New Year, Same Me

I feel like it has become a bit of a troupe that New Years resolutions are destined to fail, which is why I have changed how I look at creating different habits. For New Years, I prefer the language of “intention” rather than “resolution.” It’s a minor change, but provides a bit more grace for the times when we aren’t abiding by our pronouncements to change. And grace is something that is really important when we are trying to change our habits.

There is a tendency to start/stop a new routine/habit and then beat ourselves up if we don’t adhere to it perfectly. We feel like we failed. The reality is, we are inevitably going to miss a day of our new routine or have a moment of using one of our go-to habits that we’re trying to stop. That doesn’t mean that our work before then didn’t matter, it just means that one day didn’t work how we intended. But there’s always tomorrow. When we stop looking at changes in our habits/routines as pass/fail, we enable ourselves to actually create change, because we’re allowing for mistakes without giving up.

I rarely set New Years intentions, but this year I noticed I have fallen off of my mindfulness practice, so I set the intention at the New Year for a daily practice. Over the weekend I was visiting a friend and completely forgot about my commitment to a daily mindfulness practice. When I realized this on Sunday (only the 5th day into the year), I simply set aside 5 minutes for a brief mindfulness practice. If I was looking at this as a pass/fail situation, I could have beat myself up for failing my resolution, telling myself that this is what I always do, feeling shame and embarrassment. From there, I could have decided to try again on Monday or February or 2026 or never again. Instead, I just decided to try again when I remembered. And I know it will get easier to keep up with my practice, once it is a regular part of my routine.

So whether or not you’ve decided to create a new intention at the start of the new year, I want to invite you to practice giving yourself some grace. When you notice that you’ve fallen off of your attempts to change your behaviors, you can just try again. It doesn’t make you a failure. And I want to add my reminder for every year: No matter how much you achieved or didn’t, you survived 2024, so congratulations on making it through.

As always, take what is helpful and leave the rest. I hope you have the week you need.