The key to keeping new year resolutions? Don’t make them in the first place

Setting endless goals can lead to a downward spiral. Stop wasting your life resolving to improve yourself and you might just find you enjoy it more

When you stop to think about it, the strange thing about conventional new year resolutions – the big, ambitious, change-your-life-completely kind – isn’t that they never seem to work. It’s that we ever imagined they might.

Consider the situation. For one thing, you’re too busy (who isn’t?), so it’s not as though making time for several new daily habits is likely to prove straightforward. For another thing, you’re a good person, who generally seeks to do their best – so the fact that you’re not already working out thrice weekly, or meditating daily, or doing more to reduce your carbon footprint or organise your personal finances, isn’t for want of trying. There are reasons these behaviours haven’t proved easier for you. And now a resolution is somehow going to change things? Good luck with that. “‘Resolving’ is just firmly telling yourself, ‘Next time will be different,’” says Jessica Abel, a creativity coach. It “makes you feel like you’re making a real change, when most likely you’re doing little more than wishing harder”. And then hating yourself even more when it all goes wrong – as it rapidly will.

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