Rethinking New Year’s Resolutions: A More Sustainable Approach to Health
Every January, so many of us feel the pressure to better ourselves with new health routines, calorie restricted diets, new clothes and gadgets from the Boxing Day sales. With the best of intentions, you set out at the start of the year with ambitious new health resolutions. You commit to waking earlier to fit in a workout, eating perfectly to lose some weight, committing to exercise five times a week and to finally be consistent.
For a few weeks, this works and you feel great, but by the end of January you feel exhausted and blaming yourself for not having enough discipline or motivation.
The problem isn’t a lack of willpower, it’s the way we’ve been taught to approach change.
Why New Year’s resolutions so often fail
Most New Year’s resolutions are built on pressure, a pressure that we put on ourselves to look and feel a certain way, not on the reality of our daily lives. These resolutions assume that you have endless time and energy, that your stress levels will magically decrease and that your motivation will stay high, even during busy or emotionally demanding weeks
They don’t take into account that your toddler woke you up 3 times in the night or that you’re up at the crack of dawn getting packed lunches ready and kids out of the door before a day of back to back meetings at work. If you’re already overwhelmed with balancing work, family, and mental load, this all-or-nothing approach is never realistic. Then, when it inevitably falls apart, you beat yourself up for failing again, for your lack of willpower and motivation.
This is not a personal failure, but a flawed system. Trying to overhaul your entire lifestyle overnight doesn’t account for real life. It ignores the fact that stress, poor sleep, hormonal shifts, and constant demands all affect how much capacity you actually have.
A more sustainable way to approach health this year
If you want this year to feel different, the answer isn’t doing more, it isn’t about having stricter rules or bigger goals it’s about having a different approach.
A sustainable approach to health means:
Letting go of the idea that everything has to change at once
Letting go if the idea that everything has to be perfect
Building habits that fit into your existing life
Working with your body and nervous system, rather than constantly pushing against them
Creating a positive and lasting change in your health and wellbeing is achieved through simple, science-backed habits, not extremes. It’s about:
Focusing on energy and capacity, not perfection
Choosing behaviours you can maintain even when life feels messy
Making small changes that compound over time
Consistency doesn’t come from doing more, it comes from doing what’s sustainable.
Moving away from perfection
So much of the New Year’s resolution culture is built around short-term intensity, 30-day resets, strict plans, all-or-nothing routines, but health isn’t something to be achieved in a month. Real health is an ongoing journey that helps you to feel more energised, more confident in your choices and more in control of your health across the whole year, even when it’s busy, stressful and messy.
When your habits are realistic and supportive, you don’t need to keep starting over. You simply keep going.
The alternative path to sustainable health
This shift from pressure to practicality is the foundation of my work as a health coach. I support busy, overwhelmed women who are tired of cycling through guilt, extremes, and “failed” resolutions, and who want a calmer, more sustainable way to feel better in their bodies.
If you’re ready to stop resetting every January and start building habits that genuinely support your life, I’d love to help. You don’t need another resolution, you need the right support.
If you’d like help creating simple, science-backed habits that work for your life in 2026 and beyond, you can book a free consultation with me today.