As we quickly approach a new year, many people are taking the time to reevaluate their life. It’s a common time for us to come up with new goals that we wish to achieve to in the New Year. Many of us use this time of the year as a reason to completely makeover our life and become the person we have been wanting to. The New Year, new me mentality. However, we find that we tend to fail year after year. We set off on this new life for a few months or so, only to go back to our own ways shortly after. Here are some reasons you are setting yourself up for failure and how to correct that to achieve your goals this year.

Unrealistic Expectations

Most of us go about our goals with an entire U-turn of our life; jumping head first into these changes, without much of a thought. The problem with this is humans are resistant to change. Our brains are wired to keep doing the things we were doing over and over again. If we don’t take time to ease ourself into these huge changes it becomes difficult.

In order to create a change, we must first create new habits. To do this takes time, repeating the new action over and over again until it starts to be something your brain knows and wants to do. For example if you want to change your eating habits, a crash diet isn’t going to cut it. The best course of action is changing your diet long term. You can eat bad stuff; you just have to eat it less. If most of the days in the week you are eating healthy, a junk day isn’t going to be an issue. If you are eating junk 6 days out of the week, this is where the issue comes in. Moderation is key.

Some ways to ease yourself into this is adding more fruits and veggies to your diet. Increase your water intake over the next few weeks, while cutting out soda and juice. Eating clean protein with every meal is going to help as well. As time goes on you will find that these things get easier to add, while taking out the bad stuff.

You Burned Yourself Out

The best way to fail a New Year’s resolution is by going too hard, too fast. By the end of the first month you just want to take a little rest, but end up falling back into your old habits. Once that happens it’s hard to start back up and you end up putting it off for a whole year again.

Say you want to go to start going to the gym. You don’t want to start going to the gym every day for a week and burn yourself out. By the time the next week comes around you are going to be burned out. Ease yourself into a going every other day or even just on the weekends. Start off slow. Get your body used to moving, and then you can start to increase the amount of exercise you do a week. Once it becomes a habit, going to the gym 5 days a week should be easy

You Doubt Yourself

After setting out on your goals you start to think that it’s too hard. You don’t give yourself enough time for a change to actually show. At this time you start thinking it impossible and too hard to accomplish. Failing back into old habits is easier.

Everyone has doubts from time to time. When you rush into change and don’t see results right away, it can have an effect on your drive. And once doubt enters your mind it can take away all that motivation you had at the beginning. While you can’t always control the doubt, you can push through it.

Be realistic when setting your goals. Know what to expect and find a way to push through the doubts. Don’t let them rule your mind. Motivation is going to help you start, but you need persistence to keep going.

New Year’s is a great time to take a look at the things you want to change. It’s like opening a new chapter with new possibilities. But change takes time and the best way to go about it, is to ease yourself into these changes. You don’t want to jump head first into your new goals. That is only setting you up for failure. Give yourself time to create new habits and you will finally see your New Year’s resolutions come to fruition.