With the Christmas food coma ever so gradually subsiding, it’s time to think about the next holiday-related milestone: our New Year’s resolutions. Famously, many of us struggle to hold ourselves to the promises we made at the beginning of a fresh 365-plus days. We tend to hold ourselves to standards that are too high, or we don’t fully commit to a strategy that makes our resolutions stick. It can be a lot easier to brainstorm than to do it in practice.

If we do want to have a fighting chance at seeing through what we started, we’ve got to be realistic. It helps if we know there is something in it for us that is going to make us feel good. For example, if we want to become nicer and more forgiving we can make a point of surrounding ourselves with more wholesome content. It makes us feel good, so we make others feel good in turn.