Stoicism: Conquer Your Resolutions

Thank you. What is your New Year's resolution? For some of us, it’s to be more productive; for others, it’s to lose weight or simply be healthier. For you, it might be to spend more time with friends and family, or finally write that book that you’ve been putting off for the past year.

When the clock strikes midnight on January 1st, most of us already have a list of goals we wish to achieve. Things we hope to be better at, and habits we desperately want to let go of—all within the next 365 days. There’s a newfound sense of hope when we flip that last calendar page.

In reality, it’s just another day, but to most of us, it feels like a fresh start, a new beginning. And so we stack up all the things we want to change about ourselves, and other goals we hope to accomplish. Yet, year after year, most of us fail to achieve all, if any, of these goals.

There’s a staggering lack of follow-through with New Year's resolutions. Most of us find it very difficult to stick to them. We start with a bundle of energy and motivation, but as the year goes on, gyms that are packed in January are back to normal capacity by March. Healthy eating habits stop as soon as a stressful life event occurs, and saving habits fade away once an emergency that requires financial attention happens.

To add insult to injury, not only do we end up not achieving what we set out to do, but that failure makes us feel even less motivated to pursue the next goal, to chase the next dream. It leads us down a path that slowly convinces us that these goals aren't even worth setting in the first place. It’s no wonder that the older you get, the less likely you are to create New Year's resolutions.

The screams, loud bang of fireworks, and light shows in the sky as the clock strikes midnight get less exciting with every passing year. When you think about it like that, the situation seems quite grim. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The truth is, one of the biggest reasons most people fall short of their resolutions is they don't have the willpower and mental fortitude to push through the difficult situations.

But by learning from the Stoics, we can better understand not just how to follow through on our set agenda for the year, but how to create proper goals right off the bat. Because while it’s true that barely 10% of people stick to their New Year's resolutions, nothing says that you can't be one of those people.

Understanding New Year's resolutions from the Stoics' point of view begins, like all things with stoicism, with the question of control. What is in our control? People often like to pin down very ambitious and, quite frankly, unrealistic goals at the start of the year. A lot of times, we end up with goals that are beyond our control, which sets us up for failure before we even got the chance to try.

Let’s say your goal for the year is to lose weight. The first step in the Stoic handbook would be to figure out and acknowledge what isn’t in our control. Eating healthy and exercising regularly are within our control, but other things, like how ripped we look, for example, are largely determined by how fat is distributed across our body, which, in turn, is largely determined by genetics.

So, if our goal is to look a certain way instead of simply to lead a healthier lifestyle, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. There are other more apparent truths people tend to ignore when drafting their resolutions—things like the fact that our willpower is finite.

When people decide to become more productive or fight off an addiction, they fail to realize that the machinery that allows us to fight our urges is finite. Every time we fend off our craving for some unhealthy food, for example, it becomes that much harder to maintain that discipline later in the day. That’s one of the main reasons people that start out strong with their resolutions don’t end up following through with them to the end.

At the beginning of the year, our willpower is refreshed. We’re riding on the high of starting from the beginning, but as days turn into weeks and weeks into months, that willpower is drained ever so slowly, such that the motivation that we started the…