Today is the start of another new year: 2024. There are numerous people who like to start the new year with New Year’s Resolutions that are supposed to make their lives better in some way. Indeed, according to a Forbes poll 62% of people feel pressured to make a New Year’s Resolution. Purportedly, women (64%) feel more pressure than men (60%). Resolutions such as losing weight or exercising more are the most common, representing one-third and one-half of resolutions, respectively. A lot of people also resolve to improve their finances over the year. According to Forbes:
Less popular resolutions include traveling more (6%), meditating regularly (5%), drinking less alcohol (3%) and performing better at work (3%).
About 12% of resolutions hope to stop smoking. Others on the list include make more time for loved ones (25%), make more time for hobbies (7%) and improve work/life balance (7%). Forbes also notes that improving your mental health (36%) is more popular a goal than losing weight (34%), improving your diet (32%) and only slightly falls behind improving your finances (38%).
So how might you boost your mental health in 2024? The Wall Street Journal recommends, for happiness in the new year, stop overdoing everything.
Each New Year, we pledge to transform our bodies, improve our careers, organize our homes and develop new hobbies. We dedicate ourselves to doing more—more exercise, more work, more activities and social engagements. On its face, striving for more sounds pretty good. But it also has a dark side that we need to resist.
Overachieving and overthinking are ways we try to feel more secure, but they can seriously hurt our mental and physical health.
Here is the thing: New Year’s Resolutions are often broken. It’s sort of an old cliché that fitness gyms are overcrowded starting in January but thin out by March. People make resolutions to exercise more, eat better, lose weight, be better with money, get out more (without spending more money of course) while making time for loved ones, hobbies and achieving better work/life balance. Some of these goals sound contradictory and impossible to achieve simultaneously.
By setting yourself up for failure you guarantee you will feel like a failure and feel bad about yourself. You probably are not going to exercise more. It takes not just effort but also time away you’re your family. Besides, that gym you want to join makes it almost impossible to unjoin in March when you realize you’re spending $50 a month on a membership you’re not using. (That also flies in the face of the stabilizing your financial situation.)
Here is more advice from the Wall Street Journal:
As a neuropsychologist, much of my work focuses on how people respond to stress. I often find myself helping people understand the effects of self-defeating behaviors that I call the Overs. It’s a familiar list: overworking, overachieving, overthinking, overexplaining, overgiving, overcommitting and overaccommodating.
We engage in the Overs to create psychological safety for ourselves. They’re a form of nervous-system regulation. When you feel anxiety, stress, frustration or uncertainty, it’s because threat networks in your brain have activated: You’re afraid. To restore balance, you engage in compensatory behaviors designed to alleviate your fear. You may think, for example, that you overwork so your boss won’t get mad at you, but the deeper explanation is that you overwork to relieve the stress you feel in the face of that prospect.
All too often, however, the Overs themselves become a primary source of psychological danger in our lives. In my work with high-achieving individuals, they often agree that all their overfunctioning feels bad to them, but they insist they need to continue overdoing it in order to stay safe—or, as they put it, to stay “relevant” or “on top.” Regardless of the semantics, the underlying neurobiology is the same: Overdoing is a form of self-protection. The problem is, it becomes bad for us.
The author of the WSJ piece, Julia DiGangi, is a neuropsychologist. Consider my short summary the cheapest psychotherapy you will ever receive. Her piece was really about the stress on overachievers, but you probably should get out and exercise more, improve your diet and lose some weight. Also, give your visa card a break. Happy New Year!
Forbes poll: New Year’s Resolutions Statistics 2024
Wall Street Journal article: For Happiness in the New Year, Stop Overdoing Everything