New Year’s Never-lutions: 5 Things *Not* to Do This Year
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After the stress of the past two and a half years, it feels as if both my body and my mind need a gut renovation. Exercise, healthy eating, self-care, saving money: Where to start? I reached out to experts who suggested that, instead coming up with a list of things to begin, we think about the things we need to stop in 2024.
Stop living by to-do lists
You know that feeling you get when you’re being super productive, slashing items off your to-do list like a ninja of efficiency? Slash! Slash! Slash! Done! Done! Done! That feeling may be leading you off the path of happiness, into an emotional no-man’s-land.
“We think of productivity as getting things done as quickly as possible, but true productivity is making progress on the work that truly matters to us—and our to-do list can distract us from that,” explains Cassie Holmes, PhD, author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.
Holmes speaks from personal experience. She was walking her son to preschool, and he kept trying to point out things along the way, but Holmes was hurrying, thinking of the busy day ahead. Finally, a particularly emphatic, “Mom, look!” made her turn to find her son with his nose buried in a rosebush. When Holmes heard herself exclaim, “We don’t have time to smell the roses!” it was a wake-up call.
How do you beat the productivity con? One way, Holmes suggests, is by elevating the routine to the ritual.
Step 1: Begin with a mundane activity you enjoy. (For Holmes, this is a weekly on-the-way-to-school coffee date with her daughter, which began as a purely functional caffeine pit stop.)
Step 2: Estimate how many times you’ve done this activity. (For Holmes, 400 coffee dates so far.)
Step 3: Estimate how many more times you’re likely to do it. (Accounting for the onset of adolescence, 230 coffee dates ahead.)
Step 4: Calculate the percentage you have left. (Thirty-six percent of coffee dates left.)
“Recognizing that I only have 36 percent of my coffee dates with my daughter left makes me protect the time for this ordinary activity that has so much meaning for us,” Holmes explains. “And it helps me pay attention. My phone is away. I’m totally in this moment.”
Bottom line? The path to happiness involves a to-do-list detox, plus, sometimes, math.
Stop bedtime procrastination
“If you’re trying to exercise more, lose weight, start new habits,” says Tara Doyle, MD, an integrative and functional medicine physician at Minnesota Personalized Medicine in Minneapolis, “sleep is going to be an integral, foundational building block for those things.”
As a perpetually sleep-deprived person, I didn’t want to believe this, but a mammoth body of medical research makes clear it’s irrefutable. Too little sleep has been consistently proved to increase appetite and food intake, according to a study published in Metabolism, and is associated with increased risk of hypertension, a leading cause of death, according to The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“When we sleep, our brain has the opportunity to ‘take out the trash,’” explains Doyle. “This leaves people able to perform at a higher level, mentally, physically, and emotionally.”
The question of how to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night (the amount recommended by the National Sleep Foundation) is a thorny one, but for most people, it involves ending revenge bedtime procrastination. You know what this is. You finally put the kids to bed, or close your work laptop and, fighting off sleep, you binge Netflix or scroll through TikTok, until you realize that you’ve killed your chances at a decent night’s sleep.
This is a habit you should kick this year. And as soon as I finish White Lotus, I’m kicking it with you.
Stop “punishing” your body with exercise
Everyone, everywhere, knows that exercise is essential for health. My grandmother knows this. People who’ve lived in bunkers for several decades know this. How essential? Well, regular exercise reduced causes of mortality by up to 30 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That essential.
Still.
Exercise. Sigh. The sweating. The lungs burning. The stitch in the side. Maybe it’s just the Catholic in me, but it feels like a penance.
When I ask Rebecca Alexander, a psychotherapist in Manhattan and the author of Not Fade Away, what we should resolve to stop doing this year, her response is clear. “People often exercise for punitive reasons, because of dissatisfaction with the way they look, or because they feel like they’ve eaten too much,” she says. “But you connect your mind with your body so much more when you see that taking care of your body is a major part of taking care of your mental health.”
Researchers are still trying to figure out the exact mechanism by which exercise improves mental health; maybe it’s the elevated endorphins, possibly it’s something else. What they do know, through countless studies, is that it does help—a lot. Regular exercise mitigates the effects of stress on the body, elevates mood, reduces anxiety, helps with depression, even aids memory.
Put that way, running on the treadmill seems less like a stint in a medieval penitentiary, and more like a bubble bath.
Stop panicking about the recession
If there’s one thing I dread more than exercise, it’s making a budget. Making a budget with the threat of a possible recession looming? Significantly more dread-inducing. So, I am exactly the kind of person that Andrea Woroch, budgeting expert in Bakersfield, California, is referring to when she says that the biggest mistake people make around budgeting is embracing a negative mindset.
“A budget allows you to enjoy the things you value,” says Woroch, “because it helps you avoid spending on unnecessary purchases or things that don't matter.”
One small way to save a lot of money is to curb impulse spending. The first step, Woroch says, is to figure out what’s triggering the purchases. Maybe you hit “Buy” when you’re bored or sad, or maybe you’re a sucker for a killer sale, or maybe you’ve got a social media–induced inferiority complex. Once you’re aware of what’s causing the impulse buys, set up some barriers for yourself.
“You can achieve this by deleting payment info in retail sites,” says Woroch. “And unsubscribing from retail newsletters and turning off sale notification in store apps.”
Having to enter all those credit card digits, plus the expiration date, plus the security code will give you enough time to remember that you read an article just the other day that told you to cease and desist impulse buying.
Stop rushing to respond
Ninety seconds. That’s how long it takes for the physiological response of intense emotion to flood your body and then dissipate, according to Harvard-trained neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, here interviewed in Psychology Today. This means that in a minute and a half, the flame of anger (or embarrassment or disappointment) will burn itself out—unless you ignite it all over again.
This is the basis for the New Year’s advice from Nick Trenton, Jr., author of Stop Overthinking. “Try to create separation from feeling an emotion to reacting upon it,” he says. “The longer the pause, the less powerful the impulse, and the more logic can kick in.”
Enter the 90-second rule. It’s similar to the five-second rule, except instead of helping you eat filthy floor doughnuts, it helps you not throw your phone out the window in a rage spiral. Rather than beating the clock, you want to ride it out. For a minute and a half, focus on the seconds ticking by on a clock, or do deep breathing or splash water on your face— do anything but react to the trigger. When the 90 seconds are over, you’ll have a much better shot at responding with intention, rather than reacting in a way you’ll later regret.
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