The Trouble with New Year’s Resolutions

Here’s a fun game our brains love to play at the end of the year: making a mental list of up all the things we didn’t manage to do this year. You know the kind of stuff:

Another year without applying to graduate school. Probably too late now.

Guess we never finished that sweater we were knitting. Why not give up before the kid is in college?

We barely wrote a word this year. Maybe it’s time to stop pretending we can finish a screenplay.

These kinds of observations are the stock and trade of what I call the deficit mindset, or our brains’ tendency to keep a running tally of all the ways we haven’t yet met our own expectations.

It usually feels like we’re totally justified in yelling at ourselves for not making enough progress, since taking steps toward goals we actually want to meet doesn’t seem like it should be that high a bar.

But actually, it doesn’t really matter whether yelling at yourself is justified, because there’s another, more fundamental issue at play: yelling at yourself doesn’t work.

In fact, yelling at yourself makes you LESS likely to change, not more.

It’s true. And I can prove it to you in about 30 seconds.

Imagine how you feel when you think something like I did almost nothing on my screenplay this year.

If you’re anything like most of us, the answer is: deeply shitty.

Now consider: what are you most likely to do when you feel deeply shitty? Something emotionally and mentally challenging like opening up the screenplay doc? Or something soothing and distracting, like opening up a bag of chips and scrolling your Netflix queue?

This is why yelling at ourselves for being avoidant is always counter-productive. Negative thoughts about ourselves make us more avoidant, because they create negative feelings we want to escape.

Plus, our brains get trained to associate those negative feelings with the very thing we’re trying to get ourselves to do.

All of this means that trying to change by yelling at yourself is like trying to start a fire by hosing down the wood first. We’re making it harder on ourselves before we even get started. We’re making it harder on ourselves because of the how we try to get started.

Basically, the more we keep mental lists of our self-designated failures, the more likely we are to keep living out the exact same list.

The negative feedback loop

This is why I think New Year’s Resolutions don’t usually work that well for people prone to the deficit mindset. Which is unfortunate, because we are also exactly the kind of people that love the idea of the fresh start that comes from New Year’s Resolutions.

And that makes sense. Because if feel like you’re stuck in an endless cycle of letting yourself down, the idea of a new year and new start seems ideal. Who wouldn’t want to wipe away the old bad behaviour that is so painful and inexplicable? We resolve to do that every day as it is, so why not give it an extra try on 1 January?

But that’s the problem. These kind of New Year’s resolutions are just a variation on the theme of yelling at ourselves. They all boil down to some form of I’ve suck so far, but I vow to be better moving forward.

And, as we’ve seen, when you start from the premise of ‘I suck’, your brain has checked out and headed for the chips and Netflix before you even get to the end of the sentence.

If we want positive change in our lives, we have to start that sentence from somewhere that doesn’t cause our brains to abort mission. And that means we have to work on changing from a non-‘I suck’ place.

Specifically, we need to switch from a cycle of negative thought about self -> negative emotion -> avoidance to something more like positive thought about self -> positive emotion -> engagement.

I know the first thing your brain is likely to do at this moment is start hollering But I didn’t DO ANYTHING positive on the screenplay/sweater/promotion/whatever.

And I promise you that this is 100% complete bullshit.

You worked on the screenplay a couple of times. Or you thought about a plot point in the shower or had a dream about it or made some notes on your phone on the bus. You googled some grad school programmes. You asked your friend in the another department how she got her promotion. You watched a youtube video on the hard part of the knitting pattern.

Whatever your version of the examples in the above paragraph is, you kept the flame of this project alive, even when it seemed like everything your brain and life and world was conspiring to put it out.

And we KNOW this — I know this, without even knowing you or what you are trying to do — because people who let the fire go out are not still yelling at themselves about whatever they’re trying to do. They’ve given up.

I know I just said yelling doesn’t work. And that’s true. But your brain hasn’t known that, so it has kept yelling because it is trying to stay on mission.

Even when yelling made you feel worse, you kept it up because you care that much about getting this fucking fire blazing already.

You have been willing to make yourself feel worse through all this yelling, every single day of your life, if that was your best chance of moving forward. That is not the attitude of a quitter.

Imagine what you can do once you stop yelling and starting motivating in a way that actually works.

Old Year’s Contributions > New Year’s Resolutions

In just a few minutes you can complete a process I do with some clients at the end of the year instead of resolutions, called Old Year’s Contributions.

Here’s how you do it.

1. Make a list of 15 things that you did in 2022 that support your movement forward in your life and goals, no matter how small or tangential. These are your Old Year’s Contributions.

I know 15 seems like a lot, and that’s on purpose.

When the number seems wayyyy too large, it forces our brains to look beyond our usual rules for what does and doesn’t belong on a list like this. The blinkers fall off, and we start to notice things we’d never have paid attention to otherwise.

Everyone’s blinkers are different, but keep in mind how wide the range of contributions toward your goals can be. Sleep, relationships, learning, practice, and play can all contribute, one way or another. You can even include yelling at yourself, since it kept the flame of your goal alive when it was the best tool you had.

2. Pick three things on the list that feel particularly useful or like they create more palpable positive emotion. Notice how you feel when you remind yourself that you did these things. Notice how much better it feels than any version of the ‘I suck so I have to be totally different’ type of thoughts.

3. Now write each of these three things down in this form:

I already did [thing from list], so I can probably [next SMALL FIVE-MINUTE STEP].

So let’s say the thing on your list was I talked to my friend J. about how she got her promotion.

You might write something like I already talked to J. about this, so I can probably make some notes about how what she said could apply to my situation.

Or let’s say it’s I read part of that screenplay book even though it was kind of anxiety producing.

You might write something like I already read part of that screenplay book even though it was kind of anxiety producing, so I can probably read another chapter.

The key here is not to fall into the New-Year’s-Resolution trap of going after slate-wiping, miraculous transformation. Instead, the focus is on creating a positive feedback loop that gets you moving forward bit by bit.

When you prove to yourself that have HAVE taken positive action already, that creates a spark of good feeling like hope or interest. That gives you the momentum to think of and carry out the next step. And then that step creates the next bit of positive emotion, and on and on.

You start to see that your life is not a pile of rubble which has to be cleared before you can build anything of value. Instead, you notice you’re standing on a solid little platform built of all the tiny steps you took when you were busy yelling at yourself for not doing enough.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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