I understand the reasoning behind New Year’s resolutions, of course. Fresh start to the year, fresh start to one’s life and all that yumminess. And yet it seems fundamentally flawed to me. Deciding to make a pile of changes of a single day, after weeks of excess and partying, strikes me as a recipe for failure and for feeling crappy about yourself when you end up flagging and falling into old habits because the changes were too wide-ranging and ambitious to be sustainable.
We all know the truth of it: long term lifestyle changes are ideally small, incremental, and undertaken gradually, in the context that will support the changes, and thereby allow each new habit to settle in and stick. Otherwise, they’re not going to last. And though it feels like very little is being done when transformations are undertaken in this manner, they add up. Look back after a year of small changes, and you’ll be amazed at how far you’ve come.
