How to Set New Year’s Resolutions That Actually Work | A Guide for People with Anxiety
By Jordan Kurtz (she/her), MA, LPCC, Anxiety Therapist in Denver, CO.
Setting New Year’s resolutions can feel like a high-stakes gamble when you live with anxiety. While the "New Year, New Me" energy is everywhere, it often brings an uninvited guest: the crushing pressure to be perfect. For many, the tradition of goal-setting quickly devolves into a cycle of overthinking, self-criticism, and the inevitable "all-or-nothing" spiral.
But here is the truth: productivity culture wasn’t designed with a sensitive nervous system in mind. Standard goal-setting advice, like "push past your limits" or "no excuses", often triggers the very avoidance and overwhelm we’re trying to manage.
If you’ve spent years making resolutions in January only to abandon them by February out of pure exhaustion, it’s not a lack of willpower. It’s a lack of a framework that accounts for your mental health. In this guide, we’re shifting the focus from rigid milestones to sustainable, anxiety-informed growth. We’ll explore how to set intentions that honor your capacity, lower the stakes, and actually stick, and we’ll help you learn how to do this without sending your stress levels into overdrive.
How to Set Healthy New Year’s Resolutions
Explore this guide on how to set mindful, intentional, and healthy New Year’s resolutions that actually work for a sensitive nervous system. Below, I offer insight into the same themes we might explore together in an anxiety therapy session. My hope is that these reflections help you navigate your own process and set goals in a way that truly supports your well-being, rather than adding to your stress.
New Year’s Resolutions for Diet and Movement
Your Resolutions
“I want to change my diet”
“I want to be stronger or more active”
“I want to become more confident in how I look”
“I want to feel more energized”
Your Therapist’s Curiosity
Our relationship with our bodies and food are not created in isolation. Societal pressures, familial norms, our physiological makeup, and more contribute to how comfortably we can move our bodies, our acceptance with our bodies, our definition of “healthy”, and what we consider exercise. Holding these goals, a Denver therapist on our team is likely to collaborate with you to also understand:
Rules around food growing up
How you define an “ideal” body type and the impact of that standard in your daily life
The function of exercise in your life
How others around you discuss bodies, movement, and food
Awareness of these elements will allow you and your therapist to understand the driving forces and accompanying emotions that color your relationship with food and body acceptance and/or neutrality. If it comes to light that goals are driven by shame, guilt, anxiety, rigid expectations, and/or a system of punishment, your therapist will cultivate insight with you about the origin of these emotions and how to dictate your own compassionate and balanced relationship with your body
New Year’s Resolutions for Self Improvement
Your Resolutions
“I want to develop a faith/sense of purpose/meaning”
“I want to connect to a community of people like me”
“I want to learn more about a culture I belong to”
“I want to understand myself better”
Your Therapist’s Curiosity
Identity exploration can only occur in spaces of safety, acceptance, and autonomy. Many of us growing up were told by family members, religion, economic or cultural geography that some part of us wasn’t welcome, wasn’t tolerated, didn’t/shouldn’t exist, or should be different- race, ability status, gender orientation, or sexual orientation are just a few. At CZ Therapy Group, we will identify what or who these barriers were and how you have adapted to a non-inclusive world. Validation for how you have endured and permission to fully embody all parts of yourself in a non-judgmental space will help deepen your self-discovery path.
New Year Resolutions to Improve Your Relationships
Your Resolutions
“I want to feel more connected to my partner(s)”
“I want to prioritize more intimacy with my partner(s)”
“I want to be open to being vulnerable in a relationship”
“I want to be able to have tougher conversations in a healthier way with my partner(s)”
Your Therapist’s Curiosity
Relationships are interconnected systems that hold the capacity for positive cycles of connection and negative cycles of disconnection. Disentangling our own individual contributions to the cycle (i.e. how we respond to negativity from our partner) and how we are impacted by our partner (i.e. things they do that trigger us) is challenging to do in isolation, even when partnerships have strong foundations of communication. In anxiety therapy at CZTG, we hold space for parts of your experience that influence how you show up (consciously or unconsciously) in relationships, - including sexual history, familial and cultural norms about intimacy and vulnerability, and coping mechanisms – to bring empathy and awareness towards core needs beneath emotions in conflict. In couple’s therapy, a CZTG helps redirect blame to the cycle of conflict itself versus individual partners to undo shame. Once the cycle is identified and can be labeled and caught by both partners when conflict emerges, a therapist will then help formulate language for each partner to express what they need to deescalate tension.
New Year’s Resolutions to Change Your Habits
Your Resolutions
“I want to quit ____”
“I want to start going to/doing ____ weekly or monthly”
“I want to strengthen this part of myself…”
“I want to be free of this part of myself…”
Your Therapist’s Curiosity
Habits that we are quick to label as “destructive”, “useless”, or “unhealthy” are not often approached with wondering: How did this habit arise? What did it arise in response to? What does it offer us? How do we feel when we do it and when we don’t do it? Freeing ourselves of a habit or developing an alternative without exploration of the emotional origins of that habit can create difficulty in maintaining change as we are addressing symptoms, not causes.
If you were exploring these in anxiety therapy, your therapist may guide you to the catalysts for developing a habit and reframe them as protections against painful emotions. Once these emotions are identified, your therapist may then help you process them safely in ways that don’t require leaning on our protective habit.
Experience Anxiety Therapy in Denver, CO.
Anxiety therapy in Denver, CO can offer so much support as we start off the new year! Our team of anxiety therapists would love to connect! Follow these three simple steps to get started:
Reach out to schedule a free 20-minute consult call to see if couples therapy is right for you
Connect with the Denver anxiety therapist of your choice via a phone consult.
Begin the process of healing in anxiety therapy!
Meet The Writer: Jordan Kurtz, Anxiety Therapist in Denver, CO.
Jordan Kurtz (she/her) is a Denver anxiety therapist, couples counselor, and staff writer at CZTG. Jordan focuses on therapy for anxiety, trauma, adolescence, and relationships. Her approach is authentic, warm, and affirming, which she interweaves throughout her use of advanced evidence-based modalities, including EMDR, Emotion Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT), and somatic therapy. She provides anxiety therapy in Denver and virtually throughout the state of Colorado. If you’d like to work with Jordan, feel free to reach out to schedule a consultation call.