A week into the new year, the resolutions that you made on Jan. 1 may be starting to slip away. Research has shown that most people struggle to persevere when they set goals. The good news is that if you’re willing to think about setbacks productively rather than simply give up, you can use them to do better next time.

“Progress is never a linear process,” explains Sharon Salzberg, the author of “Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World.” “There is resilience training in realizing I can start over.” In fact,...

A week into the new year, the resolutions that you made on Jan. 1 may be starting to slip away. Research has shown that most people struggle to persevere when they set goals. The good news is that if you’re willing to think about setbacks productively rather than simply give up, you can use them to do better next time.

“Progress is never a linear process,” explains Sharon Salzberg, the author of “Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World.” “There is resilience training in realizing I can start over.” In fact, one of the best predictors of successfully quitting smoking is the number of times a person has tried and failed in the past.

“You want to steer clear of the ‘abstinence violation effect’—the attitude that if you’ve slipped once, you might as well give up completely.”

When you slip up on a resolution, instead of giving in to shame and despair, try to respond as you would to a friend who describes feeling defeated. “If you get stuck in ‘I’m so horrible, this has been happening for years,’ or blame others, you’ll feel disempowered and miss what you can change,” says Ms. Salzberg. What you want to steer clear of is succumbing to the “abstinence violation effect”—the attitude that if you’ve slipped once, you don’t have what it takes to persist and you might as well give up completely. For instance, if your New Year’s resolution was to eat healthier and you have a scoop of ice cream, you might as well finish the whole pint.

A better approach is to stay focused on your goal and where you are relative to it, rather than reverting to old habits. Try thinking of your resolutions as a form of performance, suggests George Mumford, an expert in sports psychology and the author of “The Mindful Athlete.” If you slip up you can start again, now.

To improve your ability to stick to a resolution, it’s important to understand the sequence of events that led to your misstep. One technique I use with clients in my therapy practice is called behavioral analysis or chain analysis. It is often used in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, an evidence-based treatment that helps people to manage emotions and reduce impulsivity. “The vast majority of people think willpower is the way to solve all their problems. That’s simply not true,” explains clinical psychologist Dr. Shireen Rizvi of Rutgers University, author of “Chain Analysis in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. “Instead, you need to assess what is getting in the way so you can address it.”

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To do your own analysis, begin with the slip and move backward in time, tracing the chain of events that led to it. Think of it as rewinding and replaying the tape, and be sure to watch with kindness, rather than cringing.

The process involves five steps. First, look at your vulnerabilities—whatever might have made you more susceptible to slipping that day, such as poor sleep, a pressing deadline, struggling with your mood, or loneliness. Second, pinpoint the prompting event, the exact tipping point where the likelihood of slipping went from possible to probable. Third, identify the thoughts, feelings and habits that followed from the event and led to the fourth item, the target behavior you want to change. Fifth and finally, take a look at the consequences of your behavior, both positive and negative, immediately and in the longer term.

Here’s one example. Say your goal is to exercise for 30 minutes before work, but when you woke up this morning you kept hitting the snooze button and didn’t have enough time to work out. Your vulnerability factors might be scrolling on your iPhone until after midnight or ongoing issues with insomnia, which led to the prompting event: waking up feeling exhausted.

Links may include thinking your day will be a wash if you don’t get more sleep, telling yourself you can’t exercise without coffee, scrolling on your phone in bed, stressing about the day ahead, or telling yourself you deserve to get more rest. Once you’ve missed your workout, some consequences might include being more sluggish later in the day, feeling down on yourself, and worrying that missing today’s exercise session leaves you more vulnerable to skipping again tomorrow.

With my clients, I like to take a piece of paper and make a numbered list of these steps: 1. Vulnerability, 2. Prompting Event, 3. Links, 4. Target Behavior, 5. Consequences. Then fold it in half vertically. On the left side of the page, fill in detailed information about the problem you encountered at each step. Then, on the right side of the page, write down solutions that would help you address it. For instance, if your target behavior is exercising before work, you can increase your chance of actually doing it by setting a bedtime alarm, seeking treatment for insomnia and planning to work out with a friend.

“Sticking to a new habit means doing some tracking and strategizing until things become automatic.”

This may sound complicated, but like living on a budget, sticking to a new habit means doing some tracking and strategizing until things become automatic. If you want to meet a goal that deeply matters to you, working on a chain analysis will be more useful than assuming you will always self-sabotage, or that you just can’t do it.

Whatever your New Year’s resolution, whether working on your temper or establishing a steady exercise routine, sitting with a slip and taking a closer look at why it happened can be uncomfortable, but ultimately it’s empowering. Rather than allowing waves of optimism or pessimism to drive you or hold you back, you can make more predictable progress by understanding what matters to you and what drives your behavior.

“There is a reason why a certain behavior occurs,” Dr. Rizvi explains. “Dissecting the events in the chain can help you gain a clear sense of exactly why and how your setback happened, and provides you with a wealth of information to help you forge ahead more effectively. ” Or as I tell my clients, with chains, you can actually change.

—Dr. Taitz is a clinical psychologist, an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of the books “How to Be Single and Happy” and “End Emotional Eating.”