New Year's Resolutions

By Charlotte van Nus on 18 January 2012

As some of my colleagues already said: happy 2012 to everyone! When the year comes to an end we reflect on the past and look forward to the coming year. We dwell by the things that we have achieved, the new experiences we have gained, the things that unfortunately went wrong or the goals we weren’t able to achieve. New Year is an event to reflect on our life and develop new goals for the coming year.

In a time of economic recessions, climate disasters and a 24 -7 life controlled by our Smartphone’s and social networks I think many people desire to live more consciously. Conscious by the choices we make, the happy moments we enjoy and our daily life experiences. New Year is a pre-eminently event to try to be conscious about our life of the past year. This results in the New Year’s resolutions whereby we try to formulate goals to make changes in our life, make commitments to personal goals and improve our wellbeing. However New Year’s resolutions always seem very hopeful, they often aren’t successful. So why do we still make resolutions every year then?

The New Year is a way to make a fresh start to achieve former unattained goals. In this period we experience an opportunity to make a new concrete attempt to make a change: going to the gym more, spending more time with family and friends or make that amazing trip you always wanted to make. One can easily be immersed by these thoughts, because a few weeks before Christmas until New Year’s Eve we are constantly being reminded by this by the media, corporate marketing and New Years related events. Social media made it even easier to make New Year’s Resolutions. If you tell all your Facebook friends and Twitter followers what your resolution for the next year is, you have a handhold, because you don’t want to fail your resolution and look like an idiot. Besides that, one can also use iPhone apps for help to get started a better year. However there is more why we formulate resolutions and why we feel the need to do that.

From a psychological perspective the idea of bettering our self is a motivator to formulate New Year’s resolutions. We - human beings - like to self-improve, because this is a confirmation of our existence and our self-esteem. In contrast, on average 60 percent of our 70.000 thoughts per day are negative. During New Year we try to decrease these negative thoughts and negative experiences of the past year and focus on the positive assumptions in the New Year. To be successful in achieving the resolutions it is therefore important to understand the negative thoughts so one can prevent that these feelings will influence the behavior. If one is able to face the negative thoughts one can replace these thoughts with positive ones. But because New Year’s resolutions are hastily developed without truly thinking of why we want to achieve that specific goal, this isn’t done very accurate, according to Norcross, Mrykalo & Blagys in their article ‘Succes predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year’s resolves and nonresolvers’. So when you are conscious of what you want to change, why and how, we can be able to achieve the New Year’s Resolutions.

This New Year’s Eve I spend in Thailand with my family. Different from the past New Year’s Eves I spend the night without the annual New Year’s Eve hectic: at a floating hotel on the River Kwai surrounded by tea lights and watching the stars instead of the fireworks. We just sat, chatted and enjoyed the moment. Without thinking of positive assumptions or other goals I want to achieve in the New Year, I had the simplest and most pleasant New Year’s Eve. Maybe it has to do something with the Buddhist culture of Thailand, whereby everyone is establishing mindfulness in one’s day-to-day life. The way they are achieving and discovering a life of joy, pleasure, self-knowledge and insights is through introspection during every day of the year. So the forced awareness that we are trying to create during New Year is in the Buddhist culture a natural way of living the day-to-day moments during the year. In this way we don’t need to make New Year’s Resolutions.

How we celebrate the New Year in the world divers significantly as well as how we experience our happy and unhappy moments and formulate personal goals. There are many ways of reflecting and improving our life whereby New Year’s Resolutions are one of them. I would love to learn more from the Buddhist culture, so I can escape from the New Year’s Resolutions.

Here is to a happy mindful 2012!

tagged with: mindfulness, resolutions, new year

Comments

There are no comments yet, be the first to post a comment!