Should we make New Year’s Resolutions?
For many of us, the start of a new year is a time to make a fresh start, reflect on our goals and think about new habits we might like to welcome into our lives. This can be a really rewarding process, and it sometimes gets a bad rap these days.
The reasons for this are many, but a couple of prominent ones come to mind:
- There is an implicit notion that whatever new habit you’re after can ‘FIX’ you, and you are, after all, utterly broken and in need of fixing!
- Boom and bust cycles of dieting. Say no more.
I see that both of these are problematic and ultimately unhelpful. If your starting point is that you are broken and need fixing, the likelihood is that whatever new habit or goal you set, the journey will not be seamless, you will not achieve a perfect record and you may feel worse or more broken afterwards. I don’t even want to go into the second one, because I hope that we are all agreed now that crash diets- endless cycles of feast and famine- generally just don’t work!
But, what if we don’t go down either of these common routes? What if, instead, we start from a simpler and kinder place of accepting that we are wonderful, flawed human beings, now, and will continue always to be? And yet despite this, we could learn new skills, pick up new healthy habits and achieve new goals, however small, that will improve our lives?
What if we approached our resolutions as we would help a child to learn? We wouldn’t say to them that unless you do this perfectly every day, it is futile. We would congratulate them on any progress they make towards their goal. And we wouldn’t expect them to change overnight, but instead to gradually learn about and slowly master the new habit or skill. We would expect them to resist it at times, to not always want to do it, but to gradually get used to it and enjoy it until it becomes a part of their routine, their identity, their nature.
With this approach, why not use the New Year to reflect on what you want to see more of in your life? It does feel like a natural time to reset and think about the future. Perhaps re-start that daily meditation practice you had been trying to do but often not managing. Perhaps find a new yoga class that you commit to and welcome in the calm, strength and enjoyment that it brings. Perhaps, yes, tweak the quality of your diet for the better. But let’s help each other to do it gently and encouragingly. Nothing too big to commit to- small steps, every day, slowly improving, and acknowledging it won’t be perfect, but that it is still worth doing.
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