I'm starting my New Year's resolutions this weekend

I have made dozens of them in my lifetime.

From pledging to cut out meat and dairy, to my sudden desire to become proficient in pilates, or dedicating each morning to writing reems of detail about my day-to-day in my diary.

But, despite my best intentions and my deep, genuine desire each year to follow through with my pledges, I am not yet a super-flexible vegan with a budding memoir in the works. That’s because my resolutions never stick.

And – after a week or a month – when I inevitably jack in my new lifestyle, I feel like I’ve failed. Which is not the emotion anyone wants to start the year with.

It is said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. So this year, I am taking a new approach to my resolutions – by ditching the ‘New Year’ part of it and starting them now.

In December.

Before Christmas.

My goal is to read more – particularly before bed. I want to reach for a novel rather than doomscrolling for hours.

By kicking off my healthy, wholesome habits early, I think I’ll finally be able to commit to them long-term.

I’m not alone in struggling to keep my new habits going beyond January. The data around traditional New Year’s resolutions suggests that the concept just doesn’t really work.

Around 64% of people abandon their resolutions after just one month, according to a study published by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last year. More than half had made the exact same resolution the year before, or multiple times before – suggesting they’re not sticking to them.

So if resolutions consistently fail for the majority of people, why do we keep making them year on year?

I can see the appeal of starting new habits in January. The new year represents the turning of a page – a blank space to fill with the new and improved version of yourself.

Stepping into 2023 with better intentions for your life feels cleansing and decisive; the ‘sins’ of the year before washed away, all of your failures and disappointments confined to the past. But really, human behaviour doesn’t work like this.

You don’t wake up on 1 January with a new personality, the ability to wake up at 5am for a morning swim, cravings for spirulina and green smoothies rather than wine and kebabs. You will still be you in 2023 – the same you who messed up occasionally, struggled to be consistent, made unhealthy choices some of the time. That’s OK.

Where we tend to go wrong with our resolutions is in the overestimation of the transformative potential of flipping the page of the calendar.

The sheer existence of January will not change you, absolve you of previous mistakes, or cure your bad habits – no matter how much we want it to. Acknowledging this and setting goals in line with who you actually are could make them more achievable and more realistic.

There are other issues with an over-reliance on January, too.

First of all, it’s a bleak month. The bleakest, some would argue. Incidences of depression spike during mid-winter months. In fact, last January was the ‘saddest on record’ – according to ONS figures analysed by wellbeing provider Champion Health – in which people recorded lower than average happiness scores.

It doesn’t make sense to make your life harder with a new challenge or drastic lifestyle change when everything around you is already sad. It’s no wonder so many people give up on trying to better themselves in the first few weeks – January is tough enough as it is.

Giving yourself a head start could really help. The University College London found in 2012 that it takes an average of 66 days for a person to form a new habit. So if you’re already well on your way to 66 days by the time it gets to January, you’re more likely to push through and resist the temptation to give it up as a bad job.

January is often positioned as the polar opposite to the festive period. This is, in part, a marketing technique.

The majority of typical New Year’s resolutions are geared towards losing weight, going to the gym, being healthier – often as some kind of penance for the ‘excesses’ of Christmas. But this binary, all-or-nothing approach to health is a fallacy designed to sell fitness clothes and gym memberships, and it only sets you up for failure.

Improving your diet or getting fitter are perfectly valid goals to have, but when those goals are part of an extreme contrast – either the ‘over-indulgence’ of December or the denial in January – they are rarely sustainable or healthy.

Avoiding the January gym-joiners – by starting your resolution in December for example – not only means you avoid the crowds, it can also help you develop a more balanced and realistic relationship with exercise.

Rather than trying to run 5K every morning in January, and then not looking at my trainers for the rest of the year, I would rather find a form of fitness that I truly enjoy, that I genuinely want to do all year-round, and that doesn’t feel like a ‘punishment’ for drinking buckets of Baileys.

And, despite what the relentless January adverts for gym membership and juice diets might have you believe, your resolutions don’t have to have anything to do with your diet, your physical fitness, or the size of your body.

The wellness industry wants you to think that the only way to improve yourself is to make yourself smaller, tighter, slimmer. But unsubscribing from the New Year’s marketing push can free you up to make positive changes in so many other areas of your life.

I’m picking up a book and starting my resolution now.

I like the idea of finishing the year on a high, rather than scrambling to become a whole new person on the first day of 2023.

Self-improvement can happen at any point in the year, and limiting ourselves to starting in January only limits our potential.

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