The New Year means many different things to people. For some it’s a time to reflect on the year that’s coming to an end, to recognise and make sense of our experiences. For some it’s a time to focus on what happens next, to consider what the possibilities might be for us. Whatever your perspective the New Year often represents change in some way, which is why I’ve been thinking about at how we might approach this.

New Year’s Resolutions

Trying to incorporate small changes into our lives can be a way to boost our physical and mental health. However, a relatively recent study (details below) found that self-improvement is not necessarily the best motivation for making new habits stick. Instead, they suggest that it’s about finding ways to take pleasure in things. This might mean choosing a new habit that you know you’ll enjoy rather than feel you should be doing. Or it might mean finding a way to make a resolution feel enjoyable, for example by combining things (exercising while listening to your favourite music), taking an alternative route to the end goal (consuming more books but in an audio format) or giving yourself small rewards along the way (allowing yourself a treat after a day of healthier eating).

For Auld Lang Syne

The New Year can often lead us to think about the relationships in our lives. This can mean taking a moment to be thankful for those that we love and who are important to us, whether we feel compelled or able to share the thought with them or not. It can also be a time to think about what we need or want from future relationships. Do we have people around us who give us confidence, clarity, consideration, comfort, constructive criticism and whatever else we need? And if not, are we ready for these relationships when they come along? Although we tend to be attracted to what’s familiar, being open to new types of people in our lives can sometimes give us thing we’ve been missing (whether we’ve known it or not).

A Happy New Year

A New Year can give us the reassuring feeling of drawing a line under anything about the past year that we regret or would rather forget. However, this can also bring with it a pressure to not miss the opportunity of a fresh start, resulting in feelings of guilt or failure if we are not able to maintain our ‘clean slate’. In contrast, I wonder what it would be like to begin the year making a commitment to accept that we make mistakes. We might also find ourselves more able to look back on past experiences and make sense of them, in turn helping us to think about how we might make positive changes in the future.

New Year, new you

At the beginning of the year, we can tend to focus on trying to take control over what will happen in the weeks and months ahead. This can help us to feel safe and secure, particularly if we’ve recently been through some difficult times. This can be a way to protect ourselves against feeling overwhelmed or swept along by the world around us or being disappointed or hurt by those who’ve made decisions for us in the past. Therapy often works on the basis that we can’t stop challenging things happening to us, but we can change how we react to them. The key is to therefore build our resilience, our ability to bounce back from difficult thoughts, feelings, and situations. This can allow us to begin to take pleasure in the unknown and the unexpected.

Further information

This article in the Association for Psychological Science tells us what research says about sticking to New Year’s Resolutions. And researcher Kaitlin Wooley’s website provides additional insights.