January is a time for resolutions and intentions: how will you make this year different and better than the one before? After having quite a difficult 2025, I too am looking towards the future and hoping that 2026 will be better. And with that in mind, I have decided to create some ‘DBT resolutions’: skills that I want to focus on this year, to hopefully get me closer to my own life worth living.

Changing Behaviour

The start of the year can be a perfect time to re-evaluate our habits and patterns of behaviour, to make sure that they are still serving their purpose. I know that there definitely are some bad habits that I would like to get rid of this year (hello too much screen time!) as well as new things that I would like to implement, that I think would really benefit me. Reinforcement is all about rewarding positive change, to make it more likely that you will engage in the behaviour, whilst extinction or punishment is to help you stop doing a behaviour that no longer serves you. Both strategies can be really helpful in changing behaviour, and can be used separately on different habits or in combination to try and shift a very tricky particular behaviour. What’s great about this skill is that you can personalise it, with rewards or adverse consequences that really motivate you. The key is to ensure that the consequences, whether they are good or bad, come directly after the behaviour you are trying to change, to ensure that your brain links the two events together and over time, associates the reward or punishment with that particular behaviour. You can also use these skills to nudge other people’s behaviour in a more favourable direction; I have tried this, but with limited success in my own life, so I will be sticking to just using it on myself this year!

Build Mastery

This is a very underrated skill, but one that deserves to be celebrated and used more, in my opinion. Its central premise – that doing something again and again improves your skill in it – is really crucial to building a sense of accomplishment and pride in your own capabilities. You can choose anything as your Build Mastery activity as well, whether that be cooking, learning a new language, drawing, understanding complex scientific concepts, crosswords, even specific DBT skills, etc. The options are endless! What I particularly like is that you can personalise what you want to focus on and set the right difficulty level for you. Over time, you can adjust the difficulty, to make sure that the activity is still slightly challenging, even as you become more proficient in it. The very way that the skill is set up – doing something consistently – not only teaches patience, but also reminds me that small efforts, repeated regularly over time, can result in great progress. It is a lovely metaphor for DBT too: over time, you can get more proficient in these skills, which can lead to increased emotional regulation and hopefully, greater life satisfaction.

PLEASE

PLEASE is a really deceptive skill: it seems incredibly simple, but it is actually very difficult to do consistently every day, at least in my experience! Whilst different aspects of the acronym will chime with different people (some people might need to focus more on treating physical illness than their consumption of mood-altering substances or vice versa), all of us could probably benefit from thinking about our diet, sleep and exercise. These provide a great foundation for improving physical health, upon which more emotional control can be built. It can be quite overwhelming, however, to think of completely overhauling your entire sleep schedule or exercise regime. This is where pairing PLEASE with Build Mastery could be a good way to make gradual and crucially, more sustainable change. You might start by swapping one daily snack for a piece of fruit, then build the difficulty by adding 5 minutes of gentle exercise a day, then build the difficulty with the additional aim of going to bed 10 minutes earlier, etc. Over time, these small changes will really add up! I think combining these two skills can also help you to stay focused on your progress with PLEASE throughout the year, not just at the start, leading to longer-lasting and more impactful change.

Values

Whilst thinking about the year ahead, it can be very tempting to think about the separate aspects of your life that you wish to change, but Values invite you to look at the bigger picture. I must confess: this is a DBT skill I really struggle with, which is why I want to make it more of a focus for me in 2026. Values are like a roadmap, helping to guide your actions and ultimately, your life, in a way that feels aligned with your Wise Mind, your true, calm and intuitive self. This skill has two parts: firstly, you need to ascertain what your values and priorities are, what really matters to you; then, put together a plan of actions to help you embody each value. For example, you could embody the value of kindness by volunteering once a week at a food bank. Part of what makes this skill tricky for me is that, for a large part of my life, I was living other people’s values, rather than my own. I think this is a common experience for a lot of us, which makes identifying our own values all the more important. In practicing this skill, I first needed to work out what mattered to me, not what I thought I should care about or what others wanted me to become. What I really like about DBT, and this skill in particular, is that it isn’t simply theoretical: it is also about taking practical actions to change your circumstances, and, by extension, hopefully change how you feel.

Whilst these are the skills I’m looking to focus on this year, there might be other skills that would benefit you, based on your own particular circumstances and goals. The great thing about DBT is that, whatever your aims for this year are, there is usually a skill that can help you achieve them!