For anybody who is generally cynical about the human condition, the start of a new year, if nothing else, offers some excellent people-watching opportunities. The overflowing gym parking lots, the gifted aspirational athleisure, the flirtations with sober-curiosity — all of it adorable, all of it doomed. Show of hands, who has already failed at Dry January?
Whenever someone asked about my New Year’s resolutions, I would always joke that I was planning to drink more booze, eat fewer vegetables, exercise less and spend more time looking at my phone. There is a lot to be said for attainability.
But it turns out there is an even better option for mental well-being at the beginning of the year than setting the bar extremely low, and that is to abandon your goals altogether.
Are you plagued with anxiety and shame about the marathon you should be training for (but aren’t), the book you should be writing (but aren’t), the new skills and productive habits you said you’d develop (but aren’t), the mountain you should be climbing (but aren’t), the master’s program you aren’t … mastering?
The best way to conquer those anxieties, to alleviate that shame, according to actual science, is to relieve yourself from their burden. Give those goals up, in other words.
In November, the journal Nature Human Behaviour published a major review of more than 200 studies on the subject of goal adjustment. Dramatically titled “A meta-analytic review and conceptual model of the antecedents and outcomes of goal adjustment in response to striving difficulties,” the analysis makes a strong case for quitting the probably-impossible thing you’re trying to do.
The new analysis, performed by Curtin University in Australia, suggests persisting with goals that are unrealistic is even worse than just being pointless. It can pose significant risks to physical and mental wellbeing because of the stress, anxiety and depression that the lingering stink of perpetual failure can add to a person’s life.
Abandoning unrealistic goals and switching to new, more achievable ones, meanwhile, tends to be healthy and restorative. Adjusting our expectations of ourselves, the research indicates, contributes to elevated levels of wellbeing, because it leads to reengagement, purpose and satisfaction.
This idea names and reinforces a feeling I’ve developed across many years as a writer. Like almost everyone who has written for a newspaper, I have at various times nursed the idea that I would produce the Great American Novel, or the Adequate American Novel, or Any Novel Whatsoever.
But here I am in middle-age, with almost nothing to show for that dream besides a few scattered pages in Google Drive that I’m sure would be embarrassing to read if I could ever bring myself to open them.
Banging out a weekly column, it turns out, is nowhere near the same ballpark, discipline-wise, as building a story, developing characters and seeing it all through. (As a professor once told me, every journalist has a book inside them, and that’s where it should stay.)
But years ago I stopped feeling downbeat about this because I stopped pretending that it was ever going to happen. If I was going to do it, I think I would have gotten further by now. Rather than drag this self-directed disappointment through life, I gradually learned to focus on what was in front of me, and attained that rarest of midlife attributes: contentment.
This is contrary to conventional wisdom, perpetuated by decades of cultural messaging. “Hang in there, baby,” we’re told by posters featuring a dangling kitten that has surely been dead since the 1970s. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” we’re told by people who don’t seem to realize this is literally impossible.
The conventional wisdom tells us persistence toward a goal is a virtue in and of itself, no matter how difficult, unrealistic or ill-suited to an individual.
So when performing the charade of New Year’s resolutions, maybe try “goal adjustments” rather than life-altering projects. Rather than adding the sunk cost of a gym membership to your list of stresses, just go for a few walks every day.
If you fail, the only person you would disappoint is yourself, and it turns out you don’t even have to do that.