Healthy Habits in the New Year: How Can Therapy Help?

Can you believe we’re a quarter of a century into the new millennium? Like most new years, 2025 carries with it a lot of things – a new year, a fresh start, a new lease on life if you’re into that sort of thing. So, if you’re here to learn how to finally stick to at least one of those goals you set for yourself for the New Year, keep reading. We’re Claibourne Counseling, an award-winning team of licensed therapists in Scottsdale, AZ. We’re going to lay out a few ideas of how to incorporate tried and true therapeutic modalities into your 2025 goal-setting to create healthy habits that will hopefully last past February.

To start, I’m sure this isn’t the first article you’ve read about goal setting. There’s all the usual advice. Be realistic. Set attainable and sustainable goals. Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound). That advice is all great and shouldn’t be ignored. We want to go deeper though. We want to talk about how the tools we use in therapy can help with achieving those goals we know you’ve already spent time thinking through and planning. We’re going to show you how CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) can be valuable assets for creating those healthy habits you’ve always watched other people master and wondered why they were just out of reach for you. Let’s get started.

If you’re vaguely familiar with EMDR you may be asking yourself, “How can Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing help me create healthy habits and achieve my goals more effectively?” It’s a question worth asking since on the surface EMDR is a therapy that skeptics might describe as a quick fix, only for those with deep trauma, or even a pseudoscience akin to hypnotherapy. The truth is, that EMDR is a highly evidence-based approach used to resolve dysfunctionally stored information. It is an extensively researched form of psychotherapy that is proven effective and endorsed by mental health organizations around the world, including the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization.

When it comes to building health habits, a lot of people are great at picturing their ideal goal. But when it comes to setting that goal, they find themselves struggling because of unresolved emotional experiences or limiting beliefs. Some examples include:

• Fear of failure – Failure is something we all experience at some point or another. However, we all handle it differently. Past failures might create anxiety or self-doubt about trying something again. Trying again can me failing again, which is super scary and just plain sucks. This loop plays over and over preventing us from ever starting.
• Negative Self-Perceptions – The number of times I’ve failed at getting up and exercising in the morning because “I just don’t have the discipline” is embarrassing. These self-sabotaging thoughts also stifle any efforts before they begin.
• Trauma Responses – Of course, we’re going to talk about trauma. It’s not just a buzzword. Trauma, even seemingly unrelated ones, can trigger avoidance behaviors like procrastination or perfectionism.

EMDR helps to reprocess these negative memories or beliefs, so they no longer hold emotional power over you. With EMDR, you can create space for positive change and healthy habits. That’s not all though. EMDR encourages a focus on both the past and the future, allowing you to identify blocks as well as ideal outcomes. Using the Future Technique of EMDR, you can visualize achieving your goals while addressing emotional resistance. This process helps to strengthen the connection between your goal and your core values.

The purpose of EMDR is to reinforce positive beliefs. This is a priceless tool when it comes to building healthy habits and achieving goals. Here’s an example:

In an EMDR session, we discover your underlying belief that you must be perfect or that you always give up on your New Year’s Resolutions. Then, we pinpoint the first time you felt this disappointment, define the worst part of feeling you have to be perfect, or the experience affecting you the most.

Once the target is set up, the bilaterals start (i.e., the EMDR device begins alternating back and forth), and your brain literally does all the work from there. It’s now healing that wound naturally – similarly to how the body heals other physical wounds – by rebuilding with fresh pathways based on new beliefs, such as “I am a hard worker, and I don’t have to be perfect.”

The reprocessing that your brain automatically completes allows you to internalize healthier self-beliefs leaving you feeling more capable and empowered to tackle challenges.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a bit easier to digest when it comes to therapeutic modalities that can help with creating healthy habits and setting goals. One of the more traditional forms of talk therapy, CBT is ideal for addressing thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that influence decision-making and follow-through. This method of therapy helps us to become more aware of negative thinking loops so that we can respond more kindly to ourselves, reframing those thoughts with positive ones. CBT helps us to identify triggers or habits, like procrastination or avoidance, that tend to impede progress. We can talk through the root of why procrastinating or avoiding might just be part of the process for one person, while it could be self-sabotaging for others. Likewise, just like with EMDR, we can work through why thoughts like “I’m not good enough.” or “I’ll never have the discipline.” play on repeat in our brains. CBT allows us to recognize those negative cognitive distortions, those all-or-nothing types of thoughts, that so often keep us from achieving our goals. CBT isn’t magic by any means, but with practice it allows us to take those negative thoughts and turn them into something positive, to see them from a different perspective. It’s from that new perspective that change emerges and that healthy habits are born.

There are several different modalities of CBT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Exposure & Response Therapy (ERT), and even more granular modalities like CBT – Chronic Pain, or CBT – Insomnia, to name a few. Each of these individual modalities requires specific training and focus from the therapist. Likewise, each of them is highly targeted for managing specific issues like irritation, impatience, disappointment, and other emotions that crop up in our daily lives. Not only can CBT help, but finding the right CBT therapist can make a world of difference in encouraging reflection on past successes and helping you recognize your capability to overcome challenges. This confidence boost makes setting goals and committing to them that much easier.

The right CBT therapist can also help you employ tools like thought logs, journaling, or behavior trackers to monitor your progress and reinforce positive changes. Tracking allows you to celebrate milestones and course-correct when necessary. You’ll also find that you’ve developed more effective strategies for managing stress, anxiety, or any setbacks that might derail your progress. CBT incorporates techniques like mindfulness, meditation, positive affirmations, and breathing exercises to help keep you on track.

When it comes to setting goals and creating healthy habits, EMDR and CBT teach you a lot of things. You’ll learn to manage your expectations, with your first lesson being that nobody’s perfect. Part of being human means that perfection was never a requirement and perhaps most importantly, that it’s OK to not be so hard on yourself. You’ll learn that you may have to learn these lessons more than once. That’s OK, too. This is all part of building those health habits and not just setting goals but achieving them.

You’ll learn about yourself and how you respond to failure and disappointment, how you process things, and that it’s OK to do things your own way. Learning your triggers, your negative thought patterns, your own way of thinking – it’s all a part of the process of being human. There’s no handbook for any of this. We’re all just figuring it out as we go along. The good news is that therapeutic modalities like EMDR and CBT are tried and true, evidence-based therapies and have helped countless individuals to create healthy habits and achieve their goals in the past and they’ll continue helping many in the future. Let’s make you one of them! Give Claibourne Counseling a call. We offer in-person counseling in our Scottsdale office or online counseling to all of Arizona.