarks included the start of a new week, month or semester, a birthday and a public holiday as well as New Year. You get a usable fresh start roughly once a week.
How long does a new habit take to form?
Longer than the 21 days often quoted. The best-known study was run at University College London by Phillippa Lally. As she summarises it, the average time for participants to form a daily habit was 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254 days.
She adds that a clear plan of when and where you will do something makes you more likely to do it than a vague intention.
Sixty-six days is nine and a half weeks. That is the argument for a 12-week plan: it covers the average with a fortnight to spare, it is short enough to see the end of, and it fits between 1 January and late March.
A 12-month plan made on New Year's Eve asks you to predict your October. A 12-week plan only asks you to get to the clocks changing, and then decide what comes next with better information.
What does a 12-week plan look like?
The plan below uses one worked example throughout: a person who wants to be more active and has reworded that as "walk briskly for 20 minutes on five days a week". That adds up to 100 minutes, a realistic step towards the 150 minutes a week in UK and US activity guidelines. Substitute your own behaviour and keep the structure.
| Weeks | What you are doing | Walking example | Check-in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 (the week before) | Word the goal as a "do". Fix the time and place. Tell one person and ask them to check in monthly | "After lunch, from the office door, round the park." Shoes and coat left by the desk | Message your person with the plan |
| 1 to 2 | The smallest version, as often as planned. The aim is turning up | 10 minutes, five days | Tick a calendar. Nothing else |
| 3 to 4 | Same slot, slightly more. Sort out the first obstacle you have met | 15 minutes. Wet-day route under cover worked out | End of week 4: first monthly check-in |
| 5 to 8 | The full version. Expect one bad week from illness, deadlines or weather | 20 minutes, five days. Bad week falls back to 10 | End of week 8: second check-in. Count the weeks at four days or more |
| 9 to 12 | Hold steady. Do not add a second goal yet. Notice whether it has begun to happen without an argument | 20 minutes. One longer weekend walk if you want it | End of week 12: review. Keep, change or drop |
The week-12 review has three honest outcomes. If the behaviour now happens mostly by itself, keep it and choose the next 12-week goal. If it happens but takes effort every time, change the slot or the size and run another block.
If it never settled, drop it without ceremony and pick something you want more. Four blocks fit in a year, which means four properly tested changes instead of five resolutions abandoned by February.
What if you have already slipped?
Then you are in the majority, and the fresh start research is on your side. The next Monday and the first of next month carry the same psychological lift as New Year's Day. Restart at the size from weeks 1 to 2, not at the size you were at when you stopped, and tell your check-in person you have restarted.
It also helps to decide in advance what counts as a slip and what counts as stopping. One missed walk is a Tuesday.
A missed week is a signal to look at the slot: the time may be wrong, the goal may be too big, or life may be too full this month for anything new. Our guide to restarting after falling off track goes through that process step by step.
Questions readers ask
What percentage of New Year resolutions fail?
It depends on when you ask and how failure is defined. In Pew's US survey, 13% of people had kept none of their resolutions by the third week of January. In Norcross's study, 46% were still succeeding at six months.
In the Swedish study, 55% rated themselves successful at a year. All are self-reported, so treat them as generous. Even so, roughly half succeeding is a long way from the "80% fail by February" line that circulates online, usually with no study attached.
Is it better to start on 1 January or wait?
Start when the conditions suit the goal. The fresh start effect applies to any Monday, the first of any month and your birthday, so nothing is lost by waiting. Indoor, low-cost goals work well in January. Anything that needs daylight, warmth or spare cash is often easier from March, when mornings are lighter and the holiday bills have cleared.
Should you keep a resolution private or tell people?
In the Swedish experiment, the group given information on social support and monthly follow-ups had the highest success rate, 62.3%. That is one study, and it was about support from people close to you, not an announcement to several hundred followers.
One person who will ask "how is the walking going?" at the end of each month is the version with evidence behind it.
Do SMART goals work for resolutions?
They did not add anything in the one large trial that tested them on resolutions. The group taught to set specific, measurable, time-framed goals with interim targets succeeded 52.5% of the time, slightly below the group with no support at all.
A clear when-and-where plan still helps, as Lally notes. The lesson is to keep the plan to one line and spend the saved effort on doing it.
How many resolutions should you make?
One at a time is the safest reading of the habit research, because each new daily behaviour takes around ten weeks of attention before it runs with less effort. If two goals share a slot and support each other, such as cooking dinner and eating earlier, treat them as one. Otherwise queue the second for the next 12-week block.
Sources
- Oscarsson M, Carlbring P, Andersson G, Rozental A. A large-scale experiment on New Year's resolutions: approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals. PLOS ONE. 2020;15(12):e0234097.
- Norcross JC, Mrykalo MS, Blagys MD. Auld lang syne: success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year's resolvers and nonresolvers. Journal of Clinical Psychology. 2002;58(4):397–405.
- Pew Research Center. New Year's resolutions: who makes them and why. Survey of 5,140 US adults, 16 to 21 January 2024. Published 29 January 2024.
- Dai H, Milkman KL, Riis J. The fresh start effect: temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science. 2014;60(10):2563–2582.
- University of Surrey. Does it really take 66 days to form a habit? We asked the expert, Dr Pippa Lally. Discussing Lally P, et al. European Journal of Social Psychology. 2010.
- Met Office. Winter: the coldest season.
- NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. When to expect the coldest day of the year.
- Department of Health and Social Care. UK Chief Medical Officers' physical activity guidelines: adults and older adults, infographic text.
© The Reset Edit™ 2026 — Modern Tools + Lifestyle Essentials for Sustainable, Reset Living. All rights reserved.