With the start of January, many of us make plans to improve our lives. Unfortunately, we frequently don’t have the right strategy to make them stick. How to keep your New Year’s resolutions and stay motivated throughout 2025? Keep reading to make this year special and abundant with positive changes.

What Are the Popular New Year’s Resolutions?

As the New Year approaches, many people make plans to improve their lives. Some of the most popular resolution ideas include:

  • eating healthier,
  • exercising regularly,
  • spending more time with your family,
  • saving money,
  • learning a new skill or taking up a new hobby,
  • getting organized,
  • quitting smoking or drinking less alcohol,
  • traveling more.

As good as it may sound in theory, in practice, we often lack the willpower to keep these resolutions. So, how can we keep our New Year’s resolutions without giving up? Follow the tips below.

How to Stick to Your New Year’s Resolutions?

Our 12 tips

New Year is a great opportunity to change our lives for the better and implement healthy habits. However, in order to stick to the resolutions, we need not only good willpower and motivation but also the right strategy. What should you focus on to succeed in 2025?

    1. Set SMART goals—your resolutions should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This will help you stay on track and measure your progress.
    2. Get organized – make a plan of action and break down each resolution into smaller milestones. This will help you slowly move forward and keep your motivation high.
    3. Measure progress. Tracking progress is a great way to stay motivated and reach the goal. Use a calendar and daily checklists, or write in a journal. This will make you feel more accountable and allow you to appreciate and acknowledge your successes.
    4. Use social maps like YouMap—it’s a great tool to search for inspiration and join like-minded communities. With its use, you can share your successes and failures with a friend, family member, or group who will support and encourage you. It can be very helpful to have a support system and stay accountable.
    5. Create the right environment—how to keep your New Year’s resolutions truly effective? Surround yourself with reminders and triggers that will help you stick to the resolutions. Put an inspiring quote on your wall, and download apps that will remind you of your goals. You can also tell others about your plans. Being aware that they’ll know about your potential failures may motivate you to try harder. Plus, it might help you stick to the resolutions if you’re close to failing, for instance, by preventing you from taking a smoke when you decide to quit!
    6. Reward yourself—celebrating small successes is a great way to stay motivated and keep going. Give yourself a reward for a job well done, but make sure it doesn’t interfere with your goals.
    7. Be flexible—life is unpredictable and sometimes plans don’t go as expected. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you make a mistake or experience a setback. The important thing is to keep going and don’t give up. Even if you fail, just try once again. After all, we’re only humans—sometimes we make mistakes.
    8. Be kind to yourself—don’t be too hard on yourself, and remind yourself that you are capable of achieving your goals. Take breaks and don’t forget to relax. Even if you fail today, you can start again tomorrow, and you shouldn’t punish yourself too much.
    9. Be patient. If you plan to save up but encounter unexpected expenses, don’t give up or feel frustrated. After all, you want to complete your resolution by the end of 2025, so if you haven’t made any progress until, for instance, May, this doesn’t mean you won’t achieve it.
    10. Stop with the “all or nothing” approach—imagine your resolution was to quit smoking, but you didn’t make it—you had a cigarette just now. With the “all or nothing” approach, this means a failure. But, if you start smoking less in the end, that’s still a success—not a complete one, but you’ve managed to partially complete your goal. Take these small wins, as they help you achieve your resolution gradually. Plus, you can learn from your mistakes and do better in the future!
    11. Avoid having too much on your plate—you have limited energy, and you can’t do anything about it. If you take up several resolutions, it will be much more difficult for you to stick to them. So, instead of making 5-7 goals, focus on 1-3 most important ones—it’ll make things much easier!
    12. Visualize success—how to stay motivated to stick to your New Year’s resolutions? Imagine yourself achieving the goal. This will give you an idea of what success looks like and will help you stay motivated.

Creating a New Year’s Resolution Action Plan

As we mentioned in our tips, you need a good plan to keep your New Year’s resolutions. How should you form it, and what points should you include?

Set a Specific Goal

Don’t say, “I want to save money.” Instead, say, “I want to save $2000.” Be specific with your goal, as it will enable you to measure your progress and view it realistically.

Break Your Goal Down into Milestones

Let’s get back to the previous example. If you want to save $2000 in 2025, break this goal down, for instance:

  • $500 by the end of March,
  • $1000 by the end of June,
  • $1500 by the end of September
  • $2000 by the end of the year.

Again, this will be crucial for measuring your progress and keeping you motivated. After all, how can you stick to your New Year’s Resolution if you don’t know whether you’re on track with it?

Identify the Obstacles and Plan Against Them

Still keeping to our example, if you know you pay your car insurance once a year, in June, you should adjust your goal accordingly—make the milestone smaller for that particular period. You will need to overcome obstacles, but identifying them and adjusting your goal will help you avoid being demotivated when something happens.

Setting Your New Year’s Resolutions with YouMap

Our social mapping app, YouMap, is a great tool for connecting with fellow enthusiasts, planning your journeys, or even recording your adventures. However, it can also help you stick to your New Year’s resolutions. How?

  • You can share your resolutions with your friends, family, and fellow hobbyists and tell them about your progress. This will add extra pressure and motivation to complete your goal.
  • You can create a New Year’s resolution map, where you will record your progress and struggles. For instance, imagine you want to quit smoking—you can point out the location where you felt the urge to buy cigarettes along with the timestamp, the reason why this happened, etc. Then, with time, this map will show you whether you’ve made progress—if these urges started occurring less frequently, you’re on the right track!

YouMap is completely free, so there’s nothing stopping you from trying it out and seeing whether it’ll help you keep your New Year’s resolutions!

The takeaway

How to keep your New Year’s resolutions? Fresh plans and resolutions are a great way to start the year off on the right foot, but if you don’t take the necessary steps to stick to them, they’re likely to fail. Hopefully, the tips in this article will help you make progress and succeed in 2025.

Need more inspiration and like-minded people? Download YouMap and join communities of enthusiasts of New Year’s resolutions.