Give Up On Your Resolutions Early This Year
Your New Years Resolutions may be doing you more harm than good
Every year in January, you’ll see a flood of posts announcing everyone’s New Years Resolutions. I’m somewhat guilty of this, including a list of resolutions in my 2021 Year in Review. What you won’t see me doing, however, is sticking to them — or, rather, berating myself when I inevitably stumble, forget, give up, lose track, or shift priorities.
This year, I suggest giving yourself permission to fail. No guilt, no pressure, no expectations. Have all the bright-eyed optimism for the year ahead as you want (or are capable of, under the circumstances). But don’t frame your success around whether or not you’ve stuck to arbitrary goals set on one day of the year. Your goal posts should move as the circumstances around us move. You’ll have discarded or forgotten most of your resolutions by February anyway, but if you give yourself permission to do so, you’ll find yourself with less New Years hangover — hopefully.
Let’s look at the Top Ten Most Common New Years Resolutions:
- Exercise more
- Lose weight
- Get organized
- Learn a new skill or hobby
- Live life to the fullest
- Save more money / spend less money
- Quit smoking
- Spend more time with family and friends
- Travel more
- Read more
What’s wrong with this list? Well, first of all, most of it are not goals that are particularly achievable right now. Things are different this year than they were… well, a few years ago. And we can’t pretend otherwise.
1. Exercise more & 2. Lose weight
Goals 1 and 2, which are often interrelated, require daily time, space, motivation, and energy. Gyms are closed due to the pandemic (if they aren’t they should be!). In a regular year, gym memberships skyrocket in January — the time of year when humans and other animals are meant to be packing on the pounds, sleeping more, doing less, and curling up in front of a fire to wait out the cold-dark season. Midwinter is not the time to be creating a new exercise regimen. Nor, I have to say, is during a global pandemic, when most people do not have access to workout equipment, classes, or even outdoor space.
In 2022: Be gentle with yourself. Drink water. Stretch. Go for a walk (if it isn’t too cold out). Go up and down the stairs a few times. Make an effort to get up from your computer and walk around the house every couple hours. If you’ve gained a few pounds during this pandemic… congratulations, so have I. So have we all. You’re allowed. Take care of your health as best as you can, but do not make the number on your scale a metric of your self-worth.
3. Get organized
What does this even mean? Nonspecific goals help no one. Are you going to clean your room? Organize a weekly family Zoom call? Re-order your bookshelf? Any of those would be a great “micro-resolution”: an actually achievable, tangible goal. But “getting organized”? No. Making vague goals without the clear steps to getting them done aren’t doing you any favours. “Getting organized” can mean a lot of different things, and will probably just create more stress and guilt than it prevents.
In 2022: Give up on this one entirely. The amount of uncertainty in our lives right now means no one is organized. The government isn’t even organized right now. Healthcare systems are in shambles. Nothing is organized and that’s fine.
4. Learn a new skill or hobby
This sounds all well and good until you choose something you actually find out that you hate. Or that you like, but takes way more time than you can invest. Or takes time away from the things you love and the people you care about.
In 2022: Rather than picking up a new skill or hobby, why not focus on the things you already love? Do more of the things that make you happy and less of the things that stress you out. There’s a lot of pressure to have “productive hobbies” or to have skills that can be monetized or seen as useful by others. Screw that! I’m going to play more Animal Crossing, write bad poetry, and watch Star Trek.
5. Live life to the fullest
This is a goal I can get behind, only if it means something specific to you. Are you going to try to do more of the things you love? Great, try to do that. Find more time for family? Go ahead! Try to make your life “perfect” by getting a better job, learning a new language in isolation, traveling and taking unnecessary risks that put your health in danger — slow your roll. We’re still in a pandemic. We’re all sick of having our lives “put on hold,” but that doesn’t mean we can give up now. Staying home and staying safe (masking up, vaccinating) are how to survive this thing. So don’t like, jump on the next plane to Costa Rica.
6. Save more money / spend less money
A consequence of this pandemic is that a lot of people are saving money. Not eating out, no impulse shopping (at least, in stores), less entertainment, and less travel means unintentional savings. But those things were always for the privileged few. When there is rent and medical bills and insurance and childcare costs and food and heat and other essentials, saving money can be hard. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, and there is no shame in it being impossible (especially these past couple years) to save up any substantial amount of money. You can’t buy a house by eating fewer avocados (sorry Boomers). But what you can do is enjoy the heck out of that avocado.
In 2022: Treat yourself! What is the point of scrimping and saving your whole life, if it means being miserable? You deserve happiness. Allow yourself to spend money on something for you this year.
7. Quit smoking
This is one resolution that I encourage you to keep, if you can. It’ll be hard. It might seem impossible. The same goes for getting sober (of alcohol or drugs). If you can do it safely, please try. This pandemic has taken so many loved ones from us. Smoking increases your risk of serious illness if you contract COVID-19. It also increases your chances of heart attack, stroke, and many types of cancer. If you can’t quit, try cutting back. Adjust your expectations: going from a pack per day to half a pack is so many fewer cigarettes overall. I believe you can do it. It may take a few tries, and please be gentle with yourself if you relapse. This year has been hard on us all. You deserve a little gentleness.
8. Spend more time with family and friends
Adjust your expectations this year regarding visitation: maybe organize a Zoom call or a “watch party” (simultaneously watching a movie online, from separate locations). We all know quarantines, rolling lockdowns, and travel restrictions are coming. Make a small bubble and stick to that bubble.
9. Travel more
Ha! As if.
10. Read more
Who can concentrate? There’s a global pandemic!
What are some more realistic resolutions?
On Medium, you’ll see people posting about how they plan to write 3,000 words per day or publish ten articles a week or this or that or make 10k a month on their side hustle. Do not compare yourself to them: they’ll burn out soon enough. Instead, let’s think about some manageable resolutions; here are some tangible goals you might actually be able to accomplish this year:
- Write when you want to and have time.
- Do more of the things you love and less of the things you don’t.
- Call your mom more often. Like, not too much, but maybe sometimes?
- Brush your teeth. Maybe even floss?
- Drink water when you’re thirsty.
- Cook a food you really like and then eat it. All of it. You have permission.
- Quit smoking. I meant it: this one is a good one.
- Less doomscrolling on Twitter. Maybe even delete an app or two that negatively impact your mental health (I’m looking at you, FB!).
- Say “no” more often. You don’t need anything else on your plate right now, and that’s okay.
- Get a booster shot!
In a “good” year, resolutions go out the window sometime in February. That promise to yourself to do 30 minutes of yoga every day becomes zero minutes per day pretty quickly, because you missed one day and fuck it, now I’ve failed. But you could just do ten minutes sometimes, and that would be good. Or skip a day. That’s also fine. Resolutions shouldn’t be an all-or-nothing deal, but we so frequently consider them to be.
In 2022: I challenge you to be kinder to yourself. You’ve been through a lot. I give you permission to fail. I give you permission to give up on your resolutions and make different ones, or none at all. I’m telling you right now, this is not the year to push yourself to the edge. This is not the year to jump. This is the year to rest, to be generous to yourself and to others, and to say to yourself, fuck it, I’m trying anyway.
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