Many centuries ago, a decision was made that the start of each year should fall just ten days after the winter solstice. Before Julius Caesar’s Roman calendar, and in some cultures still, the start of the new year was celebrated in springtime instead, on the spring equinox.
For the body, certainly, springtime is when feelings of newness, freshness, and possibility tend to arrive. Tender leaves on branches, singing birds, blooming flowers, and warming days pair well with hope and creativity.
Why would the Romans choose to honor fresh starts and new beginnings right in the dead of winter, in our coldest and most inward months? It is into this frosty, pale terrain that we are expected, to this day, to send forth our hopes and dreams for the next year. Could these cold environs be part of why so many of our resolutions fail?
Whatever the wisdom or folly of our traditions, New Year’s Day is loaded with expectations for women. We may try to honor them or try to ignore them, but either way, they affect us. This is the day that marks annual renewal and recommitment, to do better and to become better.
How does the New Year affect mental health?
The New Year can be a rough time for people with pre-existing mental health conditions. While we’re still recovering from the psychological whammy of the holidays, who should come knocking but the New Year, with all its unanswered questions about how we’re turning out? Are we who we’re supposed to be?
For some of us, pressure, expectations, and the pain we carry around past hopes and dreams rush to the forefront for our attention at this time. People who have depression may struggle with their moods more during the winter months in general. Whatever our particular way of suffering may become more intense in these times. If we are anxious by habit, we may be more so around this day.
Overall, the question of “Can I improve myself this year?” is an unsettling one for anyone who lacks complete and total self-love and self-acceptance as a starting point.
While to some people, the New Year represents a fresh start and a fresh chance to begin again, for many people it represents a danger of reflecting on the self in an unkind way, with perfectionism, self-doubt, and disappointment looming large.
If this is you, you are not in any way alone. The month of January was named for the Roman god Janus, a difficult character, a two-faced god of doorways, passages, and transition. That description about sums up January, for many of us. An awkward moment of shifting weight, stepping from a suddenly ended year into an unsettlingly open future.
Why do we create New Year’s resolutions?
The practice of creating New Year’s resolutions is traced back more than 4000 years to the Babylonians, who made promises to gods and kings in exchange for divine or imperial favor and protection.
The root of “I will be good this year, I promise” is directly linked to guarantees of personal safety and hope of reward for our good behavior. In a dangerous world, we may find comfort in magical thinking: if I am good, bad things won’t happen to me. If bad things happen to other people, maybe it’s their fault.
This magical thinking, a fallacy of cause and effect, lies at the heart of one of the most painful mental illnesses, OCD. The person obsessed with purity, ritual, and perfection believes, in their confusion, that the world turns around their own morality alone.
This childlike mechanism of being good for the pleasing of parental-feeling authorities, in hope of it earning us what we need to have a good life, is deeply at play still for many of us when we draw up our New Year’s resolutions.
How many of us attach a feeling of morality to our resolutions, when we succeed and most especially when we fail? Are people who manage to keep to their diets somehow imbued with virtue, too, as well as societal approval of their physique? Is it inherently a sign of being a superior person if we manage to change ourselves dramatically? If so, why? Why are we not allowed to be as we are already? Why do we have to change into something else? Aren’t we changing all the time anyway?
What is the psychology behind why New Year’s resolutions fail?
Most New Year’s Resolutions fail within the first month or two. The surface reason for this is that people’s goals are too broad and undefined.
If we truly want to accomplish something, we need to perform a series of tiny acts, and incremental changes. One step at a time, as long as we keep walking, we will get to the end of the trail we meant to walk.
But underneath our poorly defined goals, there often lies a bigger complexity: ambivalence about change. As everyone says, where there’s a will, there’s a way. If we felt fully lined up with the changes we say we want to make, then we would make them. We would break those changes down into tiny steps and take those steps.
When we don’t do that work of breaking a desired change down into a realistic change plan, sometimes it’s because we actually aren’t fully sure about the change.
How to work with change ambivalence? Here are three ideas to ponder, from us over here at Villa Kali Ma.
1. Pressure to Change Makes it Hard to Change
If we place pressure on ourselves to change, before really understanding and honoring why we are how we are to begin with, we will hit big waves of inner resistance.
For example, we may pressure ourselves to lose weight and set an ambitious resolution, but not understand what we get out of being a little bit overweight. When we understand all the benefits and pay-offs of our existing overeating and avoidance-of-exercise habits, then and only then can we make a fully informed choice and commitment to change. And we may very well realize that all things considered, we’d rather stay the way we are! To understand more about how that could be, read the next section: Perfectionism and Self Rejection.
2. Perfectionism and Self Rejection
Deep within us is a wounded child, who is still mourning the fact that we were never completely loved and accepted in our full nature, but rather loved only for our conformity to what our parents asked us to be for them.
Depending on the type of environment we grew up in, we may have been fully deprived of our right to be an individual person with our own impulses and dreams, instead expected to fulfill other people’s expectations, or else. We may have been abused, neglected, and mistreated, instead of loved.
A part of us is still mad about that. This inner part has a lot of psychological power, and she kicks back against perfectionistic standards and expectations to change to fit some imagined ideal. When this is the case, inner parts are at war with each other. The perfectionist who wants to be beautiful wants to put us on a diet, but the child who wants to be loved unconditionally no matter what she looks like is not on board with the latest scheme for making us conditionally lovable. This inner conflict has to be resolved before any change will be possible.
3. Unrealistic Expectations About How Much Change Can Happen, How Fast
When we do decide to make a consciously chosen change, we often get lost in polarities and black-and-white thinking, thinking we must conquer our past self rather than work with her. In reality, change is slow, and it must be incremental, or else it will not stabilize. Successful change happens one tiny little step at a time, without pushing, aggression, and forcing. Most of us try to run before we can walk because we want so much to be different from what we are now that we skip over the very basic wisdom, that change takes time and each change must be integrated by the existing system, or else the whole thing will fall apart.
Almost all of us are narcissistically wounded, which means that we have pain related to our sense of self. Who we think we are, that person we imagine other people perceive when they interact with us is some kind of a problem.
It is true that some people have an inflated sense of their value and importance, and these people may feel entitled to excessive admiration. This narcissistic patterning, looking like self-esteem on the outside, is actually the worst kind of low self-esteem, in which one so devalues themselves that they project all of their own less flattering qualities on everyone else, keeping all the good qualities for themselves.
These people are the most afraid of change, since any change may cause them to lose their fragile grasp on imagined superiority. For the rest of us, who may wonder how it is that such people are so confident while we are crippled with insecurities, may be more prone to a deflated self problem, in which we imagine that we are truly inferior to other people.
In reality, we may have areas where we think we are superior and other areas where we think we are superior, but whether we’re at the top of the Ferris wheel or the bottom matters little – wherever we are in this consciousness trap, we will find resolutions stressful.
It’s either our chance to improve ourselves (implying that we are not good enough as we are), or it’s our chance to prove again that we are the best (implying that were we to fail, we would no longer be valuable).
This pressure of the entire question of what makes a person “good” or not, is the core of the dilemma for any of us who grapple with it.
How can past traumatic experiences affect New Year’s resolution stress?
Whatever our core trauma, New Year’s resolutions will touch into those. Here’s how.
Setting aside for a moment our negative self-image and the fact that we may be judging ourselves unfairly, it is also true that pretty much all of us have non-ideal behaviors too.
For example, no matter what anyone else thinks about our body, it really is a problem, most likely, if we never exercise and only eat bad food. It makes us unhappy, stifles our life force, and deadens our spirit.
But whatever problematic behavior we have, it is a trauma response. It is a coping mechanism, a way of not having to directly confront a problem that we are scared we don’t know how to solve. We do not avoid feeling life energy coursing through our bodies (a result of good exercise and diet) because we are lazy, no-good people, but because we fear the activation of our hearts and nervous systems. This is trauma. When the trauma is healed, we have nothing to avoid anymore.
What are strategies to alleviate New Year’s Resolutions Stress?
Rather than approaching the New Year with a sense of pressure and stress to change, let’s lighten it up a little.
Here are three questions to journal on that can help with New Year’s Resolution Stress:
- What about me is already great, that I would like to simply carry forward into the next year?
- What did I do in 2024 that was fun, easy, light, and positive? What was great about those highlights of the past year?
- What comes easily and naturally to me at this point?
- What qualities and habits do I have, that I deeply approve of?
- What would delight me, if it should happen all on its own, without any forcing and effort?
Tips for effective goal-setting
If you have something serious and life-threatening going on, like addiction, then neither self-acceptance alone nor New Year’s Resolutions will help you. Rather, you need to surrender the whole question of trying to manage and change yourself and get help. This is not a personal failure, this is an important psychological emergency.
But if you are stably sober already, or not struggling with addiction at this time, you may want to reframe your resolutions as goals. In general, making SMART goals is the key: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely.
In addition to breaking your intentions into concrete actionable items which can be checked off your list without major struggle, we suggest the following approach for a gentle approach to change.
1. Start with honoring and understanding what is in place in your psyche already
When you reflect on yourself and how you are, try on the lens that everything you do actually makes perfect sense and has its advantages. Try to find out what the advantages are. For example: “If I am a little bit fat, fewer people hit on me and I don’t feel as scared”. Look for a secret payoff that makes you understand why you may be living as you live now. Listen to yourself and believe in yourself. Everything you do and are, is for a reason.
2. Get Buy-In From All Parts of You
When considering changing something, check in with all parts of you to see if they have any objections. Do not expect any inner part of you to give something up without supporting them with a different way to meet their need. For example, if you currently eat ice cream and watch TV every night to relax, but you want to stop eating ice cream, what will you do instead, that will still meet the need for pleasure and comfort?
3. Make A Conservative Plan of Tiny, Easy Changes
If you have buy-in among your inner psychological parts to make a change, then make a reasonable, slow, cautious plan for changing.
The first few goals will be for building feelings of success and confidence first and foremost. Starting with something very, very easy can be the foundation. For example, instead of running for 20 minutes three times a week, start with going for a 10-minute walk times a week. Once that easier habit is anchored in, and all parts of you are still ok, you can gradually and incrementally raise the bar.
It is better to think of these as “willingness test runs” more than failing or not. If you set an intention to go for a walk three times a week for a month and you fail in the second week, that doesn’t mean you’re bad or weak-willed, it means that some part of you wasn’t on board with the idea. Find out why not and do what you can to create inner consensus.
Villa Kali Ma can help women set effective mental health resolutions
Here at Villa Kali Ma, we are committed in full to sharing what we know about the self-change process, with all women who are ready to heal themselves. Across our multidisciplinary team of clinicians, practitioners, and healers, we represent a wide range of expertise that helps women discover true transformation and lasting change. We do this not only to help women, and to help ourselves, but to help create a future that’s safe and positive for women to live in. Each woman with a lit torch brings light to all of us and also lights many more women’s torches.
If you’re curious about changing yourself this year, consider joining us!