New Year’s resolutions

Eight New Year’s resolution ideas are in the table below, with the hours each one adds up to in a year.

Many resolutions say what you want in the end: get fit, save money, be happier. At the end of a day, you cannot tell whether you “got fit”. Each idea in the table says what to do and for how long, so every night you know whether you did it.

To write your own, do the same. “Get fit” becomes “walk for thirty minutes every day.”

The most common New Year’s resolution in the United States is to exercise more: 25% of adults chose it for 2026 in a poll by YouGov, a polling company (YouGov’s report on the poll).

Four resolutions tied at 15%, so the table has eleven rows, not ten.

YouGov asked adult U.S. citizens in December 2025, and each percentage is a share of everyone asked. We reworded row seven; the other rows are the poll’s own words, from its full results.

You keep a New Year’s resolution by making it small, clear and easy to check. Four steps help.

Pick one, and put a time in it.

Write what you will do and for how long, like “read for twenty minutes every day.”

Write it as something you start.

If you want to stop something, write what you will do in its place. “Stop looking at my phone in bed” becomes “read in bed for twenty minutes.”

In a study in Sweden, people made New Year’s resolutions and reported on them for a year. Of the people who resolved to start something, 59% said after a year that they had succeeded. Of the people who resolved to stop or avoid something, 47% said so (Oscarsson and colleagues, 2020). The people judged their own success.

Tell one person.

Pick a friend, a partner or someone in your family. Ask them to ask you about it once a month.

The same study had three groups. One got no support. In the second, each person named someone who would support them and was asked about their progress every month, and that group rated its success a little higher. A third group got still more help and advice, and rated its success lowest. So a little support seemed to help, and more did not help more.

Mark each day, and keep going after a missed day.

A tick on a calendar is enough. In a review of many experiments, people who were asked to keep checking their progress got closer to their goal than people who were not. Checking helped more when people wrote their progress down, and when someone else could see it (Harkin and colleagues, 2016).

You will miss some days. In one study, people practiced one new habit every day, and missing a single day made no real difference to how the habit formed (Lally and colleagues, 2010). For the person in the middle of that group, the habit took 66 days to feel automatic. That is longer than January, so keep going in February.

Other pages go further: how a habit forms, and self-discipline.

Every number on this page links to one of the sources below. We read each one for this page.

1. YouGov (read October 13, 2026). What are Americans’ New Year’s resolutions for 2026?
2. YouGov (read October 13, 2026). YouGov Survey: New Years Resolutions. Full results, December 9 to 11, 2025.
3. Oscarsson, M., Carlbring, P., Andersson, G. and Rozental, A. (2020). A large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals. PLOS ONE, 15(12), e0234097.
4. Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y. and Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198 to 229.
5. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. and Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998 to 1009.