I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions

It’s the last day of January. By now, 80 percent of you have failed at keeping your resolution(s). If you’ve kept up, you’ll probably fail by April. And if not, most certainly by June. In fact, only 8% of New Year’s resolutions are kept.

So, it’s only natural that I’m a doubter, hater, or whatever you want to call it.

The real reason I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions is because I don’t like the idea of needing to tie goals to a particular time in the year. Why not start today, whenever that is?

It turns out there are psychological reasons certain moments like New Year’s Day can jumpstart our motivation. Our minds think in terms of temporal chunks that give us moments of optimism. These moments aren’t limited to New Year’s Day, but any sort of “landmark” date — such as the beginning of the month, a birthday, a Monday, etc.

As I’ve been working on a career switch over the past year, I’ve struggled heavily with languishing and motivation. Physical injuries and surgery have taken away my main sources of releasing stress and exacerbated feelings of languishing, and maybe a little depression. With no real accountability, it’s stunted my progress in finishing my projects and portfolio. Time blocking, the pomodoro technique, and all the other tools I’ve learned for improving productivity and habit sticking have not helped. So I took a moment in December and started listening to The Happiness Lab podcast with Dr. Laurie Santos, deciding to focus on my mental health.

In doing so, I’ve learned there are quite a lot of benefits to making positive changes outside of just improving our mental health, including improved productivity and job performance! Listening to these podcasts have triggered a wave of optimism and motivation.

I’d like to share some strategies that helped me get unstuck (will elaborate on some of these in future posts).

• Tiny habits
• Finding an accountability buddy to do a “daily stand up” with
• WOOP (used as needed)
• Harnessing the power of the fresh start effect

Luckily the timing of my happiness journey coincided with the new year, and I’ve been able to use this moment to propel me forward and am happy to say I’ve finally launched my portfolio site. It still needs work, but as they say, done is better than perfect.

Also, I turn 35 next week! I am freaking out, but will try to use it as another temporal landmark in my happiness and career journey and not focus on getting older!