It it has felt liberating to consider the prospect of entering 2023 exactly as I am (Picture: Nadeine Asbali)
Every year, as January approaches, I brace myself for all the talk of New Year’s resolutions.
As soon as Christmas is done, we are bombarded with notice of our own inadequacy. It seems like all the things we were encouraged to buy or do just a few weeks ago – the excess food and drink, the cosier, slower lifestyle, the sheer consumption of stuff – is no longer acceptable. No, no.
Now, subliminal messages fill our screens that we need to lose weight, cull all toxicity from our lives, suddenly go vegan and frequent the gym. And not only that, we need certain (often expensive) things in order to do this.
We must all emerge on 1 January drinking green smoothies and marathon-training at 5am while completing our brand-new bullet journals.
Otherwise, we have failed. Or, at least that’s what my mind tells me.
The pressure to create a whole new persona for yourself, neatly packaged like a present to open when the bell strikes midnight, is one that I have always found hard to resist in the past. And that’s the problem.
While studies like a recent one conducted by Forbes Health suggest that – especially among Gen Z – attitudes are slowly changing to favour mental health goals over physical ones, I’ve always felt like the act of setting a New Year’s resolution is, itself, destructive to my psychological wellbeing and overall happiness.
I’m the sort of person that feels like I have to change myself entirely for the incoming year otherwise I’ve somehow failed. It doesn’t help that my ongoing body image issues – caused by being the chubby one in a family of naturally-thin people – means that my goals always seem to revolve around losing weight.
If my first meal of the new year isn’t the perfectly-balanced, ultimate epitome of health, then the downward spiral will begin and the anxiety that has been a backdrop to much of my adult life will be well and truly provoked.
I’ll start to feel as though I’ll never achieve what I want to. I won’t drop the three dress sizes I’ve decided, arbitrarily, I need to. I will never see a certain number on the scales. The muffin top and double chin will be around for life.
I’m scrapping the resolutions altogether (Picture: Nadeine Asbali)
But it’s not only that.
I won’t reach other goals either. My mind will tell me – because my feeling of self-worth will be so low and my self-loathing so high – that I lack what all the people around me seem to have in abundance: the discipline, motivation, or the energy, time and money to actually achieve their goals.
Setting massive, unreachable goals for myself every January and then inevitably falling at the first hurdle means, in the past, I have coped in dangerous ways.
If my resolution was to cut out carbs, and I scoff a piece of toast one morning as I’m rushing to work, I’ll end up consuming only black coffee for the rest of the day in an attempt to claw it back, like repenting for a sin I’ve enacted against myself and the resolution I promised myself I’d fulfil.
This year, I started to notice an anxiety bubbling up inside me at the very idea of having to set a resolution and then not achieving it. I have found myself absent-mindedly researching local weight loss groups to join once January comes or ‘ways to lose a stone in a month’ and making silent, unconscious pacts with myself that I’ll eat nothing but fruit, vegetables and protein once 2023 comes.
But then, bubbling underneath, is the dread at how I’ll feel if I don’t fulfil what I want to.
I can feel it now. The rapidly beating heart and sweating palms. The sickening feeling of regret and self-hatred churning in my stomach.
The idea of having to sit in some dingy church hall somewhere and admit to a group of other striving slimmers that I ate a piece of cake this week and so the scales haven’t been as kind as I’d have hoped, while they nod knowingly and smile sympathetically, makes me want to abandon the goal altogether so I never have to feel the sting of not reaching it.
And so the cycle continues. Because some cruel trick of the mind will tell me that a New Year’s resolution only counts if it starts from the first second of the brand-new year and either I embark on my goal now or I’ll have to wait a whole other 12 months to start.
Resolutions are supposed to be about improving ourselves – becoming a healthier, happier version of the person we’ve been for the past year. But if the outcome for me always seems to be a sense of failure, guilt and disappointment that eclipses all else (and makes me unhappier and unhealthier in the long run) then what is the point?
So, this year, I’ve decided to cut my losses before I get there. And before those losses turn into debilitating anxiety sitting like sediment in the bottom of my stomach, I’m scrapping the resolutions altogether.
Why do I need a New Year’s resolution at all? Who said I had to have one? Have I just made up this rule, this expectation, and bound myself to it for as long as I can remember?
This might sound obvious to those who are naturally equipped with a little more self-confidence and a little less nervous disposition than I, but it has felt liberating to consider the prospect of entering 2023 exactly as I am.
With my excess weight, terrible sleeping pattern and propensity for a little too much screen time in tow.
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I started to notice an anxiety bubbling up inside me at the very idea of having to set a resolution and then not achieving it.
