Why New Year's Resolutions Are Unnecessary

It’s November, and it starts. Everyone is talking about the New Year. “New Year, new me!”

Social media is flooded with the year that’s been, and you’re getting inundated with ads supporting ambitious resolutions, travel plans, and fitness challenges.

If you’re healing from an abusive relationship, you might be thinking… I just want to get through Christmas.

Depending on where you are in your journey means the previous year could still feel raw. The last thing you need is a list of expectations you’re supposed to meet for the coming year. A measure of how you’re not doing enough, being enough, or healing fast enough.

New Year’s resolutions are completely unnecessary. Even more so if you’re still tender and knee deep in building your new life.

I wanted to write this post about moving away from traditional resolutions for the New Year and considering more sustainable ways to celebrate yourself as you recover and heal.

The Problem with New Year's Resolutions When You're Healing

Why Resolutions Are Setting Yourself Up to Fail

Resolutions are grand declarations made in a moment of optimism, often disconnected from our actual capacity, resources, or current reality.

“I’ll start going to the guy.” “I’ll get my dream career.” “I’ll finally become the person I want to be.”

Wow, let’s just put more pressure on ourselves. Let’s start the New Year with a “to-do” list on top of everything else we juggle in life.

Research published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that only 46% of people who make New Year’s resolutions are still working on them six months later, with the majority abandoning their goals by mid-February. The reason? They were overly ambitious targets, with a lack of consideration for their actual life circumstances.

Now you’re healing from an abusive relationship, already carrying the weight of rebuilding your sense of self, processing a ton of emotions, and learning to trust your own judgement again.

Add to that a resolution that demands you be better, stronger, more productive, more healed, just more… Yeah, let’s not do that.

Damage by Self-Imposed Pressure

When you’re healing from an abusive relationship, you are already your own harshest critic. Abusive relationships condition us to blame ourselves for things that were never our fault, and to believe that we were never good enough.

You’ve spent the time learning and practising self-compassion, gentle self-talk, and self-care. Then comes January, and this cultural mandate that you should be setting big goals and making major changes. All that carefully grown self-compassion can get drowned out by questions in your head like “Everyone else is improving themselves. What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you doing more?”

Fun fact. Studies show that pressure to meet self-imposed goals can actually increase cortisol levels and anxiety, particularly in individuals already managing trauma. For someone healing from an abusive relationship, this pressure isn’t motivating; it’s triggering. It recreates the dynamic where you’re never doing enough, where your worth is tied to achievement, and where failure feels like proof of your inadequacy.

Healing Happens in Its Own Time

Healing doesn’t follow a calendar.

It doesn’t care that it’s a new year or that you’ve decided “this is going to be my year.”

Your nervous system, your emotional processing, and your capacity for growth all operate on their own timeline, so forcing them to conform to a January 1st deadline isn’t going to work.

When you’re healing from an abusive relationship, you’re not just “getting over” something. You’re rewiring neural pathways in your brain due to the abuse you suffered. You’re rebuilding your safety. Relearning what healthy relationships look like. Building your identity.

The Pressure and Disappointment Cycle

Think about how this whole resolution thing typically works.

You set a goal on January 1st, full of hope and grit to make a change.

By week two, life gets in the way as normal. You miss a day at the gym, skip your meditation practice, or don’t make as much progress on that project.

Instead of adjusting your expectations, you feel like you’ve failed. That disappointment triggers shame, which triggers the old scripts from your abusive relationship: “See? You can’t do anything right. You’re not strong enough.”

This cycle of pressure and disappointment isn’t helping you heal.

It’s reinforcing old patterns and unrealistic expectations. You end up feeling worse about yourself in February than you did in December, all because you tried to force healing into a resolution framework that was never designed for the complexity of trauma recovery.

New Year’s resolutions are focused on what you’re not yet doing, so they directly contradict the practice of self-compassion. They ask you to focus on what you lack rather than your progress.

When we are healing, self-compassion is the greatest action we can practice. Not resolutions.

What You Can Do Instead?

Just because the resolutions have been thrown out the window doesn’t mean you can’t create your own practice.

Consider practices that celebrate your journey, meet your needs, and build joy into your life without demanding perfection.

Like what? Well, here are some ideas.

The Celebration Jar

Get yourself a large jar. Something beautiful that makes you smile when you see it. This becomes your celebration jar, a year-long practice of acknowledging the good moments as they happen, no matter how small they seem.

Throughout the year, whenever something cool happens, you reach a goal you were aiming for, you handle a difficult situation, or you simply experience a moment worth remembering, write it on a small piece of paper and put it in the jar.

These could look like:

“Had a hard conversation and didn’t apologise for having boundaries”
“Made myself a really nice dinner just because I wanted to”
“Started therapy”
“Finished that book I’ve been reading for months”
“Laughed until my stomach hurt with friends”

The beauty of this practice is that it’s retrospective. You’re not setting expectations you might fail to meet. You’re simply noticing and celebrating what’s already happening.

At the end of the year, you can open the jar and read all the moments that made up your journey, rediscovering accomplishments and joys you’d most likely forgotten.

This practice is powerful for people healing from an abusive relationship because it trains your brain to notice positive experiences rather than fixating on perceived failures. It builds evidence of your resilience and growth.

Artist Dates: Scheduled Joy Just for You

The concept of “artist dates,” made popular by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, involves taking yourself on a weekly solo adventure to explore something that delights, intrigues, or inspires you. When adapted for healing from an abusive relationship, artist dates become personal celebrations. Time intentionally made for pleasure and your own enjoyment without any pressure of productivity.

At the start of the year (or whenever you’re reading this), create a list of artist dates you’d like to experience over the coming months.

Visiting a museum you’ve never been to
Take a pottery class or any other craft
Spend an afternoon at a botanical garden
Going to a matinee movie alone
Explore a new neighbourhood or town
Trying a cooking class
Attend a live music performance
Browse a bookstore for as long as you want

The point of artist dates is that these are activities done alone, just for you, with no goal other than nourishing your spirit.

When you are healing from an abusive relationship, where your needs and wants were dismissed, and your time was not your own, this practice is a great self-care to grow your joy and curiosity.

Building Adventure into Your Year

Many make the resolution to “travel more.” How about a practical approach to planning joy? Look at your calendar for the year ahead and identify long weekends and periods where you can take a short break.

Right now, book a few small getaways. These don’t have to be expensive or elaborate. What matters is that they’re scheduled, giving you things to look forward to throughout the year. It’s not a goal, they’re plans.

Ideas:

A cabin in the mountains for a weekend of hiking and reading
A city you’ve always wanted to explore, even if it’s just a few hours away
A wellness retreat focused on yoga or meditation
A staycation at a local hotel with a good spa
A visit to see friends or family

Planning these getaways is also practice in making choices purely for your own benefit, trusting your own judgment about what you want, and experiencing the world as a place of possibility rather than threat.

Seasonal Celebrations: Marking Time Your Way

Rather than putting all the pressure on one arbitrary date (January 1st), what if you celebrated transitions throughout the year? Each change of season offers an opportunity for personal celebration and gentle reflection.

Put reminders in your calendar with ideas of what you’d like to do:

Spring: Plan a garden planting day (even if it’s just herbs in pots), go for a long walk to see blossoms, or do a closet clean out.

Summer: Organise an outdoor picnic just for yourself, visit a farmers market and cook something fresh, take a day trip to water (beach, lake, river), or create a summer reading list of books that sound fun, not improving.

Autumn: Go apple picking, make a cosy space in your home perfect for cool evenings, try baking something new, or spend an afternoon with your favourite hot beverage and a journal.

Winter: Create a personal winter solstice ritual, make a playlist of songs that feel good, have a movie marathon day with blankets and comfort food, or reflect on what you want to “rest” from before spring arrives.

You can make these personal celebrations just for you. No one else needs to understand them or participate; they don’t even have to know.

The End-of-Year Self-Care Celebration

Instead of making resolutions, create a tradition of celebrating who you are right now.

As the year comes to an end, put together a self-care kit designed specifically for you.

Fill it only with things that bring you joy and comfort.

Ideas:

Your favourite dark chocolate (the good stuff, not the diet version)
A luxurious face mask that makes you feel pampered
Bath salts or bubble bath for a long soak
A new book or magazine you’ve been wanting to read
A playlist of songs that lift your mood
Cosy socks or a blanket
Ingredients for your favourite comfort meal
A list of movies or shows perfect for binge-watching
Candles in scents that calm you
A journal for reflecting

Make a day or evening with yourself to use this kit. This is making the end of the year a relaxing celebration just for you, your way.

This practice directly challenges the productivity culture that tells us rest must be earned and that we’re only valuable when we’re achieving. For someone healing from an abusive relationship, deliberately choosing rest and pleasure without justification is reclaiming your power.

Why This Approach Works Better Than Resolutions

The alternatives suggested here don’t require you to be someone you’re not. You’re not required to put pressure on yourself to “achieve”

They accept that today, right now, you’re doing the best you can with the resources and capacity you have. That’s self-compassion and kindness.

Notice that none of these alternatives involves setting metrics for success or failure. You can’t “fail” at filling a celebration jar. You either write notes or you don’t, and either way, you continue your healing. You can’t “fail” at taking an artist date. If you go, then you go; if you skip it, you reschedule when you have the capacity to go.

By removing the success/failure that traditional New Year’s resolutions create, you also remove the disappointment and harsh critic cycle.

You don’t need to also run a marathon, write a novel, learn a new language, or achieve any other culturally valued goal to have a meaningful year. Your year is meaningful because you’re healing, because you’re learning to trust yourself again, because you’re breaking patterns that no longer serve you. All of that is already extraordinary.

A Note on Goal-Setting

If you’re someone who genuinely finds goal-setting helpful and wants to engage in some forward-thinking planning, that’s okay, too. The issue isn’t with all goals, it’s with the pressure-filled, shame-inducing, all-or-nothing approach that New Year’s resolutions typically take.

The difference between harmful resolutions and helpful goals often comes down to;

whether they’re rooted in self-compassion or self-criticism

whether they allow for your humanity or demand perfection, and
whether they honour your healing or are trying to rush it

Doing New Year's Your Way

The pressure to transform yourself with the flip of a calendar is everywhere this time of year, but you don’t have to participate.

New Year’s resolutions are unnecessary. The self-imposed pressure they create, combined with the almost inevitable disappointment when they don’t unfold perfectly, can actually damage the careful healing you’ve been working on.

There are gentler ways to celebrate the year that’s been or look forward to the year ahead. These are just some ideas, but you can come up with your own way of creating rituals that speak to you.

You don’t need a new year to become a new you. You’re already working on that in your own time.

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FAQs

Q: If I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, doesn’t that mean I’m giving up on growth?

No. Growth happens regardless of whether you declare resolutions on January 1st. In fact, when you’re healing from trauma, growth is already happening daily. The alternatives suggested here (like celebration jars and artist dates) actually support sustainable growth better than pressure-filled resolutions because they work with your healing process rather than against it. Growth doesn’t require resolutions; it requires consistency, compassion, and patience.

Q: What if I actually achieved my New Year’s resolutions last year, should I still avoid them this year?

If you enjoy traditional resolutions and they don’t create shame or pressure, there’s no reason to abandon them. However, if you’re healing from an abusive relationship, it’s worth examining whether your “success” came at a cost. Did you push yourself too hard, or ignore your needs? The question isn’t whether you can meet resolutions, but whether they serve your overall well-being and healing.

Q: Can I combine some resolution-setting with the gentler alternatives you’ve suggested?

Absolutely. These aren’t exclusive approaches. These are simply ideas for you to consider. The key is to be honest about your motivation behind resolutions and to build in flexibility and self-compassion. If you want to set an intention like “I’d like to explore creative hobbies this year,” you can combine that with practical steps like adding artist dates to your calendar and using your celebration jar to note when you try something new.

Sources:

The Self-Compassion Institute

National Library of Medicine

PTSD Study

Why New Year’s Resolutions Are Unnecessary