Making 2025 Your Best Year

Eleven infallible strategies to transform New Year resolutions into habits

- ANIL BHATNAGAR

As we welcome 2025, many of you might like to develop New Year resolutions such as walking 10,000 steps, doing yoga, reducing screen time, reading books daily, and quitting smoking, meat, dairy or alcohol. However, writing these resolutions is easier; implementing them is what most people find daunting.

Changing any habit requires creating an alignment between the rider (the conscious intention), the elephant (the unconscious mind or the implementor), and the path (the environmental cues that prime the elephant to implement).

Here are 11 power-packed strategies based on neuroscience to create this alignment and transform your resolutions into habits:

1. Speak to your elephant in its language, not yours. Introduce your intention to your elephant in an "If/When...Then," language it can understand. For example, "When I have brushed my teeth...then, I go out and start my daily yoga exercises" or "If I find myself thinking something negative, I start observing my breath."

2. Let the trucks push the cars. "Trucks" are the robust habits you never miss (e.g., brushing your teeth in the morning), and "cars" are the intentions or weak habits whose engines have gone kaput and cannot run independently.

"Cars" must be pushed by the "trucks". So, find a "truck"-a daily habitual activity you never miss and refuse to do it unless you have done your "car." The itch to do the "truck," because it is a strong habit, will compel you to do the "car" so that you can do the "truck" you are itching for.