I am not a fan of new year’s resolutions. The whole situation makes me cringe. It seems too forced, too twisted.
Like when normal-looking balloons at the carnival are plucked from their happy place by clowns who contort them into animal shapes to make kids happy. Sure, they look okay, but what a tragic way to arrive at a desired shape, it can’t be comfortable for the supposed dog/giraffe/horse. I’m never sure what they are meant to be afterwards and with one prick of a pin, they’re back to nothing.
Clown capitalism – pressurised contortions of the body for profit.
Call me a curmudgeon but the dictum “new year, new you” fills me with a mean case of the eyerolls. If you too are troubled by this you are not alone. The ritualistic reappearance of this social expectation towards personal change is a lens to which I do not consent and yet, it is an unavoidable sentiment parodying a version of hope and change for another new year.
Conor Pope: What if dry January turned into dry forever? Eight ways life has changed since I stopped drinking in 2022
‘The minute I sat down on the train, I knew I’d been scammed’: Are the Irish susceptible to con artists?
An unsettling conversation on the Dart leaves other passengers open-mouthed in amazement
‘That would have never happened in Ireland,’ my boyfriend said after my trip to Australian A&E
Time to commit to the things you want to do, for real this time, because it’s January.
If, as essayist and film critic Philip Lopate said, “attention is a form of prayer”, then maybe we need to take heed of to whom we are praying and why. While a gym mat might be okay for kneeling on, a cross-training machine makes a poor altar. Choosing yourself, and your comfort, is not an absence of strength, it is the very essence of it. Whether the choice is to change or stay the same, in whatever way, it’s entirely personal and it’s the pace of change that matters.
January is hell-bent on prompting a sharp acceleration of attention towards self-worth. Unsurprisingly, much of this is driven by purchasing habits relating to the idea of physical change driving psychic change – deals on gym memberships, diets or clothes support the creation of this new version of your same old self. After a few weeks of tortoise-paced snacking and snoozing during the holidays, the idea that we must now shed the shell and rev up to the future in loud hare-raising fashion is both drastic and dangerous, for your health and your bank account.
In truth, you are probably perfect the way you are.
Right now, you are enough.
At the Stanford University Behaviour Design Lab they’ve been working on what kind of action creates real change. Its founder, Dr BJ Fogg, espouses the idea that tiny habits, practised consistently, create lasting change rather than the kind of drastic January commitment that cannot be maintained.
In his bestselling book Tiny Habits, Fogg posits making “really tiny” actions through the reminder of a prompt. The formula goes: behaviour equals motivation, ability and prompt.
“Motivation is your desire to do the behaviour. Ability is your capacity to do the behaviour. And Prompt is your cue to do the behaviour,” Fogg writes.
When it comes to new year’s resolutions, prompts – as outlined in this book – could be a key factor in whether you succeed or not.
The Person Prompt, which exists within us, seems the most unreliable. For example, our stomach grumbles and it reminds us to eat, but does such a prompt exist for our new year’s resolution? A more beneficial prompt is a familiar one, called a Context Prompt or “something that cues you to take action”, such as a Post-it note or calendar reminder. But Fogg’s favourite solution is an Action Prompt, which he says will “hack your behaviour”. The key is to position a small new habit after an established habit in the context of your daily routine and you have a greater chance at succeeding long term.
[ There’s a science to keeping resolutions – and it needn’t be a marathon effortOpens in new window ]
But maybe there’s nothing you need to change. A helpful antithesis to “near year, new you” is this line from the French-American writer Anaïs Nin “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself”. Claiming those words could be a kind of mantra, a self-acknowledgement, in direct opposition to the idea that you should change yourself on someone else’s schedule. For me, they have the potential to alleviate the odd feeling that rises when I see these advertisements designed to shame the viewer into feeling off-schedule. The shame could wound deeper, I think, by intimating that immediate dramatic action would create a forever change when in fact, this kind of commitment is almost destined for failure and failure makes shame boomerang back with force.
While I feel the long-held desire to be better, to outdo myself and grow with each year – because goals are great to smash – it’s not the same as the acute capitalistic pressure pushing an evolution because of a presumed shortcoming in January.
Taking small steps with tiny habits you can build upon makes sense.
Change can be quiet, personal and profound, but we must listen to actual science to create it.