New Year’s Resolutions: Is there any point?
New Year’s Resolutions are about forming new habits. Why not form the habit that will allow you to create further habits?
Happy New Year. 🎉🍾🎉
Thanks to everyone who has come on board and subscribed to my newsletter over 2024. Writers need readers, so it’s an honour to write for you all. This newsletter started in May as part of a writers development programme, but the more time I spend here the happier I have become. To see in the new year, I’ve departed my usual ramblings of my childhood trauma and written this quick piece about New Year’s Resolutions.
For 2025, I will be changing from publishing newsletters on Sundays to Wednesday. This is the first, so I hope you enjoy.
“New year, new start” is one of those phrases that slips through our lips every January, mine included. It is a terrible cliché, but I’ve always seen it as a good opportunity to close down the open tabs in my brain and refresh the browser. The trouble is having created some new, unused space, I fall into the trap of filling it with so-called New Year’s resolutions, and without realising it, I’ve stacked up new tabs and maxed out before I’ve begun. According to a recent You Gov poll, 16% of us plan making at least one New Year’s resolution for 2025. With the numbers so low, is there any point?
The custom of a New Year’s resolution dates back 4000 years to the Babylonians. They would celebrate the new year by promising the gods to pay their debts and return any borrowed objects. Whilst today we don’t make promises to the Gods, we do make them to ourselves. Has this innovation made it easier to stick to them? Well, the same poll reported that only 17% claimed to have stuck to their resolutions throughout the year, which is down from 31% in the previous year. After 4,000 years of broken promises, it’s not surprising less people are bothering. I’m someone who strives relentlessly for my goals and am finally seeing the results of my efforts. I wasn’t always this determined, so here are some reflections on what I’ve learned along the way.
New Year’s Resolutions are about getting into the habit of doing new things. In my case (and probably others on this platform), it will be writing more consistently, sending out newsletters on schedule, and building up my subscriber base. These are manageable but too often, people set overwhelming ambitions and it’s just lining ourselves up for failure.
The first hurdle we trip down on is the Monday Myth. Starting something new at the beginning of the week is certainly enticing. The synergy of a new week, new year, new habit, should make committing and sticking to our promises easier. But the problem with Mondays is that there are 52 of them this year. There will always be another Monday to start again but before you know it, it will be 2026.
In all seriousness, it’s because we’re muddled up between means and our ends, often confusing the difference between aspiration and practice. If the polling data is anything to go by, we make a practice out of setting goals and aspiring to achieve them. This is the wrong way around. I’ve found that to stick to our ‘resolutions’, there has to be a change in myself. The most effective habit to create this change was focus.
Focus isn’t something I can switch on by declaring, “Today, I’m going to focus.” I’ve learned that it’s a habit requiring continuous upkeep, mostly by learning to say no. That means no to the easy distractions, such as, podcasts, streaming shows, or social media, which at times every bone in my body is aching to give in to. Even though some (very little) of it is useful, they creep in and erode the time and mental energy I need to reflect and write. I recently read that forming a new habit takes about 66 consecutive days. That number felt huge at first! But it’s a little over two months, so by March a habit could start to form. I’ve decided to start small: I want to write for 2 hours a day, every day. If I try and do the whole two hours from the off, I’ll trip within a week or two. I know I have to build up to it. So, I’ll commit to at least 15 minutes of focused writing time a day. As I build momentum, I can expand from there and hopefully by the end of the year, I’ll build a routine of two hours a day.
Optimism alone will not create the habit of achieving the goal, trust me on this. This is the reason why so many resolutions or goals fail. Without the ability to focus, it just creates an endless doom loop of failed ambitions.
Why not form the habit that will allow you to create further habits? Change is big and hard. But it’s also lots of baby steps on a bigger journey. I have found refining my ability to focus has given me the confidence to decide what is essential and what isn’t. Therefore I have set the parameters for further change in the future.
Meaningful and lasting change is a lot of little things done well. It has scared me how many goals I have been able achieved by truly learning to focus. So yes, there a point. It’s how we grow. Set backs are unavoidable. But giving up is unforgivable. Otherwise, every year (on the current polling), we will become a nation of almosts and maybes.
What about you - any goals for 2025? Do let me know in the comments.
Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.
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Great again Matt, here's a quote from Homer Simpson : "Trying--- is the first step towards failure"
My goal is to read all of the books that are on my shelf, forgotten. I also want to continue working on my habit of writing daily in a journal. I started in the spring but I want this to be the first year when I write every day. Great post!