Here's to a Successful New Year!
Use this daily practice to help achieve your New Year's Resolutions!
The Dual Nature of January 1st
The 1st of January, for many people (including me), is a symbol of new beginnings. While it’s fundamentally just another day, it still tends to bring a sense of hope and the allure of a fresh start. I’ll even go so far as to say that this duality is one of the things that makes the new year special and significant.
The onset of a new year is like turning a fresh page in the book of your life. The past is unchangeable, but the future is yours to write. This is the time when people across the globe set resolutions, hoping to reshape their lives. Common aspirations include health and fitness goals, reducing screen time, and enhancing personal relationships. For me, my goals include all of those things and more.
Unfortunately, when it comes to making resolutions and deciding to change our lives, the newness and excitement of the new calendar year wears off quickly. The will power needed to maintain a laundry list of changes to habits and routines dwindles quickly and inertia pulls us back to doing what we were doing before.
The Sad Reality of Resolutions
Despite the best of intentions, a large majority of us fail to stick to our resolutions. The statistics I found were truly sobering, with more than 20% of people abandoning their goals within the first week… and nearly half giving up by the end of January. Less than 10% maintain their resolutions throughout the year. Only 1-in-10 people!
Think about that for a moment. Only one tenth of the people who begin the new year with a resolution will succeed. Imagine taking a class with 30 students and having the professor tell you that only 3 of you will pass. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like those odds. It’s enough to make me wonder if I should even bother with New Year’s resolutions—if I should even bother with trying to change for the better.
But instead of just shaking my head in disgust and giving up, I asked myself what that root cause might be. The answer I came up with? A lack of a solid foundation for success.
A Solid Foundation
This is only a theory, of course, and consulting with Professor Google quickly uncovered the fact that I am definitely not the first to come up with it.
Here’s my theory: Success in achieving New Year’s resolutions requires psychological preparedness.
Knowing what to do and how to do it is important but simply isn’t enough. Creating the correct “head space” is absolutely critical to eventual success. By improving our metacognition—our thinking about thinking—we can create the right mindset and a clear vision for the year ahead. It’s this vision of your future self that will help you achieve your goals. When sheer will power wanes and inertia is pulling you back toward your old, bad habits, a clear vision of your future can energize you and help you push through.
A Mindfulness Practice for Resolution Success
Enough with the theory—it’s time to get practical!
To help you stick with your New Year’s resolutions—or any resolution for that matter—use this simple yet powerful 5-minute daily mindfulness practice:
Center Yourself: Begin by sitting comfortably and taking a few deep, calming breaths—in through the nose and out through the mouth. The idea is to eliminate all distractions and focus your mind.
Cultivate Gratitude: Spend two minutes reflecting on the positives in your life, like family, friends, and enjoyable activities. Feel free to think back to your past. The goal is to appreciate the good things that have brought you to this point.
Envision Your Future Self: Take the final two minutes thinking about who you want to be by the end of the year. Don’t focus on what you want to do or how you’re going to do it. Focus on who you want to become.
Becoming a Better You
This 5-minute daily exercise is designed to build the psychological foundation necessary for sticking with your New Year’s resolutions. It’s a simple and straight-forward practice that anyone can do. It doesn’t require special equipment or any external guidance, so there’s no reason for you not to give it a try.
Doing this simple practice every morning will help you identify and solidify the “why” behind the goals you’ve set for yourself. It also forces you to “keep your eyes on the prize,” which is far better than relying on will power to keep you moving toward some vague, ambiguous goal.
Spend just 5-minutes a day on this exercise and you’re more likely to transform into the better version of yourself that you envision. So, “cheers” to a successful, resolution-fulfilling New Year!
Thank you for joining me on this journey as we build a movement focused on supporting atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and those who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.” Please become a free subscriber and tell your family and friends about the CODA Project. To support this movement even more, consider becoming a paid subscriber!