(WJMN) — As another year comes to a close, many people are thinking of their New Year’s resolutions.

A licensed professional counselor with Dial Help in the U.P. has some advice on how to make some healthy, realistic goals for 2022.

“Statistics actually have shown that 80% of people fail their New Year’s resolutions within the first three months, so by March they are failing their New Year’s resolution because they have come to realize that it’s just not obtainable, we’re setting too big of goals,” said Morgan Vallejo, Youth One Stop Clinical Counselor for Dial Help. “If I could give advice it would be kind of setting smaller goals, baby steps, taking one day at a time.”

Vallejo said your mental health can be affected by New Year’s resolutions.

“I’m sure you’ve set a goal for yourself that maybe you have achieved or you didn’t achieve it. Maybe you didn’t achieve it in the timeline that you would have like to achieve it in,” Vallejo said. “But when that happens we start to blame ourselves or we start to give ourselves guilt trips, right? Those things definitely affect our mental health, they definitely affect our emotional health, our self-esteem, and just our feelings about ourselves.”

She said you should make sure to give yourself grace.

“We need to be more graceful (to) ourselves and be more humble. And say to ourselves, ‘Hey, cut yourself some slack. You can only be better than the day you were before,'” Vallejo she said.

Vallejo said there has been an increase in anxiety and depression over the last two years and wants to remind everyone to be kind to themselves going into the new year.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is offering mental health resources. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, you can call 888.536.6136 and press “8” to talk to someone. You can also visit michigan.gov/staywell for a list of more resources.

— News 8 contributed to this report.