Health Journal Online

Tag: Resolutions

Setting Intentions and How to Manifest Your Deepest Desires

If you want to be successful at anything, whether it’s being a more relaxed parent, quitting smoking, or running a marathon, setting an intention—and then concentrating on it mindfully—will give you the focus to help turn your dream into reality. Our culture often uses the terms goal and intention interchangeably. But they actually aren’t the same. In reality, intentions are the things that should be leading the way, and that’s why it’s essential that when you’re setting intentions, you’re aligned with your deepest, truest self.

Intentions help you stay oriented toward your goal when strong emotions, exhaustion, boredom, or distraction threaten to throw you off course. Intentions connect deeply to your true heart’s desire, to what really matters to you, and use that rudder to set your course forward.

An intention isn’t a wish or a fantasy. It isn’t a proclamation of who or how you think you should be. It comes from truly listening to what’s important for you to feel most alive and, well, yourself.

Not an intention: I want to lose 25 pounds and fit into my old jeans.

Intention: I am listening deeply to my body’s desire to be healthy and active, and my heart’s desire to feel vibrant and whole.

We offer ourselves the greatest potential for easing our own suffering.

Here’s where mindfulness plays an essential role. When we take the time to tune into ourselves, to learn our inner landscape, it’s easier to discern our truth from fantasy. It’s like when you investigate a sudden craving. Is it that your body needs chips right this minute to function, or are you looking for a distraction (a crunchy, salty, flavor-bomb of one) while you nervously await word from your publisher about your manuscript?

Perhaps what you really want is to have fulfilling, creative, intellectually stimulating work, own a home you love, where friends and family will come to visit and where you have a place to garden, or learn to manage your stress better, and feel more grounded and happy.

From this place of deep knowing, you can craft a plan to achieve what you’ve identified. And when you veer off track—you’re tempted by the mind-numbing job because you’re scared no one else will hire you; you contemplate spending all your savings on a trip to Paris; or find yourself (again) stress-eating at 9 p.m.—you have something real and true to anchor you.

Saying Yes to Commitment

Change isn’t easy. But it’s often exactly what’s needed. Knowing what really matters to us, and setting an intention that helps create the circumstances for that desire to flourish, also makes it far easier to commit to changing behavior or habits that keep us from our goal.

After mindfully reflecting on my experience with my stepdaughter, I realized that my deepest desire was to have a warmer relationship with her. I set the intention to be loving and warm toward her, as I am with other people I care deeply for. On a recent visit, when I felt myself becoming cranky and brittle, I recalled my intention. In an instant, I saw the extraneous stuff that wasn’t contributing to greater love or warmth but instead lessening my resolve to keep my intention. I recommitted to what I really wanted, not to the random thoughts and feelings that were triggered by, say, my low blood sugar or my petulance. And because it mattered—this is how I want to live—that commitment felt invigorating, and was easy. The rest of the day went beautifully.

Two things here speak to the power of intention: When you know what’s important to you, and you intend to honor that, your intention is an alarm that goes off when you forget what really matters. Then you can choose to chart a different way forward.

Saying No to Resolutions

You may want to lose weight, get your real estate license, or be a better listener—but if you don’t know why you want this, you will quickly lose motivation and fall back into your old habits. However, discomfort and resistance are no longer insurmountable obstacles when we know what we really want and recommit to it again and again.

I’ve never been able to diet. But I have managed to control my diabetes by setting the intention to stay alive through changing the way I eat. I tell people, “I’m not on a diet. I just don’t want to die-yet.” Once I focused on my intention of staying alive, eating healthfully was a breeze.

Intention can also, simply, help you align your values with the way you live your life, in ways big and small. Without it, life can feel a bit like a pinball machine, slinging you about, miserable, confused, never satisfied with what you have because you don’t know what you really want. In this way, intention becomes less about making wishes come true; it’s really about honoring who you are.

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December 28, 2025
To Manifest What You Want, Passion Will Spark Your Intentions, Not Pressure
It’s draining to reach for what you want when you’re disconnected from passion. Here are 7 steps to investigate what drives you, so you can get clear on staying the course.
What drives you? What gives you goosebumps? Makes you smile unexpectedly? What do you get lost in? Lose time in? Within the answers to those questions, you’ll find your passions. And when it comes to manifesting what you want out of life, a good place to start is gently investigating your passions.

Here’s a simple, 7-step guide to help you bring life to new directions and to create a compelling sense of the why behind your intentions. I call it the RESOLVE practice.

How to Manifest What You Want: RESOLVE

R — Recognize a yearning for change

So, you want to turn in a new direction? Then you’ve already got what you need to start making changes. Once you can see that you want more freshness in your life, you can kick your resolve into gear and make it happen.

E — Engage all your resources

As we learn to tune into the body, watch our thoughts, and become friendly with our emotions, we develop inner “resources” that we can call on to help us create a feeling of stability. Engaging your resources can include forming an allegiance with someone who is also seeking to strengthen their resolve. Anything that helps support you in your cause is a resource.

Engaging your resources can include forming an allegiance with someone who is also seeking to strengthen their resolve. Anything that helps support you in your cause is a resource.

S — Soften your need for speed

Instead, make headway slowly. Impatience can be a tremendous drain on your motivation. You learn as you go, so adopt a more relaxed pace that allows you time to investigate and learn from what you are experiencing.

O — Open up to why this matters to you

Let yourself feel why this is worth the effort. Recall that you chose this route because you were determined to grow your resolve. Return to this initial inspiration whenever you need a boost of motivation.

L — Learn to make allies of your obstacles

If you take the time to stop, breathe, and examine your obstacles you might discover that some dissolve under inspection. We often fear taking a stand. We may use catastrophic thinking or overly exaggerate a negative result. Sometimes the greatest obstacle is the fear of change itself. We can gently notice this too. Awareness will feed our resolve.

V — Value your own efforts

It takes determination, energy, and powerful intention to connect with our heart’s desires. No effort is wasted. All will serve to strengthen your ability to trust yourself and your ability to stand up for what you want.

E — Enjoy the twists and turns

Plans have a nasty habit of changing or veering off course. Learn to adapt your route as your resolve propels you forward. The curve balls and surprises are what make life such a titillating adventure.

This article provides additional information related to a column that appeared in the February 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.
How to Make a Mindful Resolution

Hard-knuckling it through our New Year’s goals can strain even the best intentions. Here’s a mindful strategy for less stress and more success in keeping your resolutions. Read More

Elaine Smookler

June 5, 2018
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December 22, 2025
Struggling To Stick To Your Resolutions? It Takes At Least Two Months To Build A Habit

As January comes to an end, many of us may be struggling to stick to our New Year’s resolutions. But don’t give up just yet. Researchers say it takes not just 21 days but at least two months to turn a new habit into part of your routine.

A new study from the University of South Australia (UniSA) challenges the common belief that habits form in just 21 days. The researchers examined how long it takes to establish health-related habits, such as exercise, drinking water, taking vitamins, and flossing. The results of the meta-analysis that evaluated 20 studies conducted between 2008 and 2023, involving over 2,600 participants revealed that it typically takes around two months — and in some cases, nearly a year.

The study noted that while certain health habits took a median time of 59-66 days, some may take as long as 335 days. “Sometimes we found that the simple behaviors, (like) if someone wanted to start flossing each day, might take someone a week to get into their routine, but more complex behaviors such as changing someone’s diet and physical activity can take a lot longer,” Ben Singh, co-author of the study told CNN.

Singh also noted that people looking to build healthy habits, such as eating better or exercising more, may have greater success if they practice them in the morning when motivation tends to be higher.

The researchers believe that the current findings would help “people set realistic expectations” about habit formation, encouraging them to stay committed even if progress feels slow.

The idea that habits form in 21 days traces back to plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz, who observed that his patients, whether recovering from nose jobs or amputations, typically needed about 21 days to adjust to their new appearance. This led to the theory that people in general would take the same period to adopt a new behavior.

“There is the possibility that it will put people off and maybe discourage them and demotivate them. (But) some people (who) may think that it’s going to take them 21 days, but then after 21 days they’re still struggling, then at least this research and this evidence provides people with some realistic benchmarks that they can follow,” Singh noted.

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January 30, 2025
A Guided Meditation to Set Your Intentions for the New Year
Skip the resolutions this year. Set a different tone by cultivating your intentions for the new year with this mindful practice.
While many of us take stock at the end of a year, set goals, or make new plans for the upcoming year, that sense of letting go of what we’re caught up in and the habits we’ve been living through are a part of our everyday mindfulness practice. Each time we sit for a few minutes, there’s an opportunity to let go of wherever our minds, attention, and awareness have gotten caught up in, come back, and realign ourselves with our best intentions and efforts.

It might be a sense of bringing full awareness and attention to our experience, to the people around us, to a conversation with our children. It might be a sense of letting go of reactivity and coming back to resolve with more patience and clarity. It might also be balancing the tendency most of us have to get caught up in stress and giving more attention to gratefulness, positive moments, and things we enjoy. Or it might be a sense of wanting to bring more kindness and compassion to how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, or even how we treat the people we find difficult in our lives. All of that can be cultivated, sustained, and developed through any amount of time we spend in our mindfulness practice.

A Guided Meditation to Set Your Intentions for the New Year
1. Find a comfortable posture. Dropping your gaze or shutting your eyes, notice the physical movement your body makes with each breath. You might notice your belly, your chest, or perhaps the air moving in and out of your nose and mouth.
2. Check in with your effort and intention. What is it you’d like to bring to the practice today? Perhaps it’s an opportunity to settle and gather your attention or a sense of resolve and strength. Of course, you might have the intention to simply show up to this practice without adding any sense of stress or strain.
3. Bring that sense of intention and awareness to your practice today. One way to do that can be within each in-breath, developing a sense of open awareness.
4. With each out-breath, come up with a word that captures your intentions for yourself. Breathe in with awareness and maybe picture something or feel gratitude toward whatever feels appropriate to you right now. Breathe out with your intentions for this moment.
5. You might lose touch with your intentions throughout the practice and in life—you can come back again. If you lose touch with the practice and your mind gets caught up in distraction or reactivity or some sense of discomfort, that’s normal. That’s all part of the practice. Try coming back to the same practice with awareness.
6. As the practice ends, pause for a moment with intention, and choose when to move on with your day.
  Whatever you’re facing in life, all we indirectly influence is how we choose to relate to that. Reactivity and anger so often lead to more reactivity and anger. You can get caught up in self-criticism and in criticism of others. You can develop a more balanced sense of awareness, preciseness, and clarity through mindfulness practice. At any moment, you can catch yourself and realign yourself with your best intentions, recognizing that you may lose touch again and then come back when you do.
Why You Need a Self-Care Plan

Shelly Tygielski offers a three-step exercise to help you get started with your own self-care plan—no bubble bath required.
Read More

Shelly Tygielski

January 3, 2023
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January 20, 2025
Build Healthy Habits in the New Year With 3 Science-Backed Strategies
Our habits create our lives.

They are the basis for most of our positive outcomes in life. They determine how often we practice mindfulness, our exercise patterns, our ability to place our full attention on our work. They bolster our capacity to interact with the people around us from a sense of compassion and full presence.

Our habits also create most of the problems we encounter in life. They keep us stuck in self-defeating patterns like eating that full pint of ice cream, getting lost for hours on social media, or “checking out” instead of being present for the people we love.

As you begin this New Year, it’s easy to get caught-up thinking only about goals, outcomes, and New Year’s resolutions. These are important. But we think it’s even more important to consider the underlying habits that either keep you stuck or allow you to experience profound changes.

How do you nourish healthy habits? Here are three proven steps:

3 Science-Backed Strategies to Build Healthy Habits in the New Year

Step 1: Take an Inventory of Your Current Habit System

Edward Deming, one of America’s leading management scientists in the 20^th century, declared, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Allow that to sink in for a moment.

The idea here is that your current system of habits is “perfectly designed” to produce the negative, self-defeating, patterns you wish you could change. If you struggle to exercise, it’s because your current habit system is perfectly designed to keep you from working out. If you can’t find time to meditate, it’s because your current habit system is perfectly designed to prevent you from training your mind.

Which existing habits are standing in your way? Which new habits will allow you to make the changes you would like to see?

And that raises an important question: what results do you wish you were getting? For instance, do you want to be more mindful, less distracted? Do you want to be kinder, less agitated? Do you want to spend more time exploring the things that matter most to you, less time binge-watching shows on Netflix? These are the outcomes you want to change.

Next, look one level deeper, at changes in habits that will help you achieve these outcomes. And this begs a second question: Which existing habits are standing in your way? Which new habits will allow you to make the changes you would like to see?

Step 2: Build New Habits By Stacking Them on Habits You Already Have

By now, you should have a few new habits in mind that will help you achieve the changes you’d like to make. The question then becomes: how do you build these new habits?

In our work with high performers and executives, we’ve found that the best way to build new habits is to, in the words of habit expert James Clear, “stack” them on top of existing habits.

For example, let’s say you want to build the habit of spending less time distracted by your phone. You could try to build this habit from scratch by saying, “I am not going to look at my phone at all in the evening.”

Stacking this new habit on top of an existing habit is a much more effective strategy. For example, you can say: “After I walk through my front door and take off my jacket in the evening, I’m going to put my phone on Do Not Disturb mode.” This approach increases your likelihood of building the habit not only by tying it to an existing habit (taking off your coat as you walk in the door) but it also includes a specific action, which the research says is another important strategy for making habits stick. Instead, saying vaguely, “I’m going to try to look at my phone less,” it’s based on a tangible action, “switching my phone to Do Not Disturb.”

The path to changing your life is more about the process of building the habit than the specific habit itself.

There are numerous ways to enact this strategy in everyday life. You could use your walk into the office as a time for practicing present moment awareness, use slowing down in your car at stop signs or stop lights as a cue to take one or two mindful breaths, or use beginning meals as a cue for expressing one thing you are grateful for.

The possibilities here are endless with this simple strategy: Stack the new habit you wish to create on top of an existing habit so that it becomes integrated into the midst of your everyday life.

Step 3: Build and Sustain Your New Habits Using the Four C’s

The final step uses what we call the Four C’s of habit formation to weave these new habits deep into the fabric of your everyday life.
1. Commence Small. This first critical tip builds on Stanford professor BJ Fogg’s research, which suggests you start with a goal you can realistically achieve. For example, it’s better to start with 5 minutes of meditation each day than to set yourself up for disappointment by trying to meditate for an hour. Be careful of setting unrealistic New Year’s goals that risk failing in mere days because they are too big. Remember, the path to changing your life is more about the process of building the habit than the specific habit itself.
2. Commit. Make a 100% commitment to building your new habit. It turns out that it’s actually easier to commit to building a new habit 100% of the time than 99%. That 1%, after all, can make you miserable. It fuels that voice in your head that says, “I’ll skip it just this once.” But by making a 100% commitment to a tiny habit, you end this mental argument. We have seen over and over again with thousands of people that this is really the key tip for creating new habits.
3. Create a consistent Cue. Going back to the idea of habit stacking, where creating a “cue” helps you remember to act. Use one of your existing habits as your cue, as a trigger that helps you remember to build the new habit. If you want to spend less time mind wandering and more time noticing the sights, sounds, and sensations of the present moment, for instance, come up with a regularly repeating cue that reminds you to practice, a cue like waking up, going to bed, walking upstairs, stopping at stoplights, riding in elevators, or standing in line at the store.
4. Celebrate. All you have to do to celebrate is savor the experience for just a few seconds. Savor the exquisite feeling of connecting to your breath. Savor the feeling of pleasure that you derive from doing the activity you made a 100% commitment to carry out.
So, while the world hammers on about goals, outcomes, and New Year’s resolutions over the next few weeks, remember that real change and progress only happens when we carefully construct a system of habits that make new outcomes possible.
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January 14, 2025