Opinion: There’s nothing more designed to fail than a New Year’s resolution

Are New Year's resolutions just a "tool of self-flagellation"? Photo / 123RF

OPINION

Happy New Year, dear reader. I hope you are coming to this column with 2kgs of water weight under your belt after a festive season of over-indulgence. I hope you are waking up, stretching out, and planning to go no further than your bed today. I hope you are feeling fat and loved and if you drink, hungover. I hope that you have not spent a moment of this year so far counting calories, standing on bathroom scales, or denying yourself things that you want or need. Most of all, I hope you’re not planning on changing a goddamn thing just because it’s January.

Is there anything more designed to fail than a New Year’s resolution? January 1st is a date that many leap on as a moment to change, but if I’ve learnt anything about giving things up (alcohol, drugs, caffeine, cigarettes, fun) it’s that this process rarely seems to happen in the most miserable month of the year. Not once in my long and not-very-illustrious drinking career did I manage to do a Dry January; if anything my gym use goes down in the first weeks of the year, as I remember the need to hibernate; and as for diets – I mean, listen, the only thing I can guarantee you will lose on a New Year, New You ‘nutrition plan’ is lots of money.

As someone who has repeatedly had to resolve to change my behaviour, I’m all for self-improvement. But New Year’s Resolutions really exist as a tool of self-flagellation. They are about atoning for whatever ‘sins’ have been committed over Christmas, as if eating a box of Quality Street and drinking too much fizz is a crime that requires four weeks of penance.

I find something unspeakably sad about grown adults ‘celebrating’ the start of a new year by beating themselves up for having had the temerity to enjoy themselves. If for health reasons you really need to make a change, then do it, regardless of the date - I tell you, if you hitch all your plans for well-being to January, there’s very little hope that they will stay with you into February, let alone March. Plus, the pressure this brings is unbelievable. Now may be a good time to embark on a plan to lose weight, but it is not the only time to lose weight.

I’m sure that New Year’s Resolutions started off as a well-meaning ritual, but somewhere along the way they got co-opted by big business as a way to make money out of people’s myriad insecurities. I think my biggest beef with resolutions at this time of the year is that they make you feel so bad about yourself, so lacking. Setting resolutions involves looking at your life and focusing on all the ways you are unhappy, which is fine if you occasionally go in for that kind of thing, less so if you have a tendency to spend all 365 days of the year picking yourself apart.

Interestingly, there is very little evidence that shaming ourselves leads to healthier lives in the long term. In fact, research suggests that shaming people actually leads to worse outcomes, with smokers being less likely to seek help for issues because they believe they are to blame for them. Most people who are overweight know that they are, and that this might lead to diabetes, heart disease or joint problems. Yet this knowledge in itself doesn’t make it any easier to lose that weight. In fact, we are getting fatter and fatter, with worldwide obesity tripling since 1975.

This is in part because we often mistake obesity as a purely physical condition, rather than one that involves people using food as a sort of drug to silence all their feelings. Bad habits, from overeating to drinking alcoholically, are usually coping mechanisms for dealing with shame. It makes sense, then, that shaming ourselves, or being shamed by others, is only going to make these bad habits worse. If ‘change’ is rooted in the belief that you are somehow bad rather than just a normal human who has picked up some faulty coping mechanisms, it’s probably not going to be very long-lasting. You can bang on about lacking willpower all you want, but it isn’t making anyone any healthier.

How, then, do we enact lasting change? I really think we do it by thinking positively about ourselves, rather than negatively. By focusing on the good stuff, not the bad. That doesn’t mean we ignore our flaws - more that we accept we aren’t just our flaws. There’s a great book that has just come out which encourages you to do this through rituals, not resolutions. Your Ritual Year by Emma Lucy Knowles is as joyous a way to go into 2024 as any other I can recommend. Knowles is an author and energy healer who puts the woo into woo woo; she is beloved by Victoria Beckham and Holly Willoughby and numerous other stars. For every week of the year, Knowles gives you simple rituals “to support you in your development and your adventure through the year”. There’s no shame here, just tiny actions that take 10 minutes and remind you of the brilliance of the old you, rather than encouraging you to find a new one.

So go on a diet if you must, and cut out booze if that’s going to do you some good. But remember that the best resolution you can make this year is to be fearlessly, unapologetically you.