Cancel Your New Year’s Resolutions: Why January Isn’t a Reset Button

By Kerryann White

The 365th day of the year came as it always does, with its sense of impending doom and colossal pressure to uproot your whole existence and rebrand into a new identity entirely.

The internet seems to get a major kick over those who choose to share their elaborate plans for personal curricula — may that be impossible reading targets, promises to exercise 14 times a week or abandoning
long-standing habits — all in favour of fast-tracking major growth and development in just a short period of time. This is an incredibly attractive pattern, if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be so prevalent in society, but this all-consuming, vicious yearly cycle may not be all it’s cracked
up to be.

These steps to betterment are often poor attempts at covering up feelings of guilt, shame and pain of the misdeeds of the year that has passed, it’s all part of a culture of hustle that prioritises constant practices of optimization over well-being and true growth. Individuals are influenced to indulge in their own egotistical pursuits and thus become temporarily ‘hyped up’ to ultimately meet a monumentally miserable, disappointed space when the goals have not flourished into much by the next year. Studies on neuroscience have shown that stress actively undermines the part of the brain responsible for self-control and long-term planning, while amplifying the pull toward instant reward. In other words, the more pressure we place upon ourselves to radically improve, the less neurologically equipped we become to sustain it. This means that the collapse of New Year’s resolutions might be less like our own personal failures and incapability and more like a predictable human response to rigidity and limited systems.

Learning to understand our own strengths, flaws, limits, and tendencies offers a far clearer sense of what change is actually realistic, and where it might genuinely be useful rather than performative. When a strive for improvement is rooted in self-knowledge rather than self-punishment, it becomes slower, much quieter and far more sustainable.

Removing the pressure of having to set and publicly succeed at a list of rigid goals every January can be an act of care in itself, even more so for students battling a new semester bringing deadlines, financial stress and constant evaluation. For many, that pressure becomes the obstacle, turning growth into another metric of worth rather than a process of honest learning. The version of us that sets
resolutions is often optimistic, rested and abstracted from the realities of daily life or term schedules. The version that has to live with them is tired, stressed, overwhelmed and most of all, human.

You’ve got endless potential and that doesn’t have to be defined by a list of merciless and unforgiving ambitions. Growth doesn’t demand spectacle and timelines. Sometimes it asks only for honesty, patience and the permission to change without relentless score-keeping.

References

Maier, Silvia U., Aidan B. Makwana, and Todd A. Hare. “Acute Stress Impairs Self-Control in Goal-Directed Choice by Altering Multiple Functional Connections within the Brain’s Decision Circuits.” Neuron 87, no. 3 (2015): 621–631. 

Norcross, John C., and Daniel J. Vangarelli. “The Resolution Solution: Longitudinal Examination of New Year’s Change Attempts.” Journal of Substance Abuse 1, no. 2 (1988): 127–134.