Many of us make new year’s resolutions each January but when we look back at our list, we haven’t stuck to most of them! Why is that and how can mindfulness help you achieve more of these resolutions?

What’s on your new year’s resolution list? If it’s anything like my list, it’s got things like: exercise more, meditate more, go to bed earlier, eat less sugar, learn to play the guitar and so on…

After a bit of a holiday, we start the year feeling fired up to make all these changes and fix up our life a bit! Yeah, we can do it!

But in reality most of it doesn’t happen and next year’s list might look similar to this year’s. Why is that?

Habits aren’t easy to change

The fact is that habits are not easy to start or to stop. Research shows that we humans only have a limited amount of willpower available to us each day. It can take up to 2 months of consistent effort to create a habit to the point where we don’t need willpower to get ourselves to do it – it’s become automatic.

If we choose too many daily habit changes to make at once, we will exhaust our day’s supply of will power and not succeed with any of them. So it’s best to focus on making just one new habit at a time.

Just pick one of your habit-changing New Year’s resolutions to start! When you have mastered that, then move on to the next on the list.

Overcoming Resistance to Creating a New Habit

So how can you most effectively make the changes you want? How can you exercise more, or meditate more, or eat less sugar or whatever it is you choose?

First, read this post about how to make a habit change (using meditation as the example). It gives you the process you can use to form a new habit.

But I want to add one more mindfulness skill to your toolkit for forming a habit. It’s called Mindfulness of Resistance.

Basically, whenever we try to do a new habit regularly, we usually start off well the first few days – we are fired up and focused on the benefits of the change. It seems easy enough to head to the gym or sit down and meditate. But then after a week or so resistance creeps in. We feel tired and can’t be bothered; we’ve forgotten why we wanted to exercise or meditate more; or we’ve moved onto something more entertaining already (maybe learning the guitar?!).

So the next time this happens (ie you’re right at that decision moment of ‘will I go to the gym or not?’ or ‘will I meditate or not?’) just STOP and ride the wave of resistance. The wave feels something like this: a tension in your body as your thoughts battle in your head (gym vs lie on the couch watching TV; meditate vs just go to bed). Feelings of irritation or frustration might be there, and maybe tiredness and craving for comfort (which can be satisfied by TV, eating, looking at Facebook etc).

This is essentially you running away from discomfort. Doing the new habit is uncomfortable because your mind tells you a story that going to the gym/meditating is hard, it’s not fun, it takes too much effort. (When you finally get to the gym or sit down to meditate it will feel good, both the achievement of it and the act itself, but for now your mind is just seeing discomfort.)

So the trick is to ride the wave of resistance and feel the icky feelings – of the effort and challenge your mind is dramatising, and of the tension in your body and mind about it all! Feel those feelings in your body and stop thinking about it for a moment. Just feel the sensations in the body.

Then grasp the energy in that feeling in the body and without thinking just move towards the gym or towards the cushion to meditate. Don’t think about it. Just feel what is the best thing to do – your body will tell you.