![]() ![]() We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time.” ![]() Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. “Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. “Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath,” he wrote on 1 January 1863. The practice of pegging goals to a particular calendar date was already well-established by the 1860s, as seen in one of Mark Twain’s letters. Anna Katharina Schaffner, a cultural historian and author of The Art of Self-Improvement, notes literary references to self-improvement go back centuries, to Chinese antiquity and the Roman Stoics, for example. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when our tradition of making New Year’s Resolutions was first established. ![]() And by understanding and capitalising on those mechanisms, we can all increase our chances of sticking to our new goals for 2022. Recent psychological research, however, suggests that there are many good reasons to begin a new regime on the first day of a new year. Rationally speaking, 1 January should be no better than any other day to make a life change – so why put the needless pressure on ourselves to ‘upgrade’ our lives at the opening of a new calendar? At least a quarter of people typically make at least one New Year’s resolution, and a large portion of those good intentions end in disappointment.įor those who don’t follow this tradition, the very act of creating a New Year’s resolution can seem illogical. I am far from alone in my determination to start each new year with a plan for self-improvement. According to my weekly screen-time reports, I still spend between two and three hours each day on my phone, much of that time doomscrolling. In 2021, I mostly kept to my fitness goal of doing one 20-minute HIIT workout each day, but I failed miserably at my aim of quitting social media. The results, predictably, have been variable. Almost every year of my adult life, I’ve started the New Year with a set of resolutions that I’ve been determined to keep. ![]()
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