New Year’s Resolutions: Settle for Less or Choose What Matters?
A new year often comes with fresh commitments: do more, be more, experience more. Be a better employee, parent, friend, a better version of yourself.
But what if the next challenge isn’t adding more?
What if it’s doing less?
Not settling. Not giving up.
Choosing with intention.
Instead of adding to your to-do list, what if you took things away? Fewer obligations. Fewer hats to wear. Less hustle. Less trying to please. Leaning into saying no more often.
Every year we are pressured to think and reflect on how we can be more productive and do better. Work reviews arrive at the beginning of the year, often paired with expectations of more impact, greater visibility, more felt presence, and stronger communication. While a new year can be a chance to get into action around what is meaningful to us, it can also be an opportunity to confirm what we have already been doing and perhaps approach it in another way.
Intentionally choosing to subtract can leave you with more energy for the things that truly matter.
Things you may consider subtracting:
Shoulds
The heaviness and judgment of what you should be doing rather than what you want to be doing, or what truly aligns with your values. These “shoulds” often add pressure without meaning.
Less stimulus
There is a lot of incoming these days! You better believe it has a real effect on the nervous system. Constant input can leave us overstimulated, reactive, and depleted, making it harder to be present and grounded.
Comparisons
Energy given over to comparison can feed feelings of inadequacy, the sense that we are not enough, that we need to keep up and do better. It feeds the doing part of us and robs the being part: being content, being present, being peaceful.
Reading less news
Staying informed has never been easy, nor has being so regularly overwhelmed! We were not built to absorb all the information that comes our way. It’s okay to want to be in the know and prepared, and it’s equally important to know where staying informed crosses the line into abandoning self-care. Overwhelmed people as people without enough energy struggle to get into action when needed.
Procrastination
Procrastination is not rest. Yes, you may not be getting into action; however, you are often suspended in a state of anxiety and self-judgment, which again robs you of presence. Either do the hard thing or say no to the hard thing for now and be okay with that choice.
When you give less energy to procrastination, obligations, and shoulds, you get to put that energy into the things you really care about. From this place, action becomes more sustainable, more grounded, and more aligned.
Maybe this year isn’t about doing more, and maybe it is, but either way it is about making that choice.