Walyou

Stick Mobile App Helps You Stick to Your New Year’s Resolutions

Posted: 16 Jan 2016 02:47 PM PST

Out of all the people promising that they would change for the better once a New Year starts, only eight percent manage to stick to their promises, so it’s no wonder that January 17 has been declared national “Ditch Your New Year’s Resolution Day.”

It is said that it takes 21 days to make or break a habit, and yet, only 8% of the people starting the New Year with a new habit are able to keep it past the 17th day. With that in mind, GSW, a leader health and wellness advertising agency and an inVentiv Health company, has developed a mobile app that helps people stick to their resolutions. Intuitively titled Stick, the iOS app dissects the goals, quantifies the ongoing period the resolutions have been kept for, and offers a bonus via the included gamification scheme.

“The Stick app bridges modern thinking with modern tools to help achieve behavior change,” said GSW Executive Creative Director, Dave Sonderman. “Current behavior modification research has demonstrated that being clear and simple with new goals, and sharing these goals with others, is critical to successfully keeping new resolutions. The kinds of resolutions we want to achieve most thrive when backed by peer support.”

The problem with sticking to New Year’s resolution is that most of them are too generic. Most people (well, 92% of them, if we’re to give credit to statistics) don’t attach a number to these goals, and without something measurable in mind, it’s quite easy to lose track of the resolutions.

First of all, Stick asks you to choose whether you want to start (running a specific distance each day) or stop something (smoking is probably the best example here). Next, you’ll have to choose whether you want to do or not do that on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. After each such period passes, you are awarded points, and according to GSW, you’re receiving more points if you’re breaking a habit rather than when forming one, because it’s far more difficult to stop something than to start it.

Not at last, you can recruit friends, share your resolutions with them, and compare the points each of you has obtained for sticking to the New Year’s resolution.

“We’ve harnessed psychological guidance about how to make and actually stick to resolutions to help others succeed,” concluded Sonderman. “GSW has been passionate about translating health and wellness insights into action for more than 30 years. We call it Speaking People. Stick is a fun way to apply technology and wisdom into a tool that helps anyone who’s looking to shape their habits to achieve personal goals.”

The Stick app is available exclusively for iOS, and can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store. There’s no word on when or if an Android version will ever be developed. While there are several alternatives for Android (Habit Streak being one of them), none is as appealing as the one developed by GSW and inVentiv Technologies.

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