How to stick to New Year resolutions.

The science-based strategies for achieving New Year’s resolutions in a challenging and monotonous environment (with an emphasis on the importance of five small steps)

The winner of the 2008 Behavioral Scientist of the Year award is author of “How to Change: The Science of Getting from where you are to where you want to be.”

Behavioral scientists have discovered a host of techniques that could help you stick to your New Year’s resolution. These tactics are most useful if you’ve chosen a goal that’s concrete and bite-size. You need to set specific goals, instead of vague ones like “I’ll exercise more” and “I’ll work out four times a week.”

You feel you have failed when you read the article about New Year’s Day. The science tells you not. You can start over on any fresh start you choose – next Monday, next month or on your birthday. Or pick any day to start over, and follow these five steps to establishing another good habit.

It is useful to be able to let go of failures and try again. A lot of the goals worth achieving can be hard to nail the first time around.

Here are my favorite science-based tips to stick to your resolutions, derived from my book, “How to Change: The Science of getting from where you are to where you want to be.”

When to Follow Through: A Cue-based Plan for Your New Year’s Resolution with All Your Social Media Followers – How You Will Find Them

Just as cues tell Broadway stars when to step onto the stage, research has shown that adding a cue to your plan helps you remember when to act. Be sure to detail when and where you’ll follow through.

A plan like “I’ll meditate on weekdays” would be too vague if your New Year’s resolution is to meditate five days a week. A cue-based plan like “I will meditate at the office on weekdays during my lunch break” would work.

If you don’t plan on executing your New Year’s resolution, you will be guilty if you don’t. Setting a digital reminder and putting your plan on the calendar would be great. If you want to meditate during lunch, you must decline the offer of a proffered lunch meeting.

One easy way to do this is by telling a few people about your goal so you’ll feel ashamed if they check back later and find out you haven’t followed through. Talking about all your social media followers would increase the ante even further.

The what the hell effect is the temptation to fail at a time when you can’t feel the need to change: Tentation bundling

The logic is easy to understand. Penalties encourage us to change our decisions. We’re used to being fined for our missteps by outsiders (governments, health plans, neighborhood associations) but this time you’re fining yourself for misbehavior.

You are unlikely to stay at it if it isn’t fun. But if you get pleasure from your workouts or study sessions, research has found you’ll persist longer. And in the end, that’s what often matters most to achieving a resolution.

One way to make pursuing a goal that normally feels like a chore more fun is to combine it with a guilty pleasure. I call this “temptation bundling.” Limit yourself to only watching your favorite TV show at the gym. You will begin to look forward to workouts. It’s a hook to get you to the library if you only let yourself drink a drink during study sessions. My research shows that when you are tempted to abandon your resolution, you are more likely to keep it.

If you do not stick to your New Year’s resolution you will likely be thrown in the towel. Researchers call it the what the hell effect. Here’s what it looks like: You planned to get to bed early every night but couldn’t resist staying up late one Friday to watch an extra episode of “Succession.” After that, your early-to-bed plans went out the window because “what the hell,” you’d already failed.

Happily, there is a way to dodge this fate. By setting tough goals (like a 10 p.m. bedtime every night) but giving yourself one or two get-out-of-jail-free cards each week, you can get better results than by setting either tough or easy goals without wiggle room, research has revealed. Your stretch goal keeps you motivated, and the ability to declare an “emergency” (rather than saying “what the hell”) keeps you pushing forward after a misstep.

How to Make the Most of Your Time with Your Friends: From Running to Running and Writing to Running, and Getting Back in the Groove

Spending time around high achievers can boost your own performance. If you have a New Year’s resolution to run a marathon, or write a book, it is advisable to hang out with friends who have completed the race and shown you how it is done. Spending time together will allow you to conform to their patterns of behavior. But my research and studies done by others show that if you explicitly ask successful friends how they achieved a shared goal and try out those tactics yourself, you’ll gain even more ground.

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