The more you honor your integrity, the more dignity you have. Your promises to yourself must be so important and easily kept that you'll reach out and grab them every single day -- because you want what you've promised yourself!

The ability to overcome temptation and effectively say no is critical not only to your physical health, but also to maintaining a sense of well-being and control in your mental health.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, willpower is largely a useless strategy to overcoming internal resistance. Fortunately, there is an easier way to get unstuck from any project, goal or to-do you have been blocked from taking action on.

Frame a situation around a much-cherished goal and you are more likely to stick to that goal and/or sway others to seek it too. That's one of many stories with lessons for sticking to a plan that psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino offers in her new book Sidetracked.

We cannot control what happens to us. Sometimes, difficult and tragic events overwhelm us. Yet no matter what has transpired, we do have the magnificent power to choose how to respond to life and how to move forward.

The key is finding the joy in between the peaks -- paying attention to the moments, to the joy in the creating of your dreams, and to the pride you feel in yourself. Even if no one else ever acknowledges what you're doing, this is the true objective.

Why do we make bad decisions? Why do we eat that extra cookie or choose a cheeseburger instead of a salad with grilled chicken? It turns out there is nothing wrong with you when you give into fatigue or temptation. Your brain has simply run out of gas.

It's hard to motivate yourself to adopt new habits, but it's even harder to rid yourself of old ones. More often than not, it's the latter that keep us from becoming the person we really want to be.

"Fatigue" turned out to be the perfect word for what many people were beginning to feel after a few years of hyperconnectivity, information overload and always-on living.

With a large volume of research showing that self-control is a limited resource -- one that can be depleted as quickly as the money in your bank account -- is it worth the effort it takes to achieve self-mastery?

If your New Year's resolution involves making a change in your diet with weight loss as a goal, you are facing a dizzying array of information out there. There is a great deal of evidence about what practices help weight loss, much of it contradictory.

Have you ever tried to lose weight by not thinking about food? How about trying to stop yourself from calling your love interest by blocking out all thoughts about that person? Ever try to quit smoking by trying not to think about smoking? Did it work? I'll bet it didn't.

Let's face it: Too often, our New Year's resolutions are toothless fairytales that quickly fall by the wayside, abandoned long before February rolls around. The good news is that it needn't be this way.

The difference between those who are successful and those who aren't is not whether or not you suffer from stress, but how you deal with it when you do. Here are nine scientifically-proven strategies for defeating stress whenever it strikes.

Anyone who has tried to break a bad habit has experienced the trouble with willpower. You want to stick to your diet, but you find yourself standing at a buffet filled with tempting desserts. Psychologists have been quite interested in understanding why willpower works so poorly.

If you've begun to make a lifestyle change -- a new diet, exercise routine, stress reduction activity, or anything else -- consider that there will be times when you may need or want to get off your lifestyle wagon.

While getting the gold or winning the race matters, what carries even more weight is the willingness to dedicate every last drop of energy in pursuit of a goal.