The Mental Health Side of New Year’s “Resets”

Written by Therapist Carrie Krawiec, LMFT

A resolution is a promise to ourselves. A New Year’s resolution, however, is defined as a firm decision made on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day to refrain from doing something for the coming year. Commonly, New Year’s resolutions focus on self-improvement—weight loss, saving money, learning a new skill, or strengthening relationships. In theory, any one of these goals would improve our mental health. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. 

First, the language we use to create,

set and keeping our goals often contributes to guilt, shame, and lack of self-worth. In other words, we have been “bad,” and now we must be “good.”  Then, the rigid willpower required often makes us feel incapable, unsuccessful, and disappointed in ourselves. Lastly, as we break our self-promises, we feel a sense of betrayal, which contributes to both failure, guilt and shame, first as the perpetrators of the betrayal, and then as hurt, sadness, depression, low self-esteem and insecurity as the victim of betrayal. Altogether, it is often these feelings that precipitate the behaviors we are trying to avoid and so the cycle repeats, year after year. 

Not long ago, a movement was made to encourage those looking to make a change to create “intentions” over “resolutions.” Where resolutions can be strict and focus on fixing something that is broken, intentions can be a positive value statement that guides behavior. A broken resolution can feel like a failure, whereas a slipped intention can feel like approximations were made toward progress and can be reset. Both resolutions and intentions can frequently lack the framework to create behaviors and routines that support success. 

The start of 2026 again saw an emphasis on mental wellness goals.

Common goals this year were to prioritize sleep, reduce screen time, strengthen relationships, and practice mindfulness. Vague, negative goal statements can lead to high expectations and failure. Replacing these large umbrella goals with small, specific, daily behaviors can help us to feel successful and track progress in small steps over time. A large goal for example like “lose weight,” does not give us a road map for how we are going to do it, we may not see progress on the scale even if we are doing “everything right.” Instead setting an intention of walking for 15 minutes a day at least 5 times a week gives us the opportunity to track and encourage our progress while also leaving us wiggle room in our plan, in case we miss a day. This is called the “SMART” technique for goal setting. Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and connected to a selected amount of Time. 

Creating specific behavioral objectives is helpful as it tells us what we are going to do. It gives a road map of instructions for our daily behavior. It is also helpful because we can improve our likelihood of success by setting goals that tell us what we are going to do, versus what to avoid. When we tell ourselves to avoid something we set up triggers to deprivation that we may consciously or subconsciously sabotage. For example, replace “Quit drinking alcohol” with “Make a new mocktail nightly.” This also sets us up to predict ways to support ourselves in other environments instead of panicking and being unprepared. Brainstorm what you might do to meet your intention in environments where it is harder to do, like a wedding or workplace party. 

Relevance is an important feature of the SMART technique.

Knowing your “why” helps to connect your own personal goals and motivations instead of just societal norms. It can help to sustain progress by connecting your desires to things that matter to you. For example, instead of “losing weight” as a resolution you may explore and write down a “why” statement, such as “having more energy for my kids,” or “being healthy in my old age as to not burden my children or family.” Having a strong why statement can help us to feel more authentic, more resilient, and more motivated. 

Often, we are triggered to return to our unhelpful coping behaviors when we are under stress. When we set rigid goals, beat ourselves up, and deprive ourselves of coping mechanisms that used to be useful to us, create a recipe for resolution disaster. A clever and useful acronym to start may be the HALT technique, which is before you do one of the behaviors you hoped to avoid on your path to the new you in the New Year, “HALT” and ask yourself, “Am I hungry, angry or anxious, lonely or tired?” If the answer is yes to any of those questions evaluate your plan for taking care of yourself and make a choice based on predetermined healthy solutions. Each time you replace your go to response to a trigger with a healthy alternative you will feel stronger and more capable of reaching your goals. 

Meeting with a therapist to gain insight on your triggers, their antecedents and consequences, might be helpful to gain mastery over your intentions. To reach a Birmingham Maple Clinic therapist go to www.birminghammaple.com or call 248.646.6659.