Resolutions
I don't go for New Years resolutions. I think the idea lacks substance. Take a few examples...
If you knew you needed to lose weight in November, waiting until the end of December before starting the process is using the New Year as an excuse to delay. This delay is a symptom of an unwillingness to make the change (after all, it's just as easy to lose weight in November as it is in January). It's foolish to think that the momentary fervour brought on by a tradition of new hope at some arbitrary date will be sufficient to overcome this unwillingness. The good intentions will lapse because you'll find another excuse.
The making of New Years resolutions, especially those that have a large potential influence on your happiness and wellbeing, provides positive emotions associated with the impression that you're taking control of your life and your destiny. It triggers a visualisation exercise in which we see ourselves as having overcome some bad habit, or having achieved some goal, and the visualisation itself brings us happiness as we indulge in it, in much the same way as a lottery ticket is a license to dream with little chance of realising that dream. We too often enjoy the buzz and then make excuses to ourselves as to why we didn't bring the resolution to fruition. The act of making the resolution was itself the payoff, and acting on it is far too much like hard work.
Visualisation is an important component of reaching our goals, but not when subconsciously the visualisation provides satisfaction enough, and the only reason we want the change is because it's New Year and so we're thinking about it - as January rolls into February, there will be no triggers to remind us that we've covered none of the ground between where we were in December and where our resolutions wanted to take us.
All this is a problem to me because at the moment, I am thinking about what I would like to change in the coming year, and I know this is because of the time of year, and that the New Year brings out this sense of new hope and future achievement. I don't want to see this new hope and these shadowy undertakings crushed in the daily grind of working and sleeping and existing.
If I fall back on my analytical nature, I'll set targets and goals, and measure myself against them as the weeks go by. This can help, but too much can make the entire exercise feel sterile and uninspiring, and this kind of approach causes me to lose sight of why I'm making these efforts in the first place (i.e. because at the moment, from this particular vantage point, I believe that I would be happier having achieved these things and therefore undertake to do so).
All the New Year does is cause me to accidentally write the wrong date on a couple of cheques. It has no power to make anything happen for anyone. We have to do that for ourselves.
One approach might be to focus hard on how happy we would be if such achievements, goals or aspirations were made reality, but not allow ourselves to feel that enjoyment, only to become aware of how it would feel to live up to our own New Year's expectations. In this way we motivate the person we'll be tomorrow, in a week, or in a month. The person today doesn't need that motivation, he's already sold on the idea, we have to find an argument powerful enough to convince ourselves later on that the goals we've set ourselves for the new year are worth living up to, when the emotion associated to the New Year itself has faded.
Ultimately, the key is to find a resolution that would mean as much to you, and will motivate you equally in mid-March as it does on the 31st December, and every single day in-between, because it's worth doing regardless of the time of year. Calling it a New Year's Resolution subconsciously classifies it as something worth forgetting my Spring.
Posted by nlvp at January 1, 2006 05:56 PM