It’s February, the month of romantic love, the weather-related predictions of groundhog Punxsutawney Phil, and the ritual abandonment of most of our new Year’s resolutions. we tried-oh, how we tried. we signed up for new gym memberships. we checked out works of Great Literature from the library. we purged our pantry of simple carbs and stocked up on wheat grass, tempeh, and kale. and yet here many of us are, a month later: still flabby, ill-read, and guiltily filching our kids Ritz Bitz snack packs and eating handfuls of Lucky Charms out of the box.
What the heck happened?
Now here’s where most of us turn to self-flagellation, just in case we don’t already feel bad enough: I’m lazy. I have no self-control. and now that I’ve blown it, I might as well spend the rest of the year lying in bed, reading cheesy celebrity magazines and stuffing my face with Ho Ho’s.
No, back up. what the heck really happened?
Most resolutions fail not because you’re some spectacular brand of loser, but because the resolutions were doomed from the start. an especially common way to torpedo a resolution is by choosing something you think you ought to do but have no actual passion for doing (example: read Siddhartha after getting the kids to bed). Another way to tank a resolution is to pick one because someone else thinks it’s a good idea. So you join a gym because your BFF says it’s where all the moms go after elementary school drop-off. Or your husband got a deal on a family membership. Or because you read somewhere that you’re more likely to exercise if you’ve got a lot of money riding on the deal.
But mostly? Our resolutions bite the dust because although we have the best intentions in the world to make solid, positive changes in our lives, we have no actual, well-articulated plan for carrying these changes out, or for handling the inevitable stumbles on the path from here to there without giving up altogether. we want to lose weight, so we try to deny ourselves our favorite foods without ever addressing our beliefs about food, our fear and loathing of our bodies, or how much we may be relying on eating for comfort-so we’re going to need to find other activities that bring similar joy.
We want to be more fit, so we throw ourselves at an ambitious exercise plan without considering what kinds of movement feel good to our bodies or truly understanding that it will take slow, small, intentional turtle steps to get from the body we currently have to the body we want. we want to expand our minds, learn new things, and have fresh ideas to talk about. But instead of listening to our essential selves-what excites us to think about? what articles, authors, blog writers, podcasts, even TV shows light us up?-we dutifully try to plow through some freshman lit reading list of the great classics.
Change is good. But change is hard. That’s because there’s an actual part of our brains whose entire job it is to make sure we don’t change anything. Call it the lizard brain, call it the amygdala, call it your social self: whatever you call it, it’s the part of you that seeks to protect you by keeping you in your comfort zone. it likes everything just as it is. and it will resist your attempts to do things differently at the top of its screechy little voice.
Having a plan, getting support, understanding that there will be setbacks, and taking small, intentional steps toward your goals will quiet that voice, just enough that you can hear it for the frightened child it really is. There, there, you can tell it. I’ve got this. you go off and play in the corner over there. Me, I’m going to make some really cool stuff happen. and then you will. Really, truly. There’s nothing magical about January 1. You’ve got the rest of the year-heck, you’ve got the rest of your life-to become the person you always knew you could be.
