Are You Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions?

You might be better off not making them in the first place.

Image source: freestocks.org from Olsztyn, Poland, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I never keep my New Year’s resolutions. That’s because I never make New Year’s resolutions.

But apparently, about 38% – 50% of Americans do. What do they make resolutions about? Exercise, weight loss, and healthier eating top the list, but it basically boils down to self-improvement. How many New Year’s resolutions succeed? Some say that 80% have gone by the wayside as early as the end of January, with only 8% being kept all year. Whatever the precise number, that’s a high failure rate.

So, maybe I don’t make resolutions because I’m afraid of failure. Maybe I don’t like going along with the crowd.

Or maybe I’m on to something.

Given the low success rate of New Year’s resolutions, it’s amazing that people keep making them at all. The extent to which we humans maintain enough optimism to attempt to start anew, year after year, is rather endearing. It’s also rather disheartening. Isn’t there a better way?

The self-help industrial complex sets us up for failure

To find that better way, it helps to understand the underlying problems with New Year’s resolutions. As I see it, the main one is that the resolutions stem from the conviction that we’re not good enough as we are.

Sadly, I didn’t come up with the term myself, but I’ve written before about the insidious nature of the American “self-help industrial complex,” which in 2021 was valued at $10.4 billion. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with trying to help ourselves, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to help others help themselves. But whether its proponents are well-intentioned or seeking to make a buck, the trend has not made us happier. Instead, it’s led to a feeling that we must take on the impossible task of becoming perfect.

The quest for perfection does more than set us up for failure. It makes us feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong with us in the first place.

These days, it’s not okay to just be ourselves. We must all be leaders and entrepreneurs. Ideally, we should also be outgoing and energetic. While remaining calm, balanced, and at ease. We must be thin and fit, we must look and feel young, we must take risks, we must live fully. We must have a morning routine and an evening routine. We must eat the right things. We definitely must be productive. We must go beyond being good and strive to be the best. We must be fully optimized.

In a New Yorker article titled “Improving Ourselves to Death,” Alexandra Schwartz sums it up well: “We are being sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, all at once, including parts that we did not previously know needed upgrading.”

That’s a lot of pressure.

It’s no wonder that so many people feel the need to make New Year’s resolutions. They want to get thinner, fitter, healthier, happier, wealthier — better. But even if a few specific resolutions succeed, most of these efforts are doomed from the start; by definition, no one can attain the impossible standard we’ve set for ourselves.

How not to fail

Say that, even after reading this far, you still believe in New Year’s resolutions and are resolved to keep making them. How can you succeed at keeping them?

Here’s what not to do: Don’t make resolutions without coming up with a plan for achieving them. A plan to get fit without considering the steps to get there is bound to fail. Don’t rely on willpower, because that’s easily depleted when overused. Don’t rely on the fact that you’ve made a resolution to motivate you; if you’re not ready to make a change, the resolution is unlikely to help.

And don’t expect me to tell you how to make effective resolutions. There are plenty of articles with tips on that, like this one. Go and read them if you want to; I’m not stopping you. But they aren’t for me. I remain committed to not making New Year’s resolutions.

A better way

What do I propose we do instead?

We can start by acknowledging that we will never achieve the perfection demanded of us by today’s standards. We can take small steps to exercising more and eating right without relying on resolutions to get us there, and focus more on the journey than the destination. We can try to appreciate our positive qualities while accepting the ones we’re not so crazy about (I know, easier said than done). We can put our energy into what we’re good at instead of trying to fit ourselves into boxes that just don’t fit us.

The New Yorker article provides some solace in a quote from Will Storr, author of Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us: “Once you realize that it’s all just an act of coercion, that it’s your culture trying to turn you into someone you can’t really be, you can begin to free yourself from your demands.”

The freedom doesn’t end there. We can also try to relax about how we use our time, as Oliver Burkeman suggests in Four Thousand Weeks — a book I highly recommend and that doesn’t take much time to read (I wrote more about it a couple weeks ago). Burkeman suggests that we stop holding ourselves to impossible productivity and performance standards. His ten tips for a healthier way to make the most of our limited time include deciding in advance what to fail at (because we can’t do it all) and practicing doing nothing (which can release us from our need to control everything).

His larger message is this: “Accepting our mortality helps us let go of busyness and focus on what’s most important to us in order to live a happier, more meaningful life.”

That sounds not only more effective but also more enjoyable than fretting about New Year’s resolutions. Though it’s a hard message to fully internalize, it’s downright liberating.

There’s no doubt that it takes practice to let go and refocus. It’s all about starting with small steps. I once had a meditation teacher who assured us that each time we noticed ourselves getting lost in our thoughts was a moment of awareness; the more of those moments we had, the more aware (even enlightened) we’d become. That’s the beauty of practice.

An alternative to making New Year’s resolutions, then, is to practice shifting our focus to whatever we deem important. This newsletter has been a big part of that shift in my life; making time for it has brought me hitherto-missing satisfaction, despite the angst of writing and being read. And, Flower Child that I am, my shift in focus has also increasingly come to mean focusing on love. By that I mean trying to approach all situations, even the trying ones, with love. Yes, that’s very much a work in progress — as is all of life.

So I propose that we make a fundamental shift. What if we eschew traditional New Year’s resolutions and instead focus on cultivating our ability to love ourselves, others, and our planet? That’s one resolution this Flower Child can get behind.