From the December 2007 Special Editions | 1 comments

5 New Year's Resolutions You Owe Yourself ( Preview )

We questioned health professionals and plumbed the scientific literature in a quest for the most life-enhancing New Year's resolutions possible

By Charles Q. Choi

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December
2007 Issue
The Waiting Room A Silent Minority
From the Editor The Science of Staying Well
News Suffering a Slow Recovery
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On New Year’s Day more than a few of us annually resolve to change our lives—or at least our more self-indulgent habits. On the hunch that all good things flow from physical and mental well-being, Scientific American Body offers this list of recommended resolutions based on the advice of health professionals and the scientific literature. Whatever your goals, it will help you understand why hardly anything you could choose to do would have a bigger impact on your quality of life.

Perhaps the best New Year’s resolution is coming up with a strategy to sensibly tackle each of the five listed below. “New Year’s resolutions are notoriously unsuccessful because people have a superficial commitment to them,” notes health psychologist Frederick Gibbons of Iowa State University. “Whatever behavior you want to change requires a specific plan for going about it.”

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