Welcome to 2022 everyone! The new year has officially begun and you may be feeling the annual societal pressure to create some New Year’s resolutions. However, Dr. Sophie Lazarus, a psychologist at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, believes resolutions should be put to the side. There is nothing inherently bad about setting a New Year’s resolution or using the New Year as an opprotunity to start working on new goals. However, if the drive to commit to resolutions is coming from a place of pressure or obligation, it can create unneeded stress in your life. This is especially true this year as the world continues to try and recover from a global pandemic and a string of worsening climate disasters. Resolutions can be grounding if created with understanding and self-kindness in mind but they can also put pressure on an already strained situation.
Dr. Lazarus instead advocates for entering the New Year with a general goal of self-improvement; “See if you can be a bit gentler with yourself or give yourself this same kind of grace that you might give to someone that you really love or care about who’s in a similarly challenging situation,” she says. Let go of the idea of perfection, the stress of self-critism, and the belief of having to prove ones worth to others. “So often in these times of stress, we tend to really focus on what’s wrong and what is unknown and what we need to worry about,” she says. “But there are ways that we can kind of try to shift our perspective and even just being more attentive, aware and grateful for the things that are going well or that are stable.”