Today is the perfect day to ditch your New Year's resolutions

Today is ‘Quitter’s Day, which for the uninitiated, is the day most people abandon their New Year’s resolutions. The chippy term comes from a study by Strava—which, again, for the uninitiated—is basically Instagram for athletes. Reports show that over 80% of us give up our New Year's resolutions by the second Friday in January, but instead of berating ourselves, Leena Norms, author of Half-Arse Human: How to live better without burning out, says it’s time to put perfectionism aside...

By Leena Norms

There’s no polite way to say it. I am a half-arser.

I’m the person who promises you a cup of tea and wanders off halfway through brewing it. I own fifty fancy notebooks, all abandoned after filling in the first few pages. If I say “file attached” in an email, I can guarantee that the file is more likely to be partying in Vegas with a mojito in hand than attached to that email. I have been known to shave just ONE leg in the shower, shrug and get out. My washing machine is full of wet clothes, my browser is a breeding ground for open tabs, and the jumper I was going to knit you last Christmas still doesn’t have any sleeves.

You’d think, with such a natural inclination to shruggery, I wouldn’t be big on New Year’s Resolutions. You’d be wrong. Every January, I would have a saucy, scandalous fling with New Year’s Resolutions. We’d wink across the bar, smear lipstick everywhere, make beautiful vision board babies together and then toast to our future as the sun rose on what promised to be ‘my year’. The year I change it all; lose everything I want to lose, and gain what I’ve always wanted to gain. The year I get an overnight personality transplant, swing my spirit on an axis and become the opposite of a half-arser—the year I will become ‘the new me’.

Except, by the 10th of January I’m back to my damp-laundry, half-hairy, tab-jumping grizzly old self. Cinderella’s carriage is a pumpkin once more.

Am I a failure? Yes and no.

I realised that it wasn’t my ‘lazy, flaky, insincere’ self that needed fixing. It was my expectations. I’d failed at understanding myself and the way I change. The ‘how’ of goals turns out to be as important as the ‘what’ or the ‘why’.

I’m someone who needs gradual change, low bars, flexible schedules and small incentives. Tell me to run every day and I’ll run once and then hide my running gear. Tell me to jog five times in January, but I get to pick when and for how long and I get a sticker as a reward at the end? I’m in. I’ve slowly realised that my life isn’t a movie – I’m not one transformation montage away from becoming someone completely different. And thank goodness. The current ‘me’ is who my friends are fond of, the one my partner fell in love with, the person who built the job I adore and picked the favourite mug I dote on.

We know now, thanks to science, that our minds are capable of change on a structural level; the nerve circuits in our brain are much more malleable and willing to upgrade themselves than we previously guessed. We’re not stuck with the wiring we had as children, or even the ones we have now. Thanks to neuroplasticity, change does happen. But it doesn’t happen when the clock strikes midnight.

Habits are like muscles. You can’t just walk up to the bonnet of a car and expect to lift it in the air just because your New Year’s resolution was to be stronger.

Enter, my half-arse method. Got dreams? Halve them. Got a to-do list? Rip it in two and only keep the best bits. Want to try veganism? Start by eating a vegan breakfast. Want to get fit? Put your shopping at the other end of the house and walk each item to the kitchen individually. Want to improve your skincare routine? Just pledge to wear SPF every day, come rain or shine. Want to read twenty books this year? Dare yourself to read ten.

In my book, Half-Arse Human: how to live better without burning out, you’ll find a whole lot more ideas on how to halve your to-do list and double your wins — from housework to personal style, career choices to friendship maintenance. One of my favourite ideas I did last New Year was to create a ‘bingo card’ for my ambitions. I wanted to get better at sewing, so I created a grid with nine skills I thought would be useful to learn. That way, my resolution didn’t become a piece of homework that I could pass or fail; it became a ‘menu’ of different small wins I could pick from, depending on the resources future-me had to give.

Ultimately, I’ve found that whilst ‘half-arsing’ might seem unambitious to onlookers, you and I know the real truth: that you were never going to ‘whole-arse’ it anyway. It may be a new year, but you are the old you. And that’s okay. Just because you can’t commit 100% to something, doesn’t mean you can’t dip your toe in. Committing to half-arsing your goals this year can avoid two worse outcomes: burnout, from trying to be superhuman rather than just simply human – or remaining in freeze response, too scared to even begin.

When you think about it that way, a ‘half-arser’ is far from the worst thing you could be. In fact, it might be the key to keeping the resolve in your resolutions. It might mean a slow, slapdash revolution that creeps up on you while you’re busy playing bingo. A change that stays around, long after the discoballs and decorations have been packed away. After all: anything worth doing, is worth half-arsing.

Leena Norms is a poet, vlogger and presenter. She has amassed over 24 million views on her YouTube channel and was named Book Vlogger of the Year by London Book Fair in 2020. Half-Arse Human: how to live better without burning outis published by John Murray Press, available in hardback, eBook or Audio now.