Luke Row is a BACP registered psychodynamic therapist in South London, UK. He works with people who've tried managing their symptoms and are ready to understand what's underneath. Book a session →
Loading comments...
It's January. You've made the list. Lose weight, drink less, go to the gym, be more present, stop dating people who treat you badly, finally sort out your sleep, call your mother more often.
By February, you'll have quietly abandoned most of them. By March, you'll have forgotten you made them at all. By next January, you'll make the same list again.
This isn't a failure of willpower. It's something else entirely.
The ritual of New Year's resolutions reveals something we don't like to admit: we are strangers to ourselves.
We stand at the threshold of a new year and make promises based on who we think we should be, not who we actually are. We draft contracts with a version of ourselves that doesn't exist – the one who wants to get up at 5am, the one who finds salads satisfying, the one who doesn't need the third glass of wine.
The resolution is a fantasy. Not in the dismissive sense – fantasies matter enormously – but in the sense that it belongs to a wished-for self rather than the actual one sitting on the sofa, tired and uncertain.
There's something almost manic about the New Year's resolution tradition. A desperate bargain with time: if I can just become this person, everything will be different. The year stretches ahead, clean and unmarked, and we convince ourselves that the calendar's arbitrary turn will somehow grant us powers we've never had before.
It won't.
Here's the uncomfortable bit: often we don't want what we say we want. Not really. Or rather – we want it with one part of ourselves while another part is working against us.
You want to lose weight. You also want the comfort that eating provides, the numbing, the filling of something that food doesn't actually fill but temporarily quiets.
You want to stop choosing partners who treat you badly. You also find something familiar in that dynamic, something that confirms what you already believe about yourself and what you deserve.
You want to be more present with your children. You also want to escape them sometimes, and that wanting is so unacceptable that it gets pushed down and comes out sideways – as distraction, as phone-scrolling, as being there but not there.
The resolution addresses the surface wish. It doesn't touch the deeper conflict.
Freud would have had plenty to say about this. He understood that the mind is not a single thing with a single set of desires. It's a battleground. What we consciously want is only part of the story – often the smaller part.
Consider the strange satisfaction some people get from failing their resolutions. The relief of returning to familiar patterns. The vindication of proving, once again, that they can't change. That they're not worth the effort. That things are hopeless.
This isn't masochism, exactly. It's repetition. We return to what we know, even when what we know hurts us, because the unknown feels worse. The devil you know.
Your resolution to change might be sincere. The part of you invested in staying the same is often more powerful.
There's also something aggressive in the resolution. We don't often notice it, but it's there.
"New year, new me." But what happens to the old me? The one who ate too much and exercised too little and stayed in bed when they should have been running? The one who chose badly and knew it and did it anyway?
The resolution doesn't accommodate that person. It erases them. And this is where the trouble starts.
Because you can't erase yourself. The parts of you that you try to cut off don't disappear – they go underground. They become the saboteur. The voice at 10pm that says just one more, the inertia that makes the gym seem impossible, the strange compulsion to text exactly the wrong person.
You're not fighting laziness or weakness. You're fighting yourself. And the part you're fighting knows you better than you know it.
What if we started differently?
Not with the resolution to change, but with curiosity about why you are the way you are. Not I must stop doing this, but I wonder why I keep doing this.
The resolution assumes you already know what the problem is. You're overweight, so eat less. You're anxious, so relax more. You're lonely, so get out more.
But these are symptoms. They're not the thing itself.
The woman who can't stop eating already knows she should eat less. The man who keeps choosing unavailable partners already knows he should find someone different. They don't need the instruction. They need to understand what's driving them toward the very thing they say they want to escape.
There's a reason most resolutions focus on the body. Exercise more. Eat less. Sleep better. Drink less.
The body is manageable, measurable. It's easier to count calories than to examine why you use food the way you do. Easier to download a running app than to sit with the anxiety that running keeps at bay.
Resolutions to improve relationships are rarer. Resolutions to understand yourself, rarer still. We prefer the concrete, the quantifiable. Lose ten pounds. Run a 5k. Dry January.
These aren't bad goals. But they're often addressing the wrong problem. They're treating the symptom while the cause remains untouched – and the cause will simply find another symptom.
Stop eating and start spending. Quit drinking and start smoking. Leave the wrong relationship and find someone just as wrong in a different way.
The pattern adapts. The pattern survives.
Real change – the kind that actually lasts – requires something more uncomfortable than willpower. It requires understanding.
Why do you do what you do? Not the explanation you give others, not the story you've polished, but the actual reason. The one you maybe don't want to look at.
Sometimes people eat because they were hungry as children, not for food but for attention. Sometimes people drink because it's the only way they can access their feelings. Sometimes people choose bad relationships because good ones feel unfamiliar, exposing, like being seen when you're not sure you want to be seen.
These aren't character flaws. They're adaptations. They made sense once. They helped you survive something.
The problem is that you're still using strategies designed for a situation that no longer exists. You're still avoiding a danger that's already passed. You're still protecting yourself from something that isn't threatening you anymore.
But you can't know that until you look at what you've been avoiding looking at.
The resolution is future-focused. It's about who you will become, what you will do differently, the better version waiting just around the corner.
But the work is actually about the past. About understanding how you got here. About recognising the patterns you're caught in and where they came from.
You won't change by deciding to change. You'll change by understanding what's been keeping you stuck.
I'm not suggesting that resolutions are pointless. Sometimes the act of naming what you want matters, even if the wanting is complicated.
But perhaps this year, instead of listing all the ways you should be different, you might get curious about why you're the way you are. Not to excuse it, not to wallow in it, but to understand it.
Because once you understand why you overeat, you might not need to control your eating so fiercely. Once you see why you choose unavailable partners, the available ones might become more interesting. Once you grasp what the anxiety is actually about, you might not need to run from it every morning at 6am.
The goal isn't to become someone else. It's to become more fully yourself – including the parts you've been trying to leave behind.
So if you've already abandoned your resolutions, don't worry. You haven't failed. You've simply discovered, again, that change is more complicated than wanting it.
The question isn't whether you'll try again next January. You probably will.
The question is whether you'll do something different this time: stop trying to change, and start trying to understand.
Related reading: