You’re already stumbling with New Year’s Resolutions, now what? 🤔

Matt Hussey

Jan 4, 2024 • 7 min read

Happy New Year, Brinkers!

How are those New Year’s Resolutions going? Still holding strong, or are you beginning to look at them like that guy who gets on the train and starts singing at the top of his voice like it’s completely normal?

Yep, our 2023 selves have been writing checks that our 2024 selves can’t, or are unwilling to cash. And we do it every year, don’t we? In fact, it’s estimated that 80% of people fail to keep up with their resolutions by February.

And if you manage to do that, you are in rarefied company indeed. Only 8% of resolutions stick around till next Christmas. What to do?

Well, in this week’s Brink I’m going to be walking you through why these resolutions rarely stick, and of course, being the helpful sort of person I am, suggest a different approach that doesn’t leave your hopes and dreams scattered across the floor like that take away you promised you wouldn’t order.

Ready? Onwards!

A Brief History of New Year’s Resolutions 📜

It turns out we’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf as part of a New Year celebration for quite some time. It’s believed the ancient Babylonians were the first to start doing it, 4,000 years ago.

When they were celebrating New Year - which began in mid-March according to our Gregorian Calendars - they made promises to the gods that they were going to pay off debts and return stuff they no longer needed. Sound familiar?

A few thousand years later, Julius Caesar, who fiddled with the calendar to make January 1 the start of a new year, and his fellow Romans offered sacrifices to the gods and made promises to behave themselves as the clock struck 12.

When Christianity rocked up, and in particular, the European variant of it, things became decidedly more moral.

For early Christians, the first day of the new year became the traditional occasion for thinking about one’s past mistakes and resolving to do and be better in the future.

In 1740, the English clergyman John Wesley, founder of Methodism, created the Covenant Renewal Service, most commonly held on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. They included readings from Scriptures and hymn singing and served as a spiritual alternative to the raucous celebrations normally held to celebrate the coming of the new year. Oh, and they make resolutions too.

While for most of us, our resolutions are largely secular - unless God really wants you only to drink green juice for an entire month - they are part of a spiritual and religious tradition that dates back thousands of years.

But why are we so bad at them if we’ve been doing it for aeons?

Why Resolutions Fail 🤦

There is a long therapeutic reason and a short, easy-to-understand reason why Resolutions fail. The short one? Our resolutions are typically overly specific and difficult to achieve. Let’s take an example.

We have a tendency to say “I’m going to lose ten kilos this year” or “I’m going to read 100 books”. That’s oddly specific, isn’t it? When we create exacting goals, it means there is a thin line between success and failure. What happens if you only lose a stone, or only read 50 books? Is that a failure? When we start to sputter along the road to these specific goals, it feels like those goals become impossible and as such, we let them go.

We also tend to make goals that require a significant amount of personal change to achieve them. So with the two examples above, if we compare them to our past performance - as in how we were in 2023 - we probably don’t have a history of exercising and dieting or making the time to read to allow those goals to be met. So we fail, spectacularly. Or do we?

The longer version 🧐

There is something interesting going on here about why we choose to create goals that we are more than likely to not meet, and what that says about us. More on that later. But in this part, I want to talk about the longer reason why we find these changes so challenging.

Change is difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. As a result, there needs to be a broader shift in our perspective to give that part of ourselves every opportunity to become the version it really wants to be. Whether it’s slimmer, happier, healthier, more knowledgeable, you name it.

To do it, we need to bring to bear lots of different parts of us to help it along its way. So if it’s hitting the gym four times a week, we need to see it as a more holistic goal of “make space for myself to be able to exercise”.

With that broader idea, we can then see what other bits need to be factored in. Things like:

Where and when can I feasibly exercise?
Do I need to move/cancel/give up something to be able to do that?
Is four times a week realistic?
Can I set myself an initial set of smaller goals, like going once per week, and gradually increasing it with time?
Do I need to think about what I’m eating a bit more?
How’s my alcohol consumption doing?
How’s work stress?
Are there parts of my life actively working against this goal that I need to look at first?

That initial resolution is really far more involved than just getting your lazy arse to the gym. It’s a bigger question: can I make small changes to multiple parts of my life to make it an easier thing to achieve?

Theme it 📚

Another approach is to change the way we make resolutions. I’ve spoken about specific goals here, but what about broader ones that set you in a direction you like to go in?

So instead of 100 books in one year, can it be “a year of reading” with some more precise details beneath it?

One of my favorite YouTubers, CGP Grey has a great video that explores taking a more thematic approach to change.

The idea is that if we can head in a direction we broadly like, it’s more likely to create a positive incentive to keep going and give it more time and energy.

Now, I want to circle back to that placeholder from earlier, about why we set ourselves goals we know we are unlikely to meet. This is a fairly abstract idea, but it’s a valuable one. Back in the dark days of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, for all his inherent flaws, noticed that a lot of people tended to repeat themselves.

Not in a Goodfelllas, Jimmy Two Times kind of way, but more broadly. He called it the Repetition Compulsion, this idea that we unconsciously revisit or repeat traumatic circumstances for reasons that clients might be unaware of.

He found it unusual, as most understandings of humans, and animals at the time that we are instinctively pleasure-seeking things, who will always look for pleasure. Not so, mused Mr. Freud.

He found his clients would often spend a lot of time and energy keeping themselves in difficult memories, or painful ideas about themselves. Or even using memories to create identities that held them in place.

This idea was taken on by other thinkers like Otto Fenichel, who went further. He believed that left unchecked, the repetition compulsion can create an unusual form of comfort or familiarity in people. When we think about our resolutions, we might find it comforting to fail, or familiar. It might become a form of ritual, to try and to fall at the first hurdle.

Fenichel believed it was a way of making more painful experiences from childhood become more attractive ones in adulthood. For example (these are ideas, not proven facts BTW), a person who was spanked as a child may incorporate this into their adult sexual practices, or a victim of sexual abuse may attempt to seduce another person of authority in his or her life (such as their boss or therapist): an attempt at mastery of their feelings and experience, in the sense that they unconsciously want to go through the same situation but that it not result negatively as it did in the past.

It was argued that this form of coping has its benefits. Erik Erikson called it a “destiny neurosis” in the way that someone unconsciously arranges for variations of an original theme that they have not learned either to overcome or to live with.

Now, I may have steered way off-piste here, and if you’ve made it this far, thanks for bearing with me. But behind the annual ritual of trying to be better, may lie something more profound.

Or it’s just part of the rich tapestry of being a person. We can choose to do things that make us feel a certain way not because of any form of neuroses, but because it makes us feel, well human.

Happy New Year everyone!

Things we learned this week 🤓

If you would be so kind 🙏

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