We’re now (somehow) nearly a quarter of the way through 2023, and despite our best intentions at the start of the year, the chances are high that some of the resolutions you carefully noted down in January have been left behind (or at least slightly neglected).

We get it. Life’s busy, and the depths of winter, with its dark mornings and low temperatures, never seems like the perfect time to embark on a gruelling self-improvement plan. But if your good intentions have slipped since we entered 2023, it’s important to remember that all is not lost.

Enter the spring reset. Three months into the year – and three months away from the post-Christmas haze in which you might have made your resolutions – it’s a great time to look back at those ambitions, see how and why your good intentions might have slipped and think about more realistic ways you can shake up your routine. Consider it a sort of quarterly review, but just for you. 

“It’s always important to regularly check in and re-evaluate your goals,” says Dr Elena Touroni, consultant psychologist and co-founder of The Chelsea Psychology Clinic. “The move into spring provides the perfect opportunity to do just that: to explore what’s working and what isn’t.” To help you kick off your reset, we’ve asked experts for their top advice on looking back at your new year goals and making a more achievable plan for the rest of the year.

Start off with self-compassion

Rather than berating yourself about all those times you pressed snooze instead of leaping out of bed for an early morning run, or the evenings you spent scrolling Instagram rather than switching off with a mindfulness podcast, be honest about just how tough shaking up your routine can be. “Firstly, we want to lean into self-compassion, especially if we haven’t made the progress we hoped we would,” says therapist Juulia Karlstedt. “Rather than beating ourselves up or going on to a place of self-criticism, we want to recognise that making a change is difficult. It is normal for our brains to want to return to our old habits, especially when we get caught up in normal life, because we’ve often been doing them for a long time.”

It’s also important, Karlstedt adds, not to get too bogged down about whether we’ve neatly ticked all our goals off yet, and instead start thinking about any small habits that might help us get to that point. “Are there positive habits that you have been able to form or unhelpful ones you have given up?” she asks. “When we get caught up in very black and white goal-focused thinking, we can forget to recognise the progress we have made.”

Focus on the positives

On a similar note, Fortis Therapy and Training founder and managing director Alexis Powell-Howard suggests writing down what you have done so far to meet your resolutions, as opposed to focusing on what you haven’t achieved yet. Seeing everything written down on paper, as small as you think it may be, is an important way of avoiding negative self-talk, she says. “[It can] encourage us to continue working towards goals, especially if they seem out of reach.” The aim is to focus on what we have done, rather than getting bogged down in our own perceived inadequacies.

Get real about your resolutions

There’s no point putting time and energy into resolutions that no longer make sense for you. Summer Jupp and Zinzi Miller-Blake, holistic practitioners and co-founders of Ark, suggest taking a moment to ask yourself: “Are these resolutions still relevant to the version of you sat here today, this week or this month?

“Simply setting a resolution doesn’t (and shouldn’t) make us restrict our future growth,” they add. “We always follow the rule: reflect on the present moment, look into the future (so to speak) and then go back and assess your resolutions.”

Don’t be afraid to scale back or simplify

We might also have set ourselves goals that are simply unrealistic – and when we can’t meet that standard, our motivation inevitably drops. To tweak your resolutions slightly to make them more achievable, Karlstedt suggests asking yourself: “How likely you are to be able to do something today on a scale of zero to 10, where zero means not likely at all and 10 means you could get up right now and do it without any hesitation.” The actions you need to take to achieve your resolutions, she adds, ideally should be ones that we can rate at a 7 or above on that scale. So no signing up for a marathon if you’re yet to complete Couch to 5k. 

Ask yourself ‘why?’

It’s important to focus on your rationale for making these changes, too. “Check in with yourself around your reasons for each goal,” Dr Touroni recommends. “Are you doing it for yourself, because you know it will make you feel good and it will add something to your life? Or are you doing it because you feel pressured – by yourself or others – in some way?”

Try habit stacking

Starting small and adding positive habits to other parts of our pre-existing routine is a simple yet effective way of sneaking changes into your day. It’s a hack that’s known as habit stacking, and it’s a great way to make larger goals feel far more manageable and part of your routine, and often leads to us staying consistent with them, Powell-Howard explains.

“If your goal is to go to the gym every day, make the habit of packing your gym kit every night before bed, then take your kit with you to work,” she recommends. Or, Karlstedt adds: “If you want to begin to take a multivitamin, you can put your vitamin bottle by your coffee machine so that your new habit rides on the back of your caffeine habit.”

Embrace a stop-start approach

“One of the most powerful things we can work on developing is a growth mindset that recognises that stopping and restarting is a part of learning anything new, including establishing new positive habits,” Karlstedt says. “The growth comes from learning to restart, not from consistently doing something perfectly.” Restarting, she adds, is not a failure, but a continuation of your journey to bring those new habits into your life. 

Images: Getty