At the start of a new year, people often experience the “fresh start effect,” a phenomenon where individuals are more motivated to make positive lifestyle changes at a specific, even symbolic moment.

However, this phenomenon can also be a hindrance to getting started with a New Year’s resolution. When people wait for the “right” time to start, it actually serves as an excuse to procrastinate. This leads to many people thinking they’d change their behavior for the better in the new year, only to put off starting to be better until Monday, January 5.

The fresh start effect also sets up unrealistic expectations. Waiting for the exact right moment to start can create the mindset that we need to be perfect in how we implement a change. 

All of this can lead to hesitations and delays in taking the first step. After that, it can lead to giving up entirely. Which can have real consequences if your resolution is safety-related.

Since New Year’s resolutions have such a high failure rate, this year we’re challenging people to help others build new habits. Taking the pressure off your own success (or failure) and focusing on helping others can actually benefit you more than you might think. When you make a point to help others work on new habits, New Year’s resolutions have a much better chance of sticking.  

At SafeStart, we like to think of resolutions as opportunities to build new habits. As mentioned in our How to Make Habits Stick guide, fewer than 10% of people achieve their goals when trying to create new habits. That number does not exactly inspire people to put in the work required to make a beneficial action second nature. But the good news is that we’ve seen many people successfully make positive changes when working on creating new habits, as long as they take the right approach. And you can be part of that success by helping others on their habit-building journeys.

Here are five reasons why you should help others practice their habits this year.

#1—It helps you pick a habit to work on.

The fresh start effect can create pressure to make a monumental change, which in turn can make it hard to choose a resolution or habit to work on. Or if you’ve previously worked on habits—as is regular practice in SafeStart—it can be hard to break from reveling in your accomplishment by selecting a new habit that may be harder to adopt. It can also be challenging to think of another new habit for yourself to work on.

Thankfully, there’s good news. By helping others with their habits, it’s easier to see the benefits that the new routine could have on you. This can motivate you to practice the same habit for your own gain, or it could inspire you to work on something similar that applies to your day-to-day life.

#2—Helping others can make you happy!

Sheryl Crow said it best: “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.”

It feels good to be productive. And even though you’re not building your own habits, by helping someone else to build good habits, you get that same satisfaction of a job well done. Feeling useful has a strong link to happiness.

Acts of kindness are known to release oxytocin and dopamine, giving you the “helper’s high,” which not only strengthens your relationships with other people but also leads to your own personal contentment and well-being.

#3—You learn while they learn.

The protégé effect—the phenomenon where teaching others helps you retain more information—also applies when helping people build new habits. When helping someone work on their new habit, you want to ensure you’re giving them the right information. That motivates you to conduct research to ensure you’ve filled any knowledge gaps, in turn helping you to better retain information going forward.

When you help someone break down their habit into manageable steps, you also anticipate the challenges and understand the principles of the habit. This can also help you tap into techniques you’ve previously used for your own habit-building that you may have forgotten.

#4—It increases your personal accountability.

If you’ve set New Year’s resolutions before and failed or tried to create new habits and abandoned them, subconsciously, you’ll remember giving up. It could be one of the reasons you don’t want to attempt a new resolution. When you keep your habit-building private, you’re only accountable to yourself. And more often than not, it’s that nagging voice in your head that says, “No one will notice if I stop,” that allows you to ditch the effort.

But helping someone else work on a habit is a strong motivator to work on your own. Distance can provide clarity—it’s much easier to point out what someone else needs to do to succeed than to recognize the same factors in yourself. Helping someone achieve their goals can inspire you to put your own habit-achieving intentions into motion. If someone else can achieve the goal they set for themselves, why can’t you? The answer is that you can, and you’re more likely to hold yourself accountable when you’ve helped someone do the very thing you want to achieve.

#5—It creates an accountability group.

If someone has agreed to make their habit-building public and is allowing you to help them achieve their new habit, they were likely looking for external accountability. By helping others with their habits, you’ll not only increase your personal accountability, as the previous point discussed, but you can also inspire others around you to do the same. You can grow your accountability group by asking the person you’re helping to return the favor. You can also ask other people to help keep you accountable, too. In essence, you’re creating a habit-building support system where you keep each other responsible. And having someone else (especially a group of people) holding you to your intentions makes it harder to justify not following through on your habit-building steps.

Now that we’ve given you five good reasons to help others build new habits, you may want help with the particulars. Check out our Helping Others Build New Habits guide, which contains an example of a daily checklist for helping the habit-building stay on track. It’s an incredibly useful resource to have at hand as you embark on helping others establish new habits this year.