New Year, New Habits: Building a Sustainable Routine for a Better You
As we’re rounding out December, we are rapidly approaching 2025. New Year’s Day can elicit a range of reactions from people. For many, the prospect of a new year is exciting - it’s a fresh start, the opportunity to leave negative experiences behind in the waning year. To others, an approaching new year can feel intimidating, as they may feel pressure to set resolutions, but have failed them in the past, and haven’t been able to build self-trust back up. Still others are apathetic, simply using the New Year as an opportunity to celebrate, then returning to their same old routine.
While acknowledging that people’s feelings about setting New Year’s resolutions vary, the purpose of this blog is to communicate the value in using the new year as a period of macro reflection and goal setting when many others are doing the same. There are lots of different kinds of resolutions, but the type of resolution we want to focus on in this blog is building healthy habits (vs. one-time resolutions - e.g., “I want to publish a book”, or “I want to visit a new country”). This blog will focus on the value of thinking intentionally about habits as a New Year’s resolution, will reflect on why routines can be valuable, and will offer some suggestions on some healthy habits we see as being especially important.
It’s helpful to think of New Year’s Day as a fresh start, an opportunity to reflect on your current habits and how you might want to modify them in the upcoming year. It’s too easy to become short-sighted and to focus on the next thing that needs to be done, losing sight of the overall picture of what we want our lives to be. That’s where building healthy habits becomes really valuable. Habits allow us to be short-sighted in focusing on the daily to-dos, while still making progress on a big-picture goal. For example, if your big-picture goal is to improve your physical health over the course of the year, choosing to go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday will allow you to fall into a routine and focus on the day-to-day without needing to constantly remind yourself of the big-picture goal. For many, building a sustainable routine improves progress toward a big-picture goal by making the smaller steps needed to achieve that goal frictionless. Remember that your lifestyle will become an amalgamation of all your small, day-to-day choices.
Your lifestyle will become an amalgamation of all your small, day-to-day choices.
To get going, here are some examples of healthy habits you might consider pursuing:
Focus on circadian health - it is so easy to prioritize circadian health as interventions tend to be cost-effective and easy to implement, yet your circadian health impacts every aspect of your wellbeing, from physical to mental. For more detailed inspiration, check out our deep dive or Finding Frequency episode 13 on circadian health.
Prioritize spending more time in nature. There is an abundance of research that points to a connection with nature having a healing effect (resource 1, resource 2). This could look like taking a walk outside, visiting local parks, or even going on camping trips.
Focus on building resilience through physically strenuous activities such as cold plunging, sauna bathing, or hitting the gym.
Since we’re entering the year 2025, think about setting goals in sets of 25. For example, you might choose to read 25 books in 2025, visit 25 parks, or spend 25 minutes per week meditating.
While setting resolutions to build healthy habits is an overall positive thing, it’s possible to set resolutions at an unrealistic level of strictness, with the attitude of, “I’ll change my life overnight.” Changing your lifestyle isn’t impossible, and in many cases it’s a good thing to reach for, but without the expectation that it will take longer than you want it to, it’s likely you’ll get discouraged and drop off. To counteract this, make sure you’re setting realistic goals, or even flexible ones, like intentions. An intention can sound like, “I want to visit more state parks this upcoming year” or “I want to do more meditating this year.” Setting intentions can help you begin to create a habit, which allows you to determine a realistic cadence to strive toward. Take care that you’re not creating a goal that’s unsustainable in the long-term. Rather, the key is to create realistic, sustainable habits that consistently move the needle towards your end goal.
