Title: New Year's Resolutions That Actually Stick

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. To end the show today, we ask, does the concept of New Year's resolutions need an overhaul that requires a more thoughtful approach, instead of grand, one-time goals, making a list? That's what author Suleika Jaouad proposes in her recently published Substack piece titled "Against Resolutions." She writes that resolutions are "outcome-driven and binary, success or failure, repair or ruin. They rely on force and control to produce change." Now, those are hardly the conditions under which we tend to become better versions of ourselves, she argues.

Instead, she turns to rituals daily, sometimes short-term practices that don't overhaul who she is as a person, or attempt to, but instead make day-to-day life and work a whole lot more enjoyable. Suleika Jaouad is the author of a bestselling memoir and, most recently, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. She joins us now. Suleika, welcome to WNYC. I'm so glad you're on with us.

Suleika Jaouad: Thanks so much for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, does this resonate with you? Tell us a story. Looking back, were your successful New Year's resolutions, if you had any, actually rituals? Perhaps instead of setting the broad goal of maybe losing weight, you decided to find a gentle workout class that you enjoy enough to actually attend regularly, or pick any other example. 212-433-WNYC, or did the binary of a New Year's resolution ever work for you past, say, January 15th? 212-433-9692. "Against Resolutions" is the title of your piece. Maybe start with a story you tell about the time you set a resolution to run a half-marathon, all while in treatment for leukemia. What inspired you in the first place? Tell our listeners what ended up happening.

Suleika Jaouad: Like a lot of people, I used to make very ambitious resolutions for myself that ran the gamut from working out a couple of times a week to learning to meditate, to pie-in-the-sky, ambitious work goals. When I was 24, I was recovering from a bone marrow transplant. I remember coming across a story in a magazine about a cancer survivor and former pro athlete and reality TV star who, between his first and second transplant, had run the New York City Marathon. I was feeling really lost. I was unrecognizable to myself, and I did this flawed math that despair excels at. I decided that if he had had 2 bone marrow transplants and run 26 miles, then I could manage 13 miles, having had 1 bone marrow transplant.

That was my New Year's resolution. I got my fancy running shoes, put on an outfit, and went for my very first jog. When I left the house, I remember asking my mom to take a photograph of me, fist raised in the air in victory, and I promptly posted it because posting it meant that I had to go through it. That was part of the flawed thinking of resolutions, that you can will yourself into doing something just by declaring it. I was very much confusing declaration with destiny because I failed to reckon with a few very important facts. One, that I was not a former professional athlete.

I hadn't even been able to run the mandatory 1 mile in my high school gym class, and I was still in treatment and spending much of my days horizontal. That first run was my last run for many years.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Suleika Jaouad: It wrecked me. It ended up resulting in a stress fracture that set me back even further-

Brian Lehrer: Oh God.

Suleika Jaouad: -in terms of my fitness goals. I didn't just feel like I had failed at my resolution. It felt like proof of my inability to change, proof that even wanting to change was dangerous. As a result of that, I started to rethink the whole idea of resolutions. Not because I stopped wanting to change, but because I stopped wanting to make a spectacle of it, and I stopped wanting-

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Suleika Jaouad: -to set myself up for something that seemed almost designed to fail.

Brian Lehrer: Ritual rather than resolution, explain the difference.

Suleika Jaouad: Resolutions are outcome-driven. They're often spectacular in nature. They depend on willpower. Research tells us that they often fail. I think something like 8 out of 10 resolutions end up failing by the end of January, which means that instead of feeling renewed, people often start the new year feeling quietly chastened, like they failed. Rituals, on the other hand, are not spectacular in nature. They're small. They don't ask us to transform overnight. They ask us to return to something again and again. To set the conditions for any transformation to be possible. They're process-oriented.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a nice one in a text that I think you'll say is consistent with that. Listener writes, "I'm a drummer, and practicing an instrument for 15 minutes a day will work wonders." John in Woodhaven concludes this text with, "Perfect ritual devotion. 15 minutes a day." Annie in Queens has something related. Annie, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Annie: Hi. I do have something that I think is similar to this. I've made resolutions for years and was never really very successful. Last year, my husband read about and suggested to me that I come up with a theme for the year. I would revisit that theme, and my theme was "The Year of Reaching Out" as a way of being more social. Every time I had to make a decision, like, should I go and do this thing or that thing, I would think about the theme, and it would really help me make a decision to be more social and be with other people. It was the first year that I got to the end, and I thought, "You know what? I actually really did accomplish that." I can see real changes in my life. I think it's in keeping with what you're talking about, although it's slightly different.

Suleika Jaouad: I love that so much because a resolution would be, "I am going to reach out to someone every single week for the rest of the year," which may or may not happen depending on the conditions of life, depending on illness or some unexpected plot twist in your life. A theme, which is very much in line with the ritual, has less to do with output and more with getting ourselves in the proper frame of mind. As you said, when you create an overarching ritual or a theme that absorbs inconsistency, that absorbs the reality of everyday life, then it does make us want to do it because you haven't missed that phone call for the week. It's just a general direction that you're setting for yourself that is so much easier to meet and invites you to come back to it again and again.

Brian Lehrer: Alice in Brooklyn has a ritual, I think. Alice, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Alice: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. Years ago, listening to your show, you had on the author Julia Cameron, who did The Artist's Way series. That particular show, she was talking about writing "Morning Pages" as a form of prayer. I, at the time, did not have a spiritual practice. I thought, "Oh, that sounds like something I could do," because it wasn't necessarily theist-based per se. I have been doing it every single day since then. Every morning, I make my morning coffee, I'm on my 1,300-something day. The end of the practice always is I give thanks. I give thanks for my family for having brought me into the world.

I give thanks to my people who have moved on [laughs] to the other side. I give thanks for the warmth of my home and the fact that I'm sitting here drinking morning coffee, and I have the freedom to sit down for a couple of minutes every day and do this thing just to take care of myself. This has been a life-altering process.

Brian Lehrer: It makes me so happy that something that we did on this show led to this for you. Two of my producers immediately looked it up. It was December 9, 2021. You being a little over 1,300 days now would be exactly right. Alice, that is so gratifying. Thank you very much. Let me sneak in Mandy in Frederick, Maryland, who says she's a therapist. Suleika, you're going to hear, I think, a professional therapist endorse your approach. Mandy, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Mandy: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I love the show, and I love your guest so much. She's such an inspiration. The Isolation Journals and her writings have meant a lot to me. As a therapist, I could not agree more with this shift. For me, a lot of it was changing to the word "intentions" instead of "goals" with clients. It's along the same lines of that framing of much more gentleness and trying to find how to build maybe practices and using intentions that allow for, I think, really a draw on building more self-compassion, more flexibility. Again, she was saying, the binary of you did it, or you didn't, and not with this kind of pressure.

Many, many clients of mine have this self-induced and sometimes external pressures that they're dealing with that are counteractive to not only change or goals accomplished, but really balance wellness. I think finding that way to, as she said, rituals, for me, intentions, or those similar words, have been so effective with clients over the years in bringing about something much more healthy and whole.

Brian Lehrer: I'm so glad you stated that out loud and articulated it here. Thank you. In our last minute, Suleika, I want to go back to the "Morning Pages" caller and use it as a hook to let you do a blurb for your new book, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, because it's a guide to the art of journaling. Journaling, which is what that caller was talking about.

Suleika Jaouad: Absolutely. Like Alice, my daily ritual is journaling. Right now, I'm doing it in the context of a 30-day New Year's journaling project on my newsletter, The Isolation Journals. There are no rules. There's no page count, no pressure to be wise. Sometimes it's a sentence, sometimes it's a doodle, but the point isn't productivity. It's staying in conversation with myself and creating a container where I get to be my most unedited, unvarnished self without the pressure of transformation. It's more of a place that steadies me. The Book of Alchemy is built for people who are interested in having a relationship with their creative life.

You don't need to be a painter or a writer to benefit from a daily creative ritual, in my opinion. The book isn't necessarily meant to be read straight through. You can use the journaling prompts. You can dip in, or you can just keep it nearby when you want some inspiration. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: I have to stop because we're out of time, but it's The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, Suleika Jaouad, who also wrote that article, that Substack newsletter, "Against Resolutions" for ritual. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. It was wonderful.

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