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How to Make and Keep New Year’s Resolutions if You’re In Recovery

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Pinnacle Team
2 years ago
Pinnacle Icon
Pinnacle Team •
2 years ago

We can’t believe it: another year is almost done.

But we have to.

The evidence is right there on the calendar: December is the last month of 2022.

Next up: 2023.

Are you ready?

We’re ready.

We’re ready to make 2023 a productive year. We spend our time supporting people with alcohol use disorder (AUD), substance use disorder (SUD), and co-occurring disorders. A significant part of the treatment and recovery process is identifying goals and working to achieve them. Identifying goals involves recognizing where we are so we can make concrete plans to help us get to where we want to go.

Does that sound familiar?

To us, that sounds remarkably similar to what millions of people around the U.S. do at this time of year: they make New Year’s Resolutions.

In fact, when we searched for data about resolutions, we learned that in most years, close to 75 percent of adults make resolutions.

Let’s take a quick look at the most popular resolutions for the past two years, according to a nationwide survey conducted by expert pollsters at Statista. Here’s what they report.

Five Most Popular Resolutions for 2022

  1. 48% resolved to exercise more
  2. 44% resolved to eat healthier
  3. 41% resolved to lose weight
  4. 34% resolved to spend more time with friends and family
  5. 24% resolved to save or be more careful with their money

Five Most Popular Resolutions for 2021

  1. 50% resolved to exercise more/get in better physical shape
  2. 48% resolved to lose weight
  3. 44% resolved to save more money
  4. 39% resolved to improve their diet and eating habits
  5. 21% resolved to get more serious about their career/work

And here’s what another poll told us about whether people thought they’d stick to their resolutions or abandon them:

  • High level of confidence: 37%
  • Moderate level of confidence: 42%
  • Low level of confidence: 13%
  • Very low level of confidence: 4%
  • Undecided: 4%

We’ll be honest: we’re impressed with the resolutions people make, because they’re almost all related to health and wellbeing, rather than material things. However, we hoped people would be more confident in their ability to keep their resolutions.

Less than half of the people who make resolutions have high expectations of keeping them.

We want to change that.

This article is designed to help people in recovery from AUD and or SUD make resolutions that promote recovery – and they believe they’ll actually be able to keep.

Setting Goals: Methods That Work

There’s a saying from the business world you may be familiar with:

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

We’re going to apply that concept to making resolutions. If we assume you make resolutions because you want to create change in your life – in the form of positive forward growth – then you need to know what to change. To do that, you need to know what you’re working with. You need to know the what of your life. By that we mean your behavior, i.e. the things you do. More specifically, you need to know the things you did over the past year, so you create positive growth next year.

That’s what you want to measure: your behavior over the last year. That will give you the information you need to manage that behavior in the year to come.

How do you do that?

With a process you probably know about: a debrief. Most of us know that word from movies or television shows. It’s what military personnel or intelligence officer do after an operation. They sit down with their superiors and go over exactly what happened. They typically have two goals: get clear on exactly what really happened, and identify what went right or wrong so they can repeat what went right and avoid what went wrong.

That’s exactly why you’re going to debrief the past 12 months: it will allow you to identify what went well and what could have gone better, so you can create resolutions that meet your overall goal of positive forward growth.

Ready?

How to Debrief Your Year

We’ll take this in four steps.

Step 1: What Happened?

This is obviously a broad question. However, when you want to examine something in order to improve it – or leave it alone because it’s working – you need to know what it is you’re examining. Get out your calendar and look back to January 2022. Where were you and what were you doing? Go through the calendar one month at a time, and remind yourself of the basic facts of your life over the past 12 months. If you need to, take notes to help you answer the next two questions.

Step 2: What Went Well?

The process of reviewing your calendar feeds directly into this step. As you identify the things that went well over the past year, try to understand the factors in place that contributed to your positive experiences. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Was I satisfied at work?
  • Were my relationships stable?
  • Was I sticking to my program? That means different things for different people, but here’s what that means to millions of people in recovery:
    • Going to meetings
    • Getting exercise
    • Eating well
    • Getting plenty of sleep
    • Engaging in sober-friendly social activities

If you can identify the factors that supported and contributed to the things that went well in your life, you can work to reintroduce and/or reinforce those factors in the year to come, or re-engage in the daily habits associated with periods in your life when things go well.

Step 3: What Could Have Gone Better?

This is the mirror of Step 2. Your calendar review in Step 1 also feeds directly into this section of your yearly review/debrief. When you identify the times over the past year that didn’t go as planned, that were challenging, painful, or simply hard, try to identify what was going on in your life that may have made things difficult.

Ask yourself the exact same set of questions we suggested you ask yourself in Step 2.

While this may seem redundant, it helps you understand the elements of your life that contribute to your happiness and wellbeing as well as understand the elements of your life that create problems. When you identify periods where things could have gone better, you may be surprised at what you find.

For instance, during a tough month in 2022, you may have been:

  • Satisfied at work
  • Stable in your relationships
  • Going to meetings
  • Eating well

During that same month, you may not have been:

  • Getting exercise
  • Getting plenty of sleep
  • Engaging in sober-friendly social activities

That’s valuable, instructive information. It teaches you that exercise, sleep, and sober-friendly social activities may contribute more to your overall wellbeing than you realize. As you look toward 2023, you can keep this fact in mind, and make plans to include exercise, sleep, and socializing as priorities for the New Year.

Step 4: How Can I Avoid Repeating the Difficulties of Last Year?

Take what you learned from Step 3 and use that information to avoid creating the same set of circumstances that led to any difficulties you faced last year. For example, your tough periods of 2022 may not have had anything to do with exercise, sleep, or socializing – as in our example above – and everything to do with dissatisfaction with work and problems in relationships with friends or family. In that case, your job is to think about how you can improve or change those factors in the upcoming year. Following through with this example, ask yourself:

  • What about work was unsatisfactory? How can I change that? If I can’t change that, how can I learn to cope without it affecting my overall wellbeing?
  • What created my relationship problems? Was I the difficult one? What can I change? Were my friends/family members the difficult ones? How can I handle that without it affecting my wellbeing? Do I need to re-establish boundaries with family, or re-evaluate my relationships with particular friends?

When you know what you need to do, you can make concrete plans to do those things. That may seem like the most obvious statement ever, but let’s be honest: we all know people who bemoan their troubles, yet never take the time to identify why they’re having problems, which most often  means they have little chance of redressing them.

Step 5: How Can I Increase My Chance of Repeating the Things That Went Well?

Take what you learned from Step 2 and repeat the process we suggest in Step 4. Let’s say you had an excellent stretch from March to September. First, maybe Spring and Summer are your seasons. But that doesn’t really help you. What you need to know is why. If it was the weather, then that’s something you need to know. Let’s assume it wasn’t the weather, but rather, that the months you felt like you were thriving had everything to do with your behavior, i.e. the things you did every day.

For example, during that seven-month period when things went well, you recall that work was not really that great, but your relationships were stable and fulfilling. You may not have gone to meetings every day, but always made it to at least three each week. What you did have was good sleep, plenty of exercise, and more sober-friendly socializing than the rest of the year.

That’s what you take away. You realize that when work is tough and you don’t get to as many meetings as you’d like, you will nevertheless thrive when your relationships are stable, you get plenty of sleep and exercise, and you frequently engage in social activities that promote recovery. Therefore, when you look toward next year, you increase your chances of repeating the things that went well when you work to keep those factors in place.

That’s how you debrief your year.

Now let’s talk about resolutions for 2023.

Making Resolutions You Can Keep

A study published in 2020 identified two types of resolutions:

  1. Approach-oriented resolutions
  2. Avoidance-oriented resolutions

Think of these two types of resolutions in terms of the phrases I will and I will not. Approach-oriented resolutions include the phrase I will and avoidance-oriented resolutions include the phrase I will not. You may wonder if there’s a difference between making the resolution “I will not eat fast food” and the resolution “I will cook healthy food at home.” According to the authors of the study we cite, the difference is in the results: among the 1000 + people who participated, 59 percent of those who made approach-oriented resolutions considered them successful, while 47 percent of those who made avoidance-oriented resolutions considered them successful.

We encourage you to use the more successful approach: when you make your resolutions, frame them with positive, approach-oriented language.

How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

1. Make Them SMART

If you haven’t encountered this acronym before, here’s what it means:

  • Specific: define your resolutions precisely.
  • Measurable: ensure you have a way to monitor your progress
  • Attainable: create resolutions that are realistic for you, now, in your life
  • Relevant: create resolutions that have personal meaning
  • Time-based: your resolutions are for the year – but it can help to create milestones along the way to keep you focused and on track

2. Make Them Yours

In a way, this emphasizes the attainable and relevant parts of the SMART acronym, but it means more than that. We mean that when you make your resolutions, make sure they’re there to serve your personal vision of happiness and wellbeing. Personal motivation matters, and increase the likelihood you’ll stick to your resolutions.

3. Plan Ahead

If your resolutions involve structural changes to your life – changes to your schedule, for instance – then start planning now so you can have everything in place when the New Year arrives.

4. Find Accountability Partners

Ask friends, family, or recovery peers if they’ve made resolutions, too. If they have, suggest helping one another stick to them. You can be as formal or as informal as you like. We’ve met people who create interactive online spreadsheets they update every day, and we’ve met people who stay accountable with a simple weekly phone call or text. Both approaches are valid, both have a place, and both can work.

5. Don’t Give Up

You know ahead of time life doesn’t always go exactly as planned. Therefore, when things come up that temporarily derail you, set you back, or tempt you to give up on your resolutions, don’t be surprised: you know that’s part of being alive. What’s important is the kind of resilience you learn in recovery. Take stock of the situation, adapt your goals, and move forward. If you prepare yourself now, then you’ll be ready when your adaptability and resilience matter most.

The purpose of your resolutions is to learn, grow, and thrive. If you’re in recovery from an alcohol or substance use disorder (AUD/SUD), then your main goal in life is to learn, grow, and thrive in recovery. If your New Year’s Resolutions begin – at any point – to cause stress or engender emotions that might lead to relapse, then we give you advance permission to reassess the situation entirely, and fall back on the most important goal of all: sticking to your program and working every day toward lifelong, sustainable sobriety.

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