Consider This from NPR - For a happier new year, rethink your resolutions.

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

It can be hard to resist jumping on the whole "New Year, New You" bandwagon. But if you've decided 2025 is your year to make some changes, we have tips to help you succeed."Life Kit" host Marielle Segarra joins us to share the best ways to approach New Year's resolutions.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The end of the calendar year means chillier temperatures, festive treats, time with loved ones, and, for many, a renewed enthusiasm for self-improvement. Resolution number one. Obviously we'll lose 20 pounds. Number two, always put last night's pants in the laundry basket. Equally important, we'll find nice, sensible boyfriend to go out with. I am going to do one thing I have never done before. That, my friends, is my New Year's resolution. Ooh, that's a good one. Mine is to pilot a commercial jet. As the clock runs out on 2024, it's a good time to reflect back on the year,

take stock of the good and the bad, and think about the year to come. And whether you love resolutions or hate them, it can be pretty hard to resist jumping on the whole new year, new you bandwagon. And, you know, more recent American culture, we have this sort of big self-improvement culture. And part of that is, yeah, you know,

I think sort of like the ways that advertising and social media and capitalism have been motivated to have us think that we should always be striving for something better and trying something new, that we should be different. Faith Hill is a writer for The Atlantic. A few years ago, she told NPR about why she was over New Year's resolutions. The structure of resolutions just doesn't really match a lot of the human experience, at least when it comes to people's most important goals. So, you know, we don't just like check being a good parent off the list and move on to something else.

We struggle our whole lives to live in line with our values and we get better and then we get worse and then better again or we succeed in some ways and fail in others. Whether or not New Year's resolutions are realistic is something Mariel Seguera has thought a lot about. She's the host of NPR's Life Kit podcast, and here's what she told us back in 2022. When I've tried to make really rigid resolutions in the past, like they're pretty much done

by day three or whatever. And also, you know, it's like we should think about what failure means because you don't have to be objectively good at a thing for it to be a success. Thankfully, if there's a better way to do basically anything, LifeKit has you covered. Consider this. Change is hard. Do New Year's resolutions help or hurt? NPR's resident advice expert weighs in on facing the year ahead. From NPR, I'm Juana Sommers.

It's Consider This from NPR. My colleague, LifeKit host Mariel Seguera, spends a lot of time talking to people about changes that can make your life better. Small changes like learning to dance in public without being self-conscious. And big changes like learning to cope with the loss of a sibling. Who should consider a prenup? How fast are we supposed to eat a meal? What should you consider when you're choosing a lunchbox? What are some ways to get back to sleep?

So here we are at the end of yet another year and a lot of people may be wondering, should I even bother to make a New Year's resolution? Maybe you don't even know what to resolve to do or not to do. Well, Mary-Al is here to help you get 2025 off to a great start. Hi there, happy almost new year.

Yeah, happy almost new year. Okay, so say for 2025, you decide to walk 5,000 steps every single day, but pretty quickly you realize that's actually a lot more steps than you thought. So you start ignoring your fitness tracker. Sometimes even when a goal feels reasonable and doable, we just let it slide.

Give us some advice, how can we stay on track? Yeah, that's the classic story, right? You have this big goal and then you drop it by mid-January. Well, we have done a lot of episodes about this every New Year. This year, we are focusing on something called accountability partners. Basically, the idea is enlist the buddy system, right? We are social creatures as humans, and a lot of the time, we are more interested in pleasing other people than we are in pleasing ourselves. So there is a way to harness that for our own goals. And probably the classic example of this is,

you have a friend who you go to the gym with or who you go running with, and you know that you're gonna show up because you don't want them to be waiting outside in the cold for you, but you wouldn't do it on your own. But you don't actually have to have the same goals. Some people do this where they have an accountability partner who they met online or who was an acquaintance and they just Some people do this where they have an accountability partner who they met

online or who was an acquaintance and they just agreed to do this. And they'll get on Zoom once a week and talk about what are your goals for this week? Did you hit your targets for whatever you're interested in last week, et cetera? Or they'll be like, we co-work basically once a week, once a day. I'll practice my juggling while you practice the tuba on mute. It actually gets people much closer to their goals than if they were going it alone. Kaitlin Luna Atlantic writer Faith Hill, who we heard from a bit earlier, said that some of the most important achievements in life, they don't really easily break down into these resolution-sized chunks. What's your take? Do

you agree with that? Faith Hill I agree that a lot of our goals in life are ongoing, and you don't get to a place where you're like, all right, I'm done. I've started eating healthy. Now I can stop, right? If only it were that easy. But something like eat healthy or be good to my body can be broken down into smaller pieces

to make it more actionable, right? So let's say you want to eat healthier, maybe you just start with one thing. Like this year, I'm going to try to make a smoothie every morning with a bunch of fruit and vegetable in it. Just pick something that aligns with that overall intention. We talked to Oliver Berkman on the show a little while back. He wrote a book called 4,000 Weeks about time management. And he talks about breaking down these larger tasks into something doable. So I wanted to retile my kitchen floor.

And he said, that's not really something you can put on your to-do list, because there are too many steps packed into one goal. So you should break it down into smaller things, like call the hardware store for an estimate, or out the tile and little by little those things can get you to your bigger goal. There are a couple of topics that usually dominate resolutions this time of year. I'm thinking of things like fitness and weight loss, giving up smoking, drinking or other

bad habits. But I know that you've talked to a whole lot of experts over the last year. What stands out as some of the best tips that people don't normally think about? Yeah, we cover a lot of personal finance. And one is if you have money in a savings account, to make sure it's in something called a high yield savings account, because you might have your money just sitting there essentially losing value because of inflation and earning next to nothing in interest. But there are other banks that will offer you between 4% and 5% interest and there's

no risk associated with that. You just have to make the switch and make sure it's a bank that's FDIC insured, insured by the federal government. Another one in the money realm is if you find yourself shopping too much and spending more than you want to, make a buy list. So basically anything that you want to buy, you put on this list and you let it sit there for a week or a month and you come back to it and you'd be surprised how often you're like, I can't believe I wanted to buy that thing. It stops you from making a lot of impulse purchases. And then we cover health a lot to health and safety. And we did an episode on CPR that was really important, I feel like, because a lot of

people are afraid to do CPR if they're not trained. We would definitely encourage everyone to go take a CPR class. But even if you haven't, if you see someone unresponsive, not breathing, first you're going to call 911. If there's a bystander, you might point to them and say, hey, you call 911. If you're by yourself, you put the phone on speakerphone call while you start doing compressions. And for compressions, you're just putting one hand over the other, arms straight, elbows locked, push in the center of the person's chest

to the beat of the song, Staying Alive. So it's like, ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin' alive, push, push, push, push, push, staying alive, staying alive. You keep doing that until the person wakes up or until help shows up. I mean, it seems like when we have these conversations about resolutions, there are always these very serious, very aspirational, very lofty goals.

So I wanna ask you, Marielle, what are some resolutions that are maybe easier to accomplish and also just plain fun? Yeah, I think New Year's resolutions don't have to be punishing, right? It's up to you. So if you think about what's fun to you, maybe you want more play in your life, maybe you want more pleasure in your life. Think about what brings that for you.

A resolution could be, I want to learn how to roller skate or start doing it again, or I'm going to put lotion on my body every night before bed just because it feels good. And that's a pretty simple promise to make to yourself. And that falls into that category of like pleasure. It doesn't have to be, I'm denying myself all these things. I love that.

Marielle, you've said in the past that you prefer to think about intentions rather than resolutions. So what are some of your intentions as we look ahead to 2025? Yeah, I have these kind of rolling intentions. I had them written on a post-it above my desk for a while. The verbs for me right now are move, play, create, connect, and rest. And I aim to do those every day if possible, every week for sure. And they can mean different things, but I try not to set super rigid goals for myself, at least at this moment in my life.

What about you? Do you have an intention this year? You know, I don't know if I have an intention, but one thing we've been talking about a lot at home is, I don't know, obviously I host a new show, so I work a lot and that means sometimes some of those household things can fly by the wayside. I used to be a great meal planner

and then I kind of fell off of meal planning, so that means there's a lot of impulse takeout where it's like I don't even necessarily want to eat that thing. I just want to not cook, or I didn't plan well enough, and there's nothing in my fridge. So I really wanna get back to being more intentional about what I feed my body.

I love cooking, I love eating good food, even when I don't cook it. So just trying to be a little bit more intentional with that. Not really like a healthy diet goal, but just, I don't know, thinking more about what I'm consuming. Well, we have multiple episodes of Life Kit that can help you with that. That is Mariel Seguera, host of NPR's Life Kit. Mariel, thanks for coming back and happy New Year.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This episode was produced by Katherine Fink. It was edited by Jeanette Woods and Megan New Year. Yeah, thanks for having me. This episode was produced by Katherine Fink. It was edited by Jeanette Woods and Megan Cain. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. And a special thanks to Mariel Seguera, host of NPR's Life Kit. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Sommers and Happy New Year.