On Creating New Habits
- saranaacu
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
by Pam Chang, L.Ac.
Sarana Community Acupuncture, January 2026
Photo by Nathan Lemon on Unsplash
Welcome to January—the time of year when many of us make promises to take better care of ourselves. While the intentions are good, I say: scrap the New Year’s resolutions. A year is too long. Life happens, priorities change. What sounded good in January may be wrong by April. If you feel compelled to make a New Year’s resolution, I suggest choosing something you can do once and be done with, like making that optometry appointment you’ve been procrastinating over, or updating the emergency contact information that lives on the refrigerator.
Psychologist Brian King writes “habits are behaviors that our brain has learned to produce without thinking about.” 1 Creating new habits requires forced repetition unless the new behavior provides us with intense pleasure. How long it takes to create new habits depends on how pleasurable or painful the new behavior is. Setting a deadline, therefore, may be setting oneself up for failure. In my opinion, setting oneself up to just keep trying new things is a better long-term strategy.
For the past few years, instead of any specific New Year’s resolution, I’ve been promising myself a monthly check-in. Around the first of the month, I ask myself if I’m satisfied with how I’m taking care of myself or if there’s something I want to change during the coming month. A month is a good trial length for test-driving a new habit. In a month, I usually know if a new behavior is tolerable or beneficial. If a month is insufficient, I can choose to repeat the same change for the next month. Or, if the new behavior is too hard or too boring or not useful, then it’s time to move on to something else.
So, here’s the things I tried and how they worked, my 2025 in review. Last January, I read recommendations for New Year’s resolutions that included the practice of saying ‘yes’ to new experiences, and to take yourself on a monthly date to something cultural. I flopped on this one, only managing to attend 3 plays and 1 museum exhibit throughout the year.
In summer, after reading Jessie Inchauspe’s book Glucose Revolution, I tried her ‘life hacks’ for decreasing blood sugar spikes, including to eat fiber before other macronutrients. Six months later, most of the time I now eat veggies as a starter course before breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I also began taking after-dinner walks to more quickly metabolize the carbs/glucose I’ve just eaten. Exploring my neighborhood at dusk turned out to be fun in summer—I met the neighborhood deer and owls—but not so nice in winter. I’ll re-start this habit when daylight savings returns.
In October, I added button mushrooms to my diet—one per day or, sometimes, two servings per week—because I learned that mushrooms contain ergothioneine, a ‘stress vitamin’ that boosts immunity, has anti-oxidant, anti-carcinogenic, and anti-inflammatory properties, supports brain and nerve health, and protects skin, eye lenses, and other organs from ultraviolet-caused DNA damage 2. I like mushrooms, so eating them regularly was easy.
In November, I started brushing my teeth before, not after, breakfast as the American Dental Association recommends 3. This change will need another month before becoming a habit.
Overall, I’m satisfied with 2025’s changes and with how I’m taking care of myself, mostly because I’m also continuing the good-enough habits that I’ve acquired over decades.
In a NY Times article, Lyna Bentahar sets three rules for people hoping to make a change 4:
Set a measurable mark to aim for, e.g. “I’ll exercise 3 times a week” instead of the vague “I’ll exercise more.”
Set a realistic goal, one that fits your time and budget constraints.
Choose something that you actually want to do.
On top of these, I’ll add my own tips for acquiring new habits:
If you don’t succeed, try again or try something else. Life’s a work in progress.
If your life or health circumstances, or those of people close to you, are prompting you to make changes, lean into that incentive as it can be a wonderful motivator. A 2005 cancer diagnosis got me to clean up my diet, start meditating, and take up swimming. Watching my contemporaries deal with joint pain keeps me doing my nightly stretches.
Make small incremental changes. Try something easy and succeed at it, then apply your new self-confidence to changing something else. Over a year, or a decade, many small changes can add up to a big difference.
Find partners to support your good habits. My workout buddies and fellow Masters teammates keep me doing Tai Chi and swimming. Having friends who pay attention to health issues and who share tips encourages me to do the same.
And finally,
Recognize that you can make a difference in your life, that it’s worthwhile to prioritize yourself, and that when you are healthy and happy, you have more power to change the world.
Here’s wishing us all a good and healthful new year. And, if you have any good tips to share, please do!
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