How to Achieve Your New Year Health Goals + Free Habit Tracker

New Year, New Me. That is, until September rolls around and you realise that your ambitious intentions got lost somewhere along the way.

What went wrong and how can we keep it from happening in 2024? I believe the answer lies in understanding habit formation. So, let’s dive into the science and use this to give us a step-by-step guide to reaching our goals.

Habits: what are they & how are they formed?

The success of many of our health goals rely on repeated performance. That is, one nutritious meal won’t achieve the same benefits as regular nutritious meals. Therefore in most cases behaviour change must be viewed as a long-term process. However, whilst many of us possess the capability and motivation to initiate behaviour change, we fail to maintain it over time. Research suggests several possible reasons for this, including changes in motivation.

This is where habit formation comes in. The automatic nature of habits can “lock in” these new behaviours, allowing us to maintain them over time despite changes in motivation.

In psychology research, habits are defined as “actions that are triggered automatically in response to contextual cues that have been associated with their performance”. To form a habit, you simple repeat an action consistently in the same context, or in other words, with the same ‘contextual cues’ (e.g. an event or time of day). During which you go from using conscious deliberative motivational processes to using automatic processes. This is where the action becomes second nature and you’ve now formed a new habit. Yay!

To help us understand this process, let’s look at the three phases of habit formation:

Initiation Phase: where we select the new behaviour and the context it will be performed in. Context basically sets the scene, it shows where in your day-to-day life the behaviour will fit in, such as ‘after breakfast’.

Learning Phase: the behaviour is repeated in the chosen context to strengthen the context-behaviour association. This is where automaticity develops and the behaviour starts to become second nature!

Stability Phase: The habit has formed and can be maintained over time with minimal effort.

Habits: step-by-step guide

Step 1: Decide on a goal

Firstly, we need a clear goal to work towards. What is something that you want to achieve for your health and why?

I encourage you to choose something to add to your life, rather than something you want to remove. For example, choosing a goal like ‘eat more vegetables’, rather than ‘stop eating takeout’. Not only does it sound more pleasant, but the automaticity of habits means that breaking existing habits requires different strategies than forming new habits.

When exploring your ‘why’, look to see if it’s coming from a source of internal or extrinsic motivation. Internal motivation refers to choosing a behaviour because you really want to, whereas external motivations refer to wanting to do something because someone else wants you to. Research shows that intrinsic motivation can aid habit formation and provide a deeper sense of satisfaction.

Step 2: Choose a simple daily action that will help you reach your goal

They key is to start small, with a simple and manageable daily action. This is because simpler actions become habitual more quickly. And when we form a healthy habit, no matter how small, we get an increase in self-confidence and in turn we’re more likely to work towards other healthy habits.

It’s also important to remember that even small changes can benefit our health. Whilst you may want to overhaul your lifestyle within a week, this approach often falls flat. And let’s be honest, failure is discouraging and can even prevent us from trying again. Consistent small changes will help us get to where we need to be in the long-run. Ever heard of the story about the tortoise and the hare? Slow and steady wins the race, my friends.

Step 3: Plan when and where you will do your chosen action.

This is where the ‘context’ comes in and shows us when and where our small daily action fits into our life. Here’s some example to help us set the scene:

After lunch at home, I will …

During my work lunch break, I will …

When I get home at 5pm, I will …

Why is this important? Research shows that repeating a simple action in a consistent context leads to the action being activated upon exposure to those contextual cues. The initiation of the action is ‘transferred’ to these cues, rather than just relying on conscious attention or motivation.

Tip: once you have a time and place locked in, find ways to make these cues even clearer. For example, if you’re action is to go for a walk around the neighbourhood as soon as you wake up, you could place your activewear next to your bed. If your action is to eat a piece of fruit after breakfast, then you could place a fruit bowl on your dining table.

Step 4: Do the action, until you reach automaticity

Do this action until you reach a stage where it becomes automatic. Whilst popular belief is that it takes 30 days to form a habit, the research shows that it’s actually around 10 weeks. This means that the new action will require conscious effort for the first 2-3 months, but if you power through it will become a habit and require very little effort to initiate from then on.

To help you keep accountability for the first 10 weeks I’ve created a free habit tracker. Simply determine what action you want to turn into a habit and tick off each day as you complete it.

You can then repeat this formula throughout the year and come December, you’ve got yourself several new healthy habits to bring into the next year.

I hope this has given you some insight into habit formation and helps you achieve your 2024 health goals this year. Remember, consistent small changes can lead to big transformations in the long run 🙂

Wishing you all a wonderful 2024!