Why I'm Not Posting New Year's Resolutions This January

And what I'm doing instead of the annual productivity sprint

Starting the New Year by slowing down

Happy New Year!

For as long as I can remember, January has meant one thing: analyze everything, set ambitious New Year's resolutions, pick a direction, and move fast. I know this ritual intimately. The spreadsheets, the lists, the intoxicating sense that if I just think hard enough and plan cleanly enough, I can somehow outsmart uncertainty. January has always felt like a starting gun going off, whether I'm ready or not.

If you're feeling that pressure right now, the weight of resolutions you haven't made yet, the guilt of rest that feels unearned, the feeling of "everyone else has their act together," I want you to know that you are not alone. I've lived most of my adult life there, actually.

But not this year.

I noticed the internal pressure rising, the voice that says, "You should already know what you're doing, everyone else does." I felt the reflex to launch myself forward before my body had even caught up from the year before. And for once, I didn't follow it.

Exhale: Interrupting the January Planning Frenzy

Instead of leaning into the adrenaline like I normally would, I paused. I exhaled. I mean, I physically let my body rest. I let mornings stretch into something slower. I stopped trying to convert the quiet of early January into momentum.

What surprised me was how uncomfortable that felt at first. Rest didn't feel nourishing right away; it felt suspicious, guilty, like I was doing something wrong, like I was falling behind some invisible schedule that everyone else was keeping.

That discomfort was the first clue that I was onto something.

(Exhale is the first phase of my Exhale-Explore-Engage™ Method, a practice I developed for moments exactly like this one, when we need to interrupt our default patterns before we can even see them clearly.)

Explore: When Urgency Is Just a Habit

Once things slowed down enough, I could actually see what was happening underneath all that January pressure.

The urgency wasn't coming from some deep truth or external necessity. It was a habit, a well-practiced response I'd learned over years of equating my worth with my output, of believing that movement (any movement) is better than stillness. This urgency had nothing to do with clarity and everything to do with familiarity.

This is what toxic productivity looks like from the inside. It doesn't announce itself as toxic. It feels responsible, mature, like the adult thing to do. And because I've lived most of my life responding to that internal alarm, of course, it felt real. Habits often do.

I've coached clients through this same realization, high-performers who have spent years responding to that internal alarm and mistaking adrenaline for ambition. The pattern is remarkably common and remarkably invisible until you slow down enough to catch it in the act.

I wrote about a similar moment in The Relief of Not Fixing Yourself, when I finally stopped treating my inner life like a renovation project that needed completing. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is simply stop.

Engage: Choosing Rest Over New Year's Resolutions

With that awareness came a choice I don't think I could have made before.

The truest response for me right now is to slow down, to rest, to stop forcing forward motion where none is actually needed.

In practice, this looks simple and radical at the same time. Fewer tasks, fewer meetings, more white space in my days. It looks like shorter to-do lists and longer creative blocks, like allowing ideas to arrive on their own schedule instead of extracting them on demand, like trusting that nothing meaningful will collapse if I don't sprint into January with a perfectly articulated plan.

This is what the Engage phase is really about: not action for action's sake, but choosing responses that align with your values instead of your conditioning.

This choice doesn't feel dramatic. It feels quiet, almost ordinary. And maybe that's exactly the point.

What Your Essential Self Might Be Asking For

I don't know yet what this year will bring, and I don't have a perfectly articulated vision. I'm letting that be true without rushing to fix it.

What I do know is that something quieter in me is asking for something different this time. Less noise, less proving, more listening.

If you're reading this with that familiar January tightness in your chest, I'll leave you with the same question I'm sitting with these days:

What is your essential self asking for right now?

It might be worth hearing what it has to say.

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If this resonates and you're curious about what it looks like to work with these patterns more intentionally, I'd love to talk. You can also explore more posts like this on my blog or learn more about my story.