I’ve always hated New Year’s resolutions , which sound to me like a list of things I should be doing, but am not. What’s the point? If it were important to me, I’d already be doing it. But talking to a colleague recently about New Year’s resolutions, I realized that maybe I’m being too dismissive. I’m all for self-improvement, which is really what most resolutions are about. I just don’t want to make myself feel crappy about something I’m not doing. And so I wondered: Could science help me find a resolution I’d actually keep? I dug into the literature and talked to some psychologists, and what I discovered is that science can’t tell me exactly what to resolve, but it has narrowed in on a few tricks that can help me succeed. The first, perhaps most crucial thing to do is pick a goal that you’re truly committed to. Not just something you think you should do, but something you truly want to do, said Marina Milyavskaya, a psychologist at Carleton Univ...