At LifeOmic, we are all about data. Scientific evidence drives everything we do — not just in helping clinicians make better treatment decisions for their patients, but in helping LIFE app users make healthy behavior and lifestyle choices that stick. That’s why, in our LIFE apps, we are focusing on features known to help people plan, enact, measure and maintain healthy behavior changes. From personalized education to social support, these features help health behavior changes stick.

How many of us have made a health-related New Year’s resolution, but only stuck with our resolution for the first few weeks of January, if we even got around to it? From losing weight, to exercising more, to eating less sugar, making a resolution to change is much easier than actually changing and sticking with the change long term.

Want to make a healthy behavior change that sticks? Follow the tips below, based in social science research and health behavior theory.

1. Focus on one behavior change goal at a time.

It’s difficult to make one long-term lifestyle or behavior change, much less multiple at a time. Changing a behavior, like quitting smoking, going to bed earlier or starting a new exercise program, is a multi-step process that requires deliberation, action and maintenance. You may be tempted to change multiple health-related behaviors at a time — like undertaking a daily meditation practice and sleeping at least 8 hours each night — but by trying to change too many things at once, you may get overwhelmed and fall quickly back into old habits and behaviors.

Trying to change too many of your behaviors at once, especially going “cold turkey” on bad health habits, can lead to fatigue and “cheating” at your goals. For example, if you try to quickly cut out many foods that you enjoy — for example, no more sugary treats at breakfast, no desert after dinner AND no afternoon coffee), you may be templated to “cheat” in one area if you’ve been doing well in another (I didn’t eat any sugar this morning, so I don’t mind drinking an extra cup of coffee this afternoon), leaving you feeling a sense of disappointment that you aren’t achieving everything you set out to achieve. Alternatively, giving into one temptation (eating that breakfast donut you said you weren’t going to eat) may lead you to think, “To heck with it, I’m just not going to worry about my sugar intake today.” By the end of the day, you may consume several more sweet treats. You’ll end up feeling stressed about failing at multiple of your behavior change goals, leading you to further “cheat” to make yourself feel better.

Focus on one small or attainable change at a time. Once you’ve made the change into a habit (like going to bed by a certain time every night), you can focus on your next goal.

2. Pick a behavior you have full control over.

In the Theory of Planned Behavior, predictors of health behavior, or at least of intention toward a behavior, include our attitudes toward the behavior, social norms (what people around us think about the behavior), and perceived behavioral control (what control we have or think we have over the behavior). When setting a new health goal, pick a behavior that you feel you have full control over.

Image credit: Robert Orzanna, Wikimedia.

For health reasons, you may want or need less stress in your life, but the occurrence of stressful events may not be under your control. You may not have control over a work environment that demands you spend multiple hours at a computer. You may feel like you don’t have control over whether friends, roommates or family members bring unhealthy foods into the house, or what a family member cooks you for breakfast when you didn’t ask, and social norms may compel you to not to “fuss” over these things.

But you can control how you react to stress, or when and how you eat the breakfast your family member prepared for you, for example. You could decide to begin a 10-minute mindfulness or meditation practice every morning when you wake up or before you go to bed, to blunt the negative impacts of stress on your body. You could decide to save the breakfast your family member cooked for you and eat it for lunch instead, giving yourself a potentially metabolically beneficial prolonged overnight fast, or decide to exercise early every morning in anticipation of having to sit in work meetings until lunch. You can also ask for friends, family members and work colleagues to honor your healthy behavior changes, by not enabling your problem behaviors or looking at you funny when you ask a coworker to walk with you for a one-on-one meeting.

3. Identify your motivation to adopt a particular healthy behavior. If the reason for change isn’t important enough to you to actually make the change, pick a different behavior. And be honest.

Our motivations are important predictors of our behaviors. Without a strong personal motivation backing up a the health behavior change we want to make, we may contemplate but never successfully make the change.