5 strategies to help your New Year’s resolution survive “Quitter’s Day”

It’s January 3. The gyms are suddenly crowded; the freshly bought journals are pristine; and suddenly, everyone you know is trying to learn Italian like they’re about to become a deep-cover spy in Tuscany. It’s the new year, new you, new everything.

Or, at least, it is for a few days. January 9, the second Friday of the month this year, is colloquially known as “Quitter’s Day,” because it’s the date nearly half of all people abandon their New Year’s resolutions.

It’s enough to make you wonder why we bother in the first place. But the New Year is one of the few moments when our culture collectively agrees that it’s normal to try to change. Behavioral scientists even have a name for it: the “fresh start effect,” the idea that temporal landmarks — a new year, a birthday, a Monday — can make people feel like they’re opening a new chapter, which can translate into change.

The opportunity to change — whether it’s a change of habits, change of skills, or change of communities, or even far bigger changes like changing careers or religion — is really a modern privilege. Even today, not everyone has that freedom, and no one has it equally, but for a huge slice of the people reading this story, our range of plausible life trajectories is far wider than it was for the vast bulk of human history, when life paths were far more limited and largely fixed at birth.

So, this New Year’s, let’s ignore the cynics and embrace the freedom to change. To help you along, I’ve gathered five evidence-based tactics designed to help your resolutions survive contact with real life and to help you take advantage of your historically unusual ability to chart your own life.

Tip 1: Lower those standards (and get specific)

Why do most resolutions fail? Because they’re vibes, not actual behavior. “Get in shape.” “Be healthier.” “Write more.” Those aren’t actions; they’re umbrella identities with disputed borders, which means every day trying to live up to them in all their vague glory becomes an enervating negotiation. How much “more” counts as “writing more”? Exactly what shape are you trying to get into, and how many edges can it have?

So, instead, make the goal so small — but so specific — that it can’t be argued. Ten minutes of meditation, two pages of journaling, one lap around the park, one email to that friend you haven’t seen in too long. The aim here is not to transform overnight; it’s to get you repeating a behavior.

Here’s a quick test: If you can’t describe your habit in one sentence that includes the all-important words when and where, it’s not ready yet. If this feels like lowering your standards, that’s okay. What you’re trying to do is lower the threshold for action, so you can build up from a solid foundation.

Tip 2: Attach the habit to a consistent cue — not your mood

A resolution powered by motivation is basically a weather-dependent infrastructure plan. Sometimes that’s literal (“it’s too cold to get that run in”) and sometimes it’s psychological (“I’m too down to get that run in”). If you’re waiting to feel motivated, you’re betting your habit on the one ingredient you control the least — whereas you can almost always increase “ability” by shrinking the task (see tip No. 1), and you can engineer the “prompt” by tying it to a stable cue.

After I [existing routine], I will [tiny habit].

Pick an anchor that’s mechanical and reliable — coffee brewing, shower ending, laptop opening — not something fuzzy like “after dinner,” which changes shape depending on how chaotic your day is. The key is to contextualize your habits.

Tip 3: Write 2 “if-then” plans for the messiest parts of your week

What’s the biggest difference between disciplined and undisciplined people? Undisciplined people count on discipline; disciplined people count on plans.

What psychologists call implementation intentions — “If X happens, then I will do Y” — can help reinforce habits because they essentially act as pre-decisions. Instead of relying on non-renewable willpower (see tip No. 2), you decide in advance what you’ll do when a reliable cue appears — or just as important, if a reliable problem pops up.

Write two if-then plans in advance:

The point here is to limit the pressure you’re putting on your future self — who, after all, is the poor guy who has to fulfill all these resolutions — by planning ahead for what could go wrong.

Tip 4: Track 1 tiny metric and recruit 1 person

A goal that lives only in your head is easy to renegotiate at 11:47 pm. Two simple ways to resist that temptation are feedback and accountability.

Self-monitoring shows up again and again as a core component of successful behavior change programs, with research demonstrating that more frequent tracking is consistently associated with better outcomes. This does not mean you have to become a quantified-self maximalist, though admittedly, I’m writing as someone who gets three separate sleep scores each night. But you do need a way to make the desired behavior visible.

Pick one metric you can record in under 30 seconds:

But, the real secret sauce of accountability is when you add in additional eyes. So enlist a witness:

“Hey — I’m doing X for January. Can I text you a ✅ when I do it? No need to respond.” (Just don’t send this text at 11:47 pm.)

This is the modern, low-touch version of a very old technology to encourage good habits: regular meetings and structured belonging.

Tip 5: For the big swing, prototype the change before you leap

Let’s end by going to the other side of the resolution spectrum: the big stuff — new career direction, a move to a different city, a spiritual shift. The common mistake is treating such massive changes as a binary, irreversible decision, which can cause you to freeze under the uncertainty.

Instead of thinking you have no choice but to stay or go, run a pilot — a time-boxed, reversible experiment that lets you try the change at a smaller scale before you reorganize your whole life around it. The point isn’t to “prove” you’ll succeed; it’s to collect real information. What does this path actually feel like on a Tuesday? What obstacles show up? Do you get energy from it, or do you mostly dread it? Does it create momentum, or does it drain you?

Break it into four parts:

The point of all this is to make change less moralistic and more mechanical. You design a better default, then practice it until it feels like you.

If you’re lucky enough to have some real freedom — the ability to choose new habits, new skills, maybe even a new path — that is itself a kind of progress worth recognizing. This New Year can just be the one where you cash in that psychological coupon gifted by many centuries of progress and build the kind of change that lasts through Quitter’s Day and well beyond.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!