Bin Those New Year's Resolutions!

I was having such a lovely day. YouTube video essays were the almost perfect antidote for the disorienting, unsettling, purgatory-esque few days between Christmas and New Year. Why, then, did it culminate in me letting out an exasperated huff and heading to my cleaning cupboard in search of my soapbox? [Buckle in to find out, because I’m writing this article stood on it!].

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The answer? It was Ads.

Advertisements.

Stupid, sponsored, commercialised destroyers of enjoyment.

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Weirdly, the interruption annoyed me even more than the video essay I was watching, and that was titled, “Can Keto Cure Autism?” *eye roll *. The ads frustrate me because they feel like intrusive attempts to influence what sort of lifestyle I should live, what wellness should look like to me, the clothes I should wear, how I should look, and why a Stanley cup with matching accessories would, like, totally enhance my life. In fact, even if I was an alien without any concept of the Earthlings’ “New Year”, I predict that I’d still be able to measure the closeness of 2025 by how many Juniper weight loss ads get shown per hour.

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It's no coincidence; with a New Year comes New Year’s Resolutions. It's why companies increase their Ad spending in the run-up, it’s why gyms start to reduce their membership or sign up fees, and it’s why January is McDonald’s slowest month. Just as ads sell us an idealised version of ourselves, New Year’s Resolutions often push us into trying to fit into a mould that isn't truly our own. By now, even if the blog title didn’t give it away, I think you can sense that I’m not a fan of New Year’s Resolutions. Slightly flippantly, I’m autistic, it’s not in my nature to endorse a day dedicated to change! On a more serious note, why exactly have we decided on 1st January as the day we ascend to our highest self?! It’s not even effective.

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Ever since the 1980s, we’ve known that the chances of sticking to our New Year’s Resolutions are pretty slim in the longer term. Norcross and Vangerelli (1988-1989) tracked 200 New Year’s Resolution makers and found that only 19% remained, well, resolute after two years, and 23% gave up in the first week. This is actually a fairly generous figure… the lowest reported success rate I could find was just 8% (Diamond, 2013, as cited in Walsh, 2017). But why do New Year’s Resolutions appear destined to fail in most cases? I guess I started forming my internal response to that when I was cursing the recurrent Juniper ads.

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You see, in the past, I have spoken the words, “I’m going to start eating healthily in the New Year”. However, those words have almost always been uttered right as I’m making my way through a delicious festive cheese selection. Was my intention actually to eat healthily? No. Was it to absolve myself of lactose-induced guilt? Absolutely. Had I genuinely wanted to eat more healthily, I need not have waited for a New Year (or even a new day) - it could've started with the very next thing I consumed. Yet, the guilt is the key point here: how many of us make New Years Resolutions because we’re primed to feel bad about something? I mentioned earlier that I’m autistic. I’ll add more detail and say that I was late diagnosed, highly masked, a people-pleaser and very perfectionistic. So, I spent years contorting myself into whatever other people wanted or expected me to be. However, since diagnosis, I’ve been deconstructing how I’ve come to believe the things I believe. Many of the standards I held weren’t my own at all. Consequently, I’ve hit my teenage, “Don’t tell me what to do”, phase later in life!

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Let me give you an example to illustrate? I held a fairly fixed belief around what it means to be a good person. To me, being a good person meant being of service to someone. It was a standard I held myself to but would never expect others to meet. So, when I experienced burnout and couldn’t work (or even function), you can guess what happened to my self-worth. I talked through this in therapy, which looked something like:

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Me: I just feel useless, like I have no value at all. I feel like I’m a bad person.

Therapist: What makes someone a good person?

Me: I think a good person can be defined by what they put out into the world. Right now, I’m not even in the world. Most of the time, I’m just in bed.

Therapist: How much would someone have to put out into the world in order to be a good person?

Me: I don’t know. Maybe you could quantify it somehow; like some sort of reward chart, a brownie point system or something?

Therapist: What if someone had done lots of good things for decades and scored lots of points. If they decide to take some time for themselves, would that then make them a bad person?

Me: Huh. I don’t think so. If all they’ve done is good stuff, and then they just stop but don’t do any bad stuff, then I think they’d probably still be a good person. *Laughs* I guess, by my logic, everyone who retired would’ve become a bad person.

Therapist: And how much good stuff would be enough?

Me: That’s the point, isn’t it? It would never be enough?

Therapist: By whose standards?

Me: Uh… Capitalism, I guess.

Therapist: And how much do you agree with capitalism?

Me: Very little.

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It was in moments like this that I realised how many beliefs I hold that were never my own in the first place. I categorically refute that someone’s value is tied to their employment status, good deeds, or any metric of output at all. Yet, I was trying to meet someone else’s perception of success. I care little about my own or others financial circumstances, marital status, number of social media followers, possessions they own or whether they’re a homeowner.?

Deconstructing my internal belief system has ended up making me quite a difficult person to sell to, whether it’s a physical product or a vision that someone’s selling. So, whether it’s TikTok telling me to buy Summer Fridays lip balm, YouTube telling me that Juniper is the solution to festive cheese damage, or society telling us all that the 1st January is the day to make huge lifestyle and personal changes – my answer to all of the above is a resounding ‘NO’.

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But don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-all resolutions. I’m a sucker for self-development, self-improvement, wellbeing, goal-setting… all of it. I am a Trainee Clinical Psychologist, after all. What I am against is the focus on 1st January. If we’re thinking of setting a goal or making a change, we can do that in small, flexible and sustainable ways all year long. We can approach it in ways that won’t make us feel like a failure if we’re one of the 23% of people to give up within a week. We can spend time reflecting on what really matters to us versus what society says should matter to us, and we can set goals that we actually aspire towards – for ourselves. So, here’s to setting goals - not because it's January 1st, but because it’s the right time for us.

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Contrary to what the title and content of this blog says, I will be setting one resolution this year. For 2025, I pledge not to make any New Year’s Resolutions.

Chance of success? 100%.

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References:

Norcross, J. C., & Vangarelli, D. J. (1988-1989). The resolution solution: Longitudinal examination of New Year's change attempts. Journal of Substance Abuse, 1(2), 127–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0899-3289(88)80016-6

Walsh, C. D. (2017). New Year's resolutions, reality, and the Affordable Care Act. Orthopaedic Nursing, 36(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1097/NOR.0000000000000315