I’m a mom who has always found making New Year’s resolutions to be way too stressful. This is because I don’t like setting myself up for things I might possibly fail at. Call this an insecurity, a mental health struggle, the fear of failure, etc. . . . but I just don’t make them.
Unless it’s a major life decision such as a move or adding a new family member, I try to avoid making any decisions for myself for the entire year that I might not have the chance to complete, because as we moms know: it’s hard to get things done sometimes. It gets harder as the years go by in fact and we get busier and busier.
Life as a mom is so unpredictable and I don’t like making plans for things when I
don’t know how the year is going to turn out.
Here’s why I find New Year’s resolutions stressful.
After the daily juggle of completing all the motherhood tasks, I don’t like feeling as if my to-do list is never ending. Like I have even more to do than I initially realized.
For me, New Year’s resolutions feel like never-ending checkboxes. Except, these aren’t necessarily daily tasks that I can check off at the end of the day or carry over to the next day to be completed—they’re yearly ones. So in my mind, the checkbox remains empty and waiting for that check mark until December 31st—for 364 days. That’s a long time to keep an empty checkbox, in my opinion.
Plus, for me–a hyper-organized planner and the type of person who loves nothing more than to check off task boxes–there was nothing more stressful than not accomplishing a resolution I’d made for myself at the end of the year. I would feel “incomplete,” and I don’t like that feeling.
I knew that going forward in my motherhood journey this had to change, because it was making me feel even more stressed out and not as on-top-of-things as I liked. So I developed a completely new attitude and system for the new year going forward.
I started making yearly goals on my birthday instead of on New Year’s Eve.
One birthday, as I started taking a mental tally of all the goals I had made for myself that year, I had a thought: why do we make “resolutions” on New Year’s Eve, and not on our birthdays? New Year’s Eve is simply the end of one calendar year and the beginning of another. But it’s not the beginning or end of our personal year in age, or even necessarily our personal goals. Does anybody actually feel any differently when that ball drops at midnight?
The excitement and trepidation of the new millennium aside (for those of us old enough to remember the transfer over to the year 2000 from 1999), is there any “spark” or lightning bolt that magically happens when that clock strikes 12:01 a.m. on New Year’s Day? Nope.
New Year’s Eve just wasn’t the goal-setting day for me.
Personally, on my birthday, I do feel a mental shift from one year to the next. I’m one year older. One year wiser. I spend it reflecting on all the things I did during the previous year of my life, and where I’d like to see myself going forward.
Even though I might not physically feel the shift of time, I know that I will have a lot of health and mental wellness tasks to complete if I’m wanting to evolve and thrive in the upcoming year. Thus, my goal setting for my personal upcoming year begins every year on my birthday.
In doing it this way I wasn’t completely dropping the growth mindset that comes with each year. I was applying it to my own personal timeline, thus taking off the added societal pressure to complete it all in a calendar year–as defined by everyone else’s standards. Since only I knew what my personal goals for myself were, the added fear of failure didn’t entail because I didn’t have to answer to anybody but myself.
I began tracking “goals” for myself rather than “resolutions.”
When I transitioned my thought process from “resolution” to “goal setting,” I felt much better about making them. This is because I wasn’t so stressed about making sure I was accomplishing them.
To be honest, it’s the word “resolution” itself that makes me nervous. It denotes a sense of finality, resoluteness, and firmness. To me it gives an idea that if I didn’t accomplish all my goals of the year I was somehow “less than” on my evolution journey. Whereas if I set goals for myself and didn’t accomplish them, there wasn’t a sense of failure, since goals are just tasks I have a desire to achieve instead of being a task that was set in stone like a “resolution.”
I dropped the “new year, new me” mentality.
While under the realization that my goals should be set on my birthday rather than on New Year’s Eve, I also came to terms with the idea that the new year does not offer a “rebirth” of myself, but rather an evolution. So even though there’s a pop culture reference to “new year, new me,” I let it go and began thinking of it as “new year, growth of current me.”
Over time I realized that it was also the concept of “new year, new me” that was adding to the stress I felt when making New Year’s resolutions. I felt as if suddenly I had to change myself and my current self wasn’t already good enough, as opposed to adding to the current self I already was.
I started doing mid-year goal check follow-ups.
Every few months or so, I take a look at all the facets of my life: health and personal goals, mental wellness goals, work and motherhood goals, etc. and I do a “goal check” to see how I’m doing in regards to possibly meeting that goal. I use the word “possibly” strongly, because again, the goal is not to stress myself out about accomplishing it. But, I check to see how I’m doing with that goal in regards to the rest of my life.
What I’m checking for is to see if that goal aligns with the season I’m currently in and the season I’m about to enter. Are there other goals I want to accomplish, or do I feel like the goal I’d originally set does not align with my life anymore?
If I’d set original New Year’s resolutions, to me they would have seemed so set in stone and I wouldn’t be able to do these goal-checks so often. In my mind, I’d have to wait until the following New Year’s Eve to check on, and possibly modify, them.
Maybe I’m being delusional and tricking myself?
I am aware that many of these ideas sound like a more basic way of saying “set resolutions” but doing all of these things has helped me feel less stressed and more accomplished in my goals and tracking them. So if they help me be a better mom and woman, and feel more accomplished and less stressed, then I’m calling that a win!
I know that this isn’t for everyone, and many people still do make New Year’s resolutions. That’s absolutely and totally fine! To borrow another pop culture phrase such as “new year, new me”: “You do you, Boo!” Do whatever works for you and your family to be the best mom and version of yourself that you can be.
