For our coffee date this first week of 2024, I want to discuss resolutions.
No matter what struggles I face in a single year, January always returns wearing a glossy shine of promise. The New Year carries an exciting sense of uncertainty, akin to a gamble: Will I do well this time around? Or suffer worse than before?
Living in the constant wake of terrible news, the uncontrollable factors of our reality feel increasingly powerful. We’re each the captains of our own vessel, forced to sail across volatile waters and beneath ominously cloudy skies.
Life is a risk, but we’re not always gambling: we steer our own ships. Like a Fata Morgana, January’s broad horizon hosts a mirage of motivation. We risk marooning ourselves if we’re only chasing shadows.
If you’ve ever had a successful New Years resolution, please brag about it in the comments: out of 41% of professed resolutioners, only 9% fulfill their resolutions. The majority of us are missing something, and I’m not convinced it’s a lack of resolve.
Yearly I cling to January’s potential to cope with time’s insensitivity, desperate to ameliorate my stubborn shortcomings. That special New Year’s glow dulls rapidly into guilt-riddled rust by my touch.
Most of my goals are the same as they’ve always been, all built upon maintaining specific yet elusive habits. Even if I work up the fleeting might to alter my lifestyle, I struggle to keep the adaptions permanent.
While proper effort is essential, so is a reliable method of change. I needed to create a different path to achieve my goals. I’m motivated by opportunity cycles, but I wanted a quicker process that gives me clear insights and promotes lasting change.
While this method is completely un-revolutionary, I thought I’d lend an adaptable alternative for when the seasonal deluge of inspiration runs dry.
The challenge is as follows:
Pick a single behavior (for instance, one underlying habit within a broader resolution) that you intend to begin, stop, limit, or increase.
Commit to following through with the changed action for fourteen full days.
Evaluate the change’s effect and livability.
Each step addresses the biggest gripes I have with January’s ‘ambition tradition’:
Resolutions are too broad. While our individual New Years Resolutions vary, the most common NYRs concern wellness: physical health, financial health, and emotional health. Success in these can often be ascribed to the combination of multiple long-term habits. The two week challenge makes specificity and slowness necessary.
They’re too indefinite. Are we supposed to follow through on these resolutions for the entire year? Even forever? Most NYRs are successful for only one to three months, but I don’t believe we make resolutions for such little lasting change. In two weeks, you can reach an informed conclusion and extend particular positive changes at will. (In my opinion, if a lifestyle change doesn’t serve you after two weeks, you shouldn’t feel guilty in stopping!)
They’re too idealized. Unrealistic expectations and excessive optimism lead to grandiose resolutions. Failing to commit, regardless of a goal’s importance, leads to unnecessary pressure and stress. Small and specific goals have to pay off within two weeks to merit becoming the future status-quo. Focus must be placed on evaluation of the potential change, not an idealized end result.
The Two Week Challenge doesn’t only chip away at resolutions: using it for short-term experiments, this behavioral experiment can simply encourage mindfulness.
Tiny lifestyle changes show us what advice is actually worth taking: do I really need 8 cups of water a day? Will I really feel better if I sleep for eight hours a night? Do I really have hidden free time to read / meditate / exercise / study / try something new?
In giving small lifestyle ‘improvements’ a fourteen-day trial run, I can view firsthand how sustainable a behavior change would fit into my life. The process melts all delusion: idealized end-goal visions evaporate in the light of sustained hard work.
But ‘hard work’ isn’t the right way to look at it, so I use the word ‘challenge’. Though it sounds childish, I feel great when I finish a challenge. ‘Goal’ is overused, ‘method’ feels too scientific. To me, ‘challenge’ possesses a novelty not unlike ‘resolution’!
The Two Week Challenge first helped me manage one of my favorite addictions: coffee. I wanted to experiment with improving focus and reducing anxiety during my Trinity classes. I found comfortable middle ground in taking a two-week break from caffeine: cold-turkey on a reasonable timeline.
Reducing one’s coffee intake in grad school is certainly ‘the road less traveled by’, and it’s always a devastating prospect as a coffee enthusiast. I figured a two-week trial would confirm whether or not such a drastic change was necessary.
If the change helped me, I’d keep going. If I didn’t notice a difference, I’d pick up right back where I started in fourteen days.
Unfortunately, I would notice an intriguing difference. Before giving a presentation on H.G Wells’s “The Shape of Things to Come,” I was completely and inexplicably free from anxiety. For context, my pulse races wildly before I raise my hand up to speak in class. Despite a fear of public speaking, I felt oddly peaceful and unbothered.
I hadn’t drank coffee in two weeks by that time. The presentation went great, and I got a latte afterward to celebrate.
I have yet to repeat this experiment to know whether placebo or a lack of caffeine was the culprit, but in only two weeks’ time, I could better weigh the mental and physical impacts of cutting out a diet staple. More than this, I learned how easy it was to distance myself from a habit I’d once considered integral to my life’s enjoyment. After only the first week of this seemingly-difficult change, I lost my typical morning itch for a latte.
While I never intended on quitting coffee permanently, I now understood that 1) I could if I wanted to, and 2) it isn’t actually as hard to do as I feared. I’m able to intermittently adjust my lifestyle with a fuller understanding of what a daunting change can look like.
I became curious what behaviors fueled the beliefs I hold about myself, and vice versa. What other changes could I plug into this format?
This challenge soon helped me write more. As I’ve mentioned previously, writing related-discipline has been historically difficult for me to come by. This especially applies to keeping up with diary entries, where I’m repeatedly infuriated by how few in-the-moment recollections I leave for my older myself.
I started easy, dedicating only half an hour a day. I could write anything (diary, essay, short story) at any time. Though I split up 30 minutes into ridiculously tiny increments, by the end of the two week period, motivation felt simple to conjure. It was easier to think on my feet, I felt more invested in the material, and at the end of each day, I had exactly the end product I wanted: more writing.
From here, I tooled around with timing: writing for half an hour at 6 AM daily, vs 6 PM. Rather than trying and failing to stick with a resolution indefinitely, staying mindful of only one change at a time encourages flexibility and experimentation.
The greatest insight to come from this silly Two Week Challenge is how adaptable we could be with the right thinking. So often I feel locked into the person I’ve become, and my goals feel like Herculean tasks. Through only simplifying my process, I was able to make changes I’d once dreaded considering.
This will likely not work for everyone, but the typical process of making resolutions doesn’t seem to either. I think this style of quick habit-assessment promotes a vital personal awareness. We shouldn’t rely on New Years or any outside influence to finally experiment with our health, habits, and mindsets. Regularly changing habits makes experimentation even easier. Compounded across months of focused change, we’re no longer chasing resolutions, but tailoring our lives to fit our values better.
This year we should challenge our set-in-stone, preconceived notions about ourselves. What can we alter to make our lives more fulfilling? What are we capable of?
I’ve been fascinated with habit-forming and habit-breaking for years now, and remain in awe of how many routes can lead us to lasting change. I’ll be writing here about my successful and unsuccessful Two Week Challenges intermittently, to inspire, share what I learn, and learn from the stories you share with me. (If you try the challenge, please share w/ me your results!)
Happy New Year everyone!
Until next week,
Constanze
I love this idea!! I’m going to give it a go for sure
"guilt-riddled rust by my touch!!"😂😂 perfect description of my feelings. Thanks Constanze