Around 14 million Australians set New Year’s resolutions for 2024, starting the year with sunny plans to eat healthier, improve their fitness or lose weight, according to a Finder survey.

Some wanted to sleep more, while others vowed to travel abroad. The problem, according to research out of the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, is that just 8 per cent of people keep their resolutions.

If you’re one of the 92 per cent who haven’t kept their resolutions, there’s still time to get back on track and finish 2024 on a high.

We asked three psychologists and behavioural experts how to start better habits, and stick to them.

1. Ask yourself, how do you respond to expectations?

The question of why people don’t do what they know is good for them has fixated bestselling author and happiness expert, Gretchen Rubin, for years.

Rubin, author of New York Times bestsellers The Happiness Project and The Four Tendencies, watched her friends repeatedly trying to establish better habits or lamenting the loss of old ones.

They would say things such as, “I used to run all the time, and I know that running makes me feel good, but I just can’t get into the habit of it any more”, she tells The Australian Financial Review from New York.

It led her to develop her theory of the four tendencies, and publish a book on it in 2017. The idea is that people fall into one of four categories: obligers, questioners, rebels and upholders.

These terms generally describe how you respond to expectations. You can take the test here, to see where you fit.

An obliger (which is 41 per cent of people) is good at meeting external expectations, but not so good at meeting their internal expectations.

A questioner is someone who will meet expectations, but only if they agree they make sense – effectively meeting internal expectations – and a rebel is someone who doesn’t really like expectations.

An upholder is someone who meets both internal and external expectations.

What does this mean for my goals?

Given the example of someone who wants to complete a marathon, Rubin says this is how each type tends to respond.

Obliger: Obligers need accountability from outside to keep motivated. “This might mean training with a friend, and every day you trade a quick text with what you’ve done for the day,” Rubin says.

In some instances, an obliger will be able to hold themselves accountable to a future version of themselves. For example, if they’ve bought their race ticket, they can create external accountability by reminding themselves of how disappointed their future self will be if they don’t put the effort in.

Or they may respond to ideas such as: “I want to show my children this is what it looks like to keep promises to myself.”

Questioner: This person focuses on efficiency and customisation. “A questioner will ask, ‘Why am I running a marathon? What do I want to achieve?’.”

If they can satisfy themselves with their answer, the behaviours will flow from there. But they can easily get caught up in analysis-paralysis. For this person, their best place to start is by setting limits around the amount of information they’ll consume before beginning.

“There are a million ways to train for a marathon,” she says. “Ask a trusted authority. Find someone who you really respect, who has done the research, ask them what they did and … that could probably save you a lot of time and energy.

 

“Otherwise, you’ll spend years researching the best trainer.”

Rebel: This sort of person does well when they lean into an identity, Rubin says.

“I’m an athlete. I’ve always been an athlete. I’m a person who loves to push myself. I’m the person who surprises people.” It is the sort of self-talk that may work for rebels.

But she adds that these sorts of people also may not respond well to nudges. For example, a loving spouse asking if they’re going to get up and run the next day may do more harm than good. “They may be like, ‘No, I’m not going to.’ Let them do it in their own way, in their own time.”

Upholder: This sort of person tends to stick to both internal and external expectations, so they may find it easier to start and stick to a habit.

“A lot of the times, for these people, it’s about putting it on the calendar. It’s about giving it a slot and saying, ‘Okay, it’s in the calendar, and so I have to do it’,” she says.

In fact, for an upholder, their trouble spots will be in knowing when they need to take a day off. “They might have a problem with rigidity,” she says.

“For an upholder, remember … listen to your body. If you train when you shouldn’t, you’re going to move backward.”

2. Ask yourself, are your goals too unwieldy?

“People can’t be motivated all day long about everything. You can only rely on it for about four to six hours a day,” says Australian Psychological Society chief executive Zena Burgess.

“That’s why we all veg out at the end of the day.”

That’s why habit formation is key.

People who are good at achieving their goals and setting new habits are good at shifting from needing extrinsic motivation, to a place where they don’t even need intrinsic motivation – it just becomes a habit.

Once it becomes a habit, they don’t waste the energy trying to decide whether it’s worth doing it or not. They just do it.

The thing is, this can take a long time. Conventional wisdom is that it takes six weeks to form a new habit but for some people, it’s months and months, Burgess says.

“When you’re starting a new regime, work out your extrinsic motivation,” she says. “After a while, the intrinsic motivation will kick in because you’re feeling so good, but when you’re starting something new, you need to focus on the extrinsic reason.”

She adds that motivation doesn’t always come before the act. It can come while you’re out for your run, for example, or even after doing it.

Setting reasonable goals is also crucial.

Meantime, find ways to keep yourself engaged. For a runner, perhaps it’s taking different running routes, visualising the big day, and setting small, achievable milestones to hit along the way.

That might be being able to run for 30 minutes without stopping, hitting a 7 kilometre goal, a 10 kilometre, and so on. Or it could be setting a resolution to run three times a week, or just hit a certain number of kilometres.

3. Ask yourself: What can I do to enjoy the process?

Another way to look at it is to avoid being overly prescriptive about your goals, says sports psychologist Richard Keegan of the University of Canberra.

Keegan refers to work done by Southern Cross University psychology professor Christian Swann, who found that for some people, setting open-ended, curiosity-based goals are more effective. That is, “Let’s go and find out how far I can run. Let’s find out just how good I can be,” he says.

“We are terrible at setting goals for ourselves, especially in exercise, and we tend to set up ones that end up being quite demotivating … because you feel like you’re failing really quickly,” Keegan says.

Instead, by tying the goal to curiosity, there’s more flexibility in what success looks like, and you’re less likely to feel like you’re failing if you have an off week. Then, you can add in an overlay of pleasure to encourage you to get out the door.

This is important because, realistically, in 2024 there’s little hard-wired biological imperative to go out for that 5 kilometre run.

Every single action someone does is driven by a bid to meet some sort of need, Keegan says.

“What you won’t hear in modern life is this crushing need to go and expend energy chasing or gathering food because that’s much more easily achieved in modern society,” he says.

So for some people, the trick is in making the process as fun as possible.

 

In his own work, he asks sports teams to look at “microscopic” goals, and consider what they want to get out of the next half an hour, and how they’d like to feel at the end of the day’s training.

He says it’s easy to use a cross diagram to study it. One axis tracks positive to negative feelings, and the other tracks high to low energy.

“During the course of exercise, we tend to lose energy, so that’s likely to dip, but it’s only when we exercise to exhaustion that it can tip over into an unpleasant experience,” he says.

“You can try to manage the experience so that you might get tired, but you’re going to try to stay in the positive quadrants of the diagram.

“You almost have to curate both the experience and curate what you’re internalising, to get to a sustainable and healthy pattern.

“It’s about managing what’s going into that history file. For me, that’s the secret to it.”