Why New Years Resolutions Fail (and What to Do Instead)

This podcast is a guide to making any kind of resolution towards long term behaviour change. It includes a step by step guide to implementing a new behaviour including choosing an area to work on, framing your resolution appropriately, setting an intention, making a plan, measuring your results, leveraging positive and negative emotions to your advantage, anticipating identity level change, and much more.

Dr. Alex Curmi is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

If you would like to work with Alex for a set for coaching sessions you can email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com and put "New Year's Resolution" in the subject line.

If you would like to enquire about an online psychotherapy appointment with Dr. Alex, you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com and put "Therapy Enquiry" in the subject line. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. It's that time of year again. It's the new year. And that's the time when whether you want to or not, people are often thinking about what are the things they might want to accomplish in the new year in 2025. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. 

This is going to be an updated version of a podcast we released back in January, 2022. And that one was called A New Year's Resolution That Works A Guide To Long Term Behavior Change. So I'm updating and re recording that podcast. We're going to go through every step of how to change your behavior in some sort of meaningful way, beginning with choosing the resolution, how to frame the resolution correctly, and I'll talk about what that means, how to make a plan, how to measure your results, different ways you can maximize the effectiveness of your plans, by, for example, [00:01:00] leveraging positive and negative emotions, some more nuanced points about the difficulties people have with resolutions, like identity level difficulties or deeper psychological difficulties. 

We're going to be using a lot of principles from behavioral psychology, but of course the difficulty with resolutions isn't just about more superficial behaviors. But sometimes difficulties with resolutions can be due to deeper problems, such as how our sense of ego or our identity may be contributing to our problem. 

And we'll talk a little bit about that too. So if there is some problem you've been facing again and again in your life, or there's something that you really want, something that you think would really add to your life. and you haven't been able to get it thus far and you're serious about changing something in order to get that thing, this is going to be a step by step plan. 

as to how to achieve that. Of course, you could do this at any time of year. It doesn't have to be New Year. I suppose the kind of [00:02:00] caricature of a New Year's resolution is that something's bothering you and you think about it on a very surface level, like you smoke a pack a day of cigarettes and you decide to stop smoking and you give it a go from 2nd January or whatever and you actually don't make a plan at all. 

You don't think about how you measure your progress. Eventually, you rely on willpower alone, and eventually you have a cigarette, say you have a cigarette on January 15th, and you've decided because you had a cigarette. Now, you've absolutely failed and since you've failed and you are a failure, then you might as well just go back to smoking a pack of cigarettes like you did before. 

And that's how it goes for a lot of people. So we're going to be doing the opposite of that, as we'll see. The overriding theme of this podcast is long term change versus short term change. So I want you to keep that in mind. Really, any change in life that's worth pursuing is going to be a long term change by definition, because short [00:03:00] term change is going to have a very minimal net effect on your life. 

It's in the long term that any changes we make are more pronounced. more amplified and therefore significantly affect the quality of your life. Crash dieting for a month to look good for one particular holiday or a wedding that's coming up, it's going to have a minimal effect on the quality of your life ultimately. 

Whereas slowly, consistently working in healthier habits so that you can have an overall healthier diet and lose weight slowly over time, that's going to improve your quality of life a lot more. You're going to have a lot more energy. more mobility, you're going to look and feel better and so on. But of course, long term is so much harder to achieve. 

And that's where most people fail. So that's the general idea of this episode. And you can apply these steps to really any area of your life you want to work on, whether it's health, building wealth, relationships, your career, and so on. If you happen to have a particular problem [00:04:00] and you would like to work with me one on one to address it, I will give you some more information on how you can do that at the end of this podcast. 

Okay, so firstly, we're going to talk about picking a resolution. You want to choose roughly the area of your life you want to work on and approach. So that might be your health, your weight, some habits like smoking, alcohol, drugs, might be something to do with a relationship, whether it's learning how to have healthy conflict in a relationship. 

Or actually the opposite, learning how to be more empathic in a relationship. It might be a hobby that you want to start, some passion you've always wanted to pursue, something to do with your career, how to build wealth. Generally speaking, you want to choose something that's actually bothering you, that moves you emotionally, whether it's something that caused you a lot of negative emotion, or you think something that, if you brought it into your life, it'll give you a lot of positive emotion. 

Something where you feel, gosh, my [00:05:00] life would be so much better if I could do this, or if I wasn't doing that. So I suppose the first part of this process is is where you might do some real soul searching and think, what kind of change would have the most effect? Because in the different areas of your life, there'll be some areas where you're quite well developed. 

And some areas where you're maybe not developed at all, and in the areas where you're not developed at all, that's going to be where the least action gives you the most results, where maybe changing that 20%, that 20 percent improvement might give you 80 percent of the results that you want. Whereas if you're thinking about an area where you're already quite highly developed, You might be at that point where it's more about tweaks and nuances, and you should know that the results of those tweaks and nuances might be not quite as effective as those big changes you make when you're just starting out in something new. 

You might come up with a few [00:06:00] resolutions, one where you're at that more fundamental level where it's really about making a big change, and you might make a couple of resolutions where it's more about those little tweaks making those little adjustments. If you already, for example, have a reasonably good diet, then it's more going to be about little tweaks and changes. 

But if you're smoking a pack a day of cigarettes and you want to improve your health, that's an area where you can make a huge improvement quite quickly. One thing to be aware of is what's called the zone of proximal development in psychology. And this will apply to whatever you do, whatever you're working on. 

And the general idea of the zone of proximal development is that you want to identify that sweet spot of challenge where you're definitely putting yourself out of your comfort zone. But you're not doing it so much that you overwhelm yourself. So for example, if you don't exercise at all, and you want to start exercising, it would probably be foolish to start a plan [00:07:00] where your intention is to go to the gym for six hours a week, but rather you'd want to construct a plan that puts you in that zone of proximal development in that sweet spot. 

So what's a little bit uncomfortable, but not overwhelming that might be going to the gym for half an hour, three times a week. Okay. or might be going for an hour walk four times a week and so on. Too little and you remain in the comfort zone. Too much and the plan becomes unfeasible and unlikely to be executed. 

Secondly, we're going to talk about setting the intention. By this I mean you want to think about framing your resolution appropriately. What I mean is, it's easy to come up with a resolution kind of shooting from the hip. For example, you might be uncomfortable with the amount of alcohol you're drinking and you might instinctively make the resolution to just stop drinking alcohol entirely, which can be a good thing of course, but on deeper reflection, or perhaps talking to someone, you might realize, That it's not so much that you depend on alcohol all the [00:08:00] time. 

But maybe you depend on alcohol in particular situations. Maybe there are some situations where you can drink moderately to a level you're comfortable with, and some situations where you drink far too much. And then maybe on deeper analysis, you might find that in social situations, you get quite anxious and it's your response to that anxiety to make you drink alcohol too much. 

And so you can see how a resolution to just stop drinking alcohol would be a bit inappropriate. because it wouldn't address some of the fundamental reasons why you're engaging in the habit in the first place. It's actually less about alcohol than you thought and more about social anxiety. And that might be indeed the best target for your efforts and will as a byproduct result in you drinking less alcohol. 

And I picked alcohol and social anxiety because incidentally I think this is extremely common in our society. So after you've picked the area you want to work on, you want to think a little bit more deeply about the issue, about the problem, and [00:09:00] see if there are any root causes you can identify. And again, talking to someone about it might help, or journaling about it might help. 

Instead of, I want to stop drinking entirely, the resolution might be, I want to change my relationship with alcohol, such that I don't use it to self medicate anxiety, and I want to become less socially anxious. And you can see, using this example, why it's so important to frame it correctly, because two different ways of framing the problem call for two very different plans of action. 

After you frame the resolution appropriately, you then want to make a plan. And throughout this whole resolution process, what I can't emphasize enough is the importance of writing things down. The main two reasons to write things down is that it's going to help you clarify your thinking, and making your thinking a lot less nebulous and also decrease your anxiety about it all. 

It's also inherently motivating because after you've written things [00:10:00] down you already feel like your plan is in motion. You're in the behavioral realm, you're actually acting like you're doing something and even taking these smaller steps, writing something down will get dopamine going in your reward circuits. 

It will kickstart the motivation that's very very important particularly at the beginning of any new habit. At the beginning of the habit, motivation is crucial to get you started. And then once you develop the habit more and more, as we'll see, it becomes more of an automatic process. So writing things down will help you kickstart things, and it helps give you a bird's eye view to brainstorm different solutions that you might need for different sticking points, and you will have sticking points. 

And you need to be aware that your plan is going to be dynamic rather than static. What do I mean by this? I mean that you're going to come up with an initial plan, a good enough plan, and you're not going to try and make it perfect. And you're going to start and try and move [00:11:00] somewhere in the direction that you want to go, in the direction of effectiveness, with the awareness that as you try this plan out, You're going to encounter some degree of failure and that's totally okay and normal. 

And then based on the results you get, the positive results and the failure, you're then going to adjust your plan accordingly. One of the biggest reasons people fail with behavior change is they get stuck in the planning phase and they feel like their plan needs to be perfect. As an example, before I make a huge career change, I need to have the plan down perfectly. 

Or before I change my diet, I need to know exactly what I'm going to be eating until the end of time. Or I need to know exactly what my exercise regime is. is going to be a good enough plan that you actually execute and start doing is way better than a theoretically perfect plan that just sits on your computer forever. 

For writing things down, I would recommend something simple as Google Docs [00:12:00] for making your plan. Of course, people use all sorts of different software now like Notion or Evernote, but keeping it simple, something like Google Docs is something you can access from your laptop. From your phone when you're out and even just that ease of convenience makes it extremely effective. 

And what's crucial to making plans is it can allow you to use categories to simplify your plan. This works for really vague resolutions. Plans can help you get some definition within that vagueness and come up with very specific actionable points. So if your resolution is to get healthier, for instance, that's quite a vague resolution. 

It's a good one, but it's vague. So you might think when you're making your plan, how you can divide it into different categories and what might indeed comprise this notion of getting healthier. It might include sleep, say diet, physical exercise. drugs and alcohol, tobacco. You might make a list of all those different [00:13:00] categories in your plan and then figure out what specific actions you might want to take in each of those areas. 

Which actions would help you move in the direction of health, say, and that's where you would apply that zone of proximal development idea that we talked about earlier. If, for example, you're currently getting around six hours a night of sleep, you might move towards getting seven or If you're already getting eight hours of sleep, then maybe that's adequate and you don't even have to think about sleep and you can move on to diet. 

If your diet's already pretty good, but maybe there are some specific tweaks you can make, you can make those tweaks and make those finer action points. So make a plan with those different categories. And then in each category, identify where is your zone of proximal development? Where's the sweet spot in this particular area? 

What actions of improvement can I take that I'm actually likely to execute consistently over the long term? Ideally, if you can, in each area, you want to pick what's known as a high leverage activity, which activities are going to give you the most gain [00:14:00] for the least amount of effort. So for example, if you're trying to lose weight. 

and you're looking at your nutrition, tracking your calories and tracking your weight is a very high leverage activity. Doing that well will really give you a lot of information and help you be very effective in the process of losing weight. On the other hand, making sure you time your meals very meticulously is a very low leverage activity because meal timing doesn't have nearly the impact on weight loss that calorie tracking and weight tracking has. 

Now, obviously, as we referenced earlier, as you get more and more advanced in any given area, the law of diminishing returns is going to take effect. There's likely to be less low hanging fruit. Inevitably, you'll move from higher leverage activities to lower leverage activities. That's an acceptable part of the process as you advance in any given endeavor, but always trying to find the highest leverage activities possible, that's a good idea. 

Taking another example of a plan, [00:15:00] something that's more specific than trying to get healthier. Let's say you want to stop smoking. You might make a plan that comprises all the different situations where you smoke. because each situation will have its different challenges. So you might think about smoking at home, smoking where you socialize at a bar or restaurant, smoking at work, and then smoking on particular occasions like celebrations, commiserations, holidays, things like that. 

And then you might think in your plan, what are the different challenges associated with stopping smoking in all of those different situations? Next, what you want to do is work into your plan, positive and negative leverage. So what do I mean by that? By positive leverage, I mean using positive emotions to help you move towards your goal. 

And by negative leverage, I mean the opposite. So an example of positive leverage is saving all the money that you might have spent on cigarettes towards something that you might want to buy. An example of [00:16:00] negative leverage would be telling all your friends and family that you're stopping smoking so that if you fail, you then have to face the demand of explaining to them why you failed or where you went wrong. 

So what you're doing, so in this way, what you're doing is marshalling your positive and your negative emotions together and get them flowing in the same direction. Another thing you can do along these lines is called future projection. Writing down what will happen in the long term both if you succeed in what you're pursuing and if you fail in what you're pursuing. 

So if you're 30 years old and you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day you could write down a paragraph of what life would be like if you're 60 and still smoking a pack a day and what life might be like if you're 60 and you've managed to stop smoking. If you haven't stopped smoking you can look forward to a life of emphysema or perhaps cancer. 

It might be difficult to play with your grandchildren. It might be difficult for you to go on holiday, you might require home [00:17:00] oxygen. If you have stopped smoking, you can live your life, you can travel, you have more energy, you can spend time with your family. These things can be really motivating. Future projection is really just a way of amplifying and creating a simulation of success or failure into the future to make success or failure seem a lot more urgent. 

Really, the problem with resolutions in general is they tend to be long term and therefore require long term thinking. And as human beings, we're often not very good at long term thinking. We're good at reacting to things acutely in the short term, and our brains are really wired for that. But often we're really bad at being aware of the effects of both our positive habits and negative habits projected over time. 

One expression in this vein is that we tend to overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in 10 years. Or overestimate the impact of a behavior in a year and underestimate the impact of a [00:18:00] behavior in 10 years. We really don't have an appreciation for the effect of small consistent habits both positive and negative over time because the effects of these habits actually compound. 

And really what I find clinically talking to patients and clients is the root of a lot of people suffering the difference between a sensible course of action and a mistake is often that failure to keep in mind the medium or the long term. So next you want to think about measuring your results. 

Measuring your results ties into both positive and negative leverage because results have an inherent motivational factor attached to them. Our reward circuits, which function with the neurotransmitter dopamine, they're activated by the sense that we're moved towards a desired goal or objective. 

They're deactivated by the sense that we're actually encountering significant obstacles or moving further away from our goal. That's why when people do drugs like cocaine, which activate their reward system, they don't just feel [00:19:00] euphoric or satisfied as such. It's more that they feel they're on the right track towards something good. 

There's a sense of progression to the happiness. And that's why it's so, so seductive. It's quite different from the pleasure one gets from serotonin, say, activated by a drug like ecstasy, which more induces a sense of peace, calm, satisfaction with whatever's happening now, a sense of psychological safety. 

The dopamine high of something like cocaine has a more profound sense of urgency and a sense of going somewhere different. It's more about apprehending a desired target or goal. So if you get good results with whatever you're doing, it's going to be inherently motivating and you're going to see that you're moving towards your goal. 

the danger of bad results, even though they're very useful as we'll see. is that it can be quite demotivating. So when you get good results, you want to welcome that motivation and harness it. So you can continue moving towards your goal. When you get bad [00:20:00] results, you want to view it as dispassionately as possible. 

And crucially don't see it as a reflection of your lack of value or your lack of worth. And this is a problem people encounter when they have self esteem issues, say a bad result. is just a useful signal that's telling you that something about your process, about what you're doing is not working and you need to adjust your plan in some way. 

So if you're dieting and you've stuck to your diet plan rigidly for a few weeks but there's been no weight loss, that's a potential indication that something about your plan, either your diet or your exercise regime or so on, something's not working and you need to adjust your plan. So in that way you can make the best of the good results and use them as fuel And you can minimize the effect of the bad results and use them appropriately just to let you know that something you're doing isn't working correctly and you need to course correct. 

In this way, you can see that one of the functions of results is to keep you oriented to reality, which is very [00:21:00] important when you're pursuing something difficult. But then the other function of results is that it's going to affect your motivation, as we've said. Another point on this is that you should be very humble about what results you expect, particularly if you're not very experienced or advanced in the particular area you're working on. 

And it's okay to try a few different iterations of a plan. before you start getting some meaningful results. And you should be aware of course that some results, some progress is infinitely better than no progress. And you should be aware that some goals are going to be harder to measure than others. So for example, measuring weight loss is relatively easy because that's something you can do objectively with a weighing scale. 

What if your goal is to, say, improve your self awareness or your self esteem, that's a bit of a softer goal, harder to define, it's going to be harder to measure. And you may have to think creatively about different ways that you can measure that. Maybe involving other people, or maybe coming up with some novel measurements yourself. 

Some measurements will certainly be better than no [00:22:00] measurement at all. And the more different ways you have of measuring your progress, the more likely it is that that those measurements are going to be some reflection of reality. Once you start doing things, start changing your behavior in some way, start enacting your plan, and then you start getting results and you start measuring them, you're inevitably going to run into some kind of failure. 

As I mentioned before, failure should be anticipated, even embraced. You should make friends with failure. It's just a part of the process. Once you start meeting some failure, let's say your resolution is to stop smoking and you have that cigarette on January 15th, you again want to dispassionately look at that failure and analyze it. 

Where was the sticking point? What was the problem? Try and think about it as if you are thinking about a friend or a family member or someone else that you're caring about. Oftentimes, we're much more compassionate towards people we know than towards ourselves. Again, this might reflect a self esteem issue. 

So what might happen [00:23:00] when someone relapses and has a cigarette is they might berate themselves, feel very guilty, engage in a lot of very harsh self criticism. They may have thoughts like, well, I'm just a bad person. I don't deserve to stop smoking. I'm terrible at this. And those thoughts and emotions are only going to restart the cycle, completely demotivate you and make you engage in the habit again, often to deal with the sense of shame or guilt. 

Instead, You want to look at this with a detached, compassionate view. Think, okay, so January 15th, I did have a cigarette. What was the situation where I had the cigarette? Why was it on January 15th and not 14th? What are the particular issues in that situation that contributed to the failure and therefore, what could I do in the future to avoid that and increase the chances of success? 

To some degree in this example, this is a measurement problem as well, because If you make it until January 15th and you have one cigarette, you can measure your success in absolute [00:24:00] terms, i. e. whether or not you've smoked at all, and in that sense you've totally failed. But, if you choose to measure your results differently, for example, the frequency of cigarette smoking, even if you had that cigarette on January 15th, you can still consider yourself as very successful because you've cut down from smoking 20 cigarettes a day to one cigarette in two weeks, which by any standard is an enormous success. 

So part of this would be the previous step, thinking very carefully about how you measure results in a way that's still reality oriented. But, maximally motivating and minimally demotivating, and because motivation is so important, particularly in the beginning stages, that's going to increase your chances of success over time. 

Another thing to be aware of is that whenever you pursue something difficult, your mind is going to throw up a lot of mental noise. And that mental noise can take the shape of that self criticism we described earlier, but also just random thoughts and self [00:25:00] talk that can be very counter productive. So, when you're thinking about success in the long term, you want to try and avoid mental noise, ignore it, and in general, when you're thinking about success in the long term, day to day, you want to be really process oriented. 

You want to think, what are, to the best of my knowledge, the correct actions that I should be taking today, rather than what are my results on any given day. Because often overthinking about and overanalyzing results can itself be a form of mental noise that can get in our way. So to recap so far, we've talked about picking an area you want to work on, Thinking deeply about the problem, framing the resolution appropriately, making a plan, working in positive and negative leverage to maximize your motivation, measuring your results as a way of marking your progress, keeping you reality oriented and again maximizing your motivation, minimizing demotivation and being careful not to get caught up in mental noise and as part of that [00:26:00] not getting too engrossed in your results all the time, but actually generally day to day being more process oriented rather than results oriented. 

And now I'll just talk about some final points that are worth keeping in mind with any kind of behavior change. As we've talked about, your motivation will fluctuate, particularly in the beginning, And some of this you can control, but a lot of it is outside of your control. A lot of it is kind of inexplicable. 

There'll be some days where you feel very, very motivated and some moments where you feel for whatever reason, quite demotivated. This is totally normal. What you need to be aware of is that when your motivation is waning, it's going to be one of two things, which will help you through. One is the exercise of specific discipline or willpower. 

And the other is the power of habit itself. Discipline, or willpower, will come into play relatively early on in the behaviour change, say within the first three months. You'll probably need to use a lot more discipline in moments where [00:27:00] your motivation is waning, where you just have to force yourself to do whatever it is you're trying to do, even though you don't particularly want to. 

And of course, you need to be aware that willpower is finite. Yes, you can build willpower over time, but you can only rely so much on willpower on any given day. And willpower will also be affected by things like what you're eating and sleeping and your general mood and other stresses in life. So that's why we've already talked so much about maximizing positive motivation and minimizing demotivation. 

Because that means you'll minimize the use of your willpower even though willpower can't be important in those crucial moments. As you get into the later stages of the behavior change, the more you make a particular habit a part of your life, the more the power of habit itself will take over. Thinking about the things you do already, you'll probably realize there are some things you do in your life, many things actually, that don't require any positive motivation, and they're not really affected by negative motivations.[00:28:00] 

You kind of just do them because you've always done them. You probably don't need to have a lot of motivation to brush your teeth every day, or to have a shower every day, that's something you do because it's something you've always done. And human beings are habit forming creatures, we're like that with most of the things we do, most of the things we do automatically and unconsciously, not really having to think about them, not having to be motivated to do them, not having to exercise willpower either. 

So really the long term goal is to incorporate whatever new behavior you're working on into just one of your daily habits. And that generally happens over the course of a few months to a few years. After that, it'll have a momentum all of its own and then motivation won't be as necessary. It's about achieving a new baseline. 

Although there will still be fluctuations in motivation, this will probably be easier when you're motivated and harder when you're less motivated. Motivation will be much less crucial to doing whatever it is you want to do. A good book about this is Atomic [00:29:00] Habits by James Clear, which is a deep dive into the process of forming new habits and incorporating them into your life. 

So what you want to do in those initial few months is anticipate when is it likely that you're going to need more willpower and discipline and then prepare for those moments accordingly. The next point I'd like to discuss is the idea of identity level change. A lot of what makes changing our behavior hard is that changing our behavior often involves changing our identity in some way. 

For example, people may find it difficult to stop smoking because smoking to them may represent something deep about their personality. Smoking might be for them symbolic of their rebellious attitude or maybe their self destructive attitude. or maybe an attitude of a kind of general irreverence towards rules or towards convention. 

That's just to take one example. And you have to be aware that with both changes big and small, The longer you [00:30:00] enact those changes, the higher the likelihood that there is going to be an accompanying identity level change. If you go from someone who doesn't exercise at all, eventually over a period of months to years, to someone who goes to the gym six times a week, that's not going to be just a superficial behavioral change, although it might start that way. 

That's going to be a change in your identity. you're going to start to think of yourself differently as for example a more athletic person, as the kind of person that goes to the gym, that takes care of their health etc. So when you're initially thinking of your goal or resolution it might also be helpful to think what are the identity level barriers in the way of achieving my goal. 

So you can think in advance about how to work around them. For example if you want to lose weight but you hate the idea of being one of those people that goes to the gym. or you think of yourself as a foodie, it's generally better to consider these factors in advance, anticipate them and see how [00:31:00] you can work around them. 

And ultimately, it's important to allow for change to happen. For you to achieve your resolution, there may be parts of yourself that have to die, as harsh as that sounds, to allow for new parts of yourself to grow. And so, disidentifying with your different behaviors, can be a very important part of this process. 

You have to be aware that this is going to affect you particularly over the long term at a very deep level and if you're not prepared for it it will become a sticking point inevitably and it may be where the process ultimately fails for you again if you're not prepared for it. When it comes to more deep rooted psychological issues and how they can interact with this process of behavior change You could refer to another podcast we've made, The Many Parts to Serve Sabotage, which we released earlier this year, and that could help you elucidate some of those barriers which may present at the deeper levels for you psychologically. 

The last point I want to mention is [00:32:00] there's kind of a general way of thinking about behavior change which I like, which is every behavior you do is a collision with reality that you can learn from. Reality is often much harder to apprehend than we think. Every time you try a diet, Every time you try a new exercise program, every time you do something different in a social interaction, all of these things are collisions with reality that can give you the opportunity to learn something new and importantly something new about how you could move towards what you want. 

and how you could move away from what you don't want. The problem is that most people have these collisions with reality without taking any notice of what could be learned, and really that's what this whole process is about. Or they stay within their comfort zone, within a set of prescribed status quo behaviors, and therefore stop learning anything new for years, or even decades in some cases. 

And that's really how people stagnate. Ultimately it's about being very conscious and deliberate in what you do in these [00:33:00] areas where you're having trouble or these areas where you feel there's some room for improvement. Being very intentional about how you behave and then being very observant about what the results of those new behaviors are because those results can then inform how you can tweak your behavior or change it in the future. 

and ultimately get the results, get the success that you want. If you would like to work with me personally in 2025, I'm opening a few slots in my schedule to work with some clients one on one towards a specific goal. To be very clear, this is not psychotherapy. This is more like coaching, although I do work with clients for psychotherapy. 

This is different. We would work together for four sessions. We would go through a specific process to what we described here, but the benefit would be that we could tailor your strategy exactly to your situation. We could screen for any deeper psychological issues, which may be a block for you. I can provide you with some accountability and some techniques which are highly specific and relevant to your [00:34:00] problem. 

These are the kinds of strategies I've used in my work as a psychiatrist, in an addiction clinic, with clients in psychotherapy. And also in my personal life, many people languish for years and years with a particular problem, whether it's health or relationship problem or career related problems, and they might eventually solve it and really regret how long they spent trying to figure it out and how easy it was in the end, once they had the right strategy. 

And in many cases, they never even solve it at all. And working with someone one on one can be a very effective way of speeding up this process. So if you think you'd be a good fit, that this is applicable to you, and you'd like to work with me, you can email me at alexcrewmetherapyatgmail. com and put New Year's resolution in the subject line. 

And as I said before, I only have a few places for this. So I would reach out as soon as you can. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend or give us a rating. It really helps new people to find us. As ever, we'd love to hear from you and love to hear what you think, so feel free to drop us an [00:35:00] email and get in touch. 

Thank you for listening and have a wonderful start to 2025.