Ditch New Year’s Resolutions Day

What the day is

Ditch New Year's Resolutions Day is observed on January 17. The date is chosen to sit at the point where resolutions are widely abandoned, which makes it a joke with unusually good timing.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The pattern it mocks is well described, and the shape of it matters more than the fact.

Resolutions do not usually decay gradually. They tend to end at a specific moment: a single missed day that gets reinterpreted. Researchers looking at self-control failure describe a common sequence in which a minor lapse is treated as proof the whole attempt has failed, which removes the reason to hold to it for the rest of the day, which produces a much larger lapse than the original one. The person concludes they lack discipline, when what actually happened is that an all-or-nothing rule made one ordinary slip fatal.

That points at the fix, which is unglamorous. Plan for the missed day before it happens, decide in advance that a lapse means resuming rather than restarting, and set the rule loosely enough to survive an ordinary week. Goals that specify a minimum rather than a perfect record survive contact with real life considerably better.

There is also a legitimate use for the day as named. Some resolutions are worth abandoning outright, because they were somebody else's idea, or were a punishment dressed as self-improvement, or described a person the resolver does not actually want to be. Dropping one of those is not a failure of will; it is an accurate judgment, and holding onto it out of stubbornness costs more than releasing it.

How to take part

• Look honestly at each resolution and sort it: keep, rescale, or drop.
• Rescale rather than abandon the ones that were simply too ambitious.
• Decide now what you will do the next time you miss a day.
• Drop anything you took on to please somebody else, without guilt.
• Restart today rather than waiting for a Monday or next January.