Why Resolutions Fail: The 2 Real Reasons (And A Better Way To Start Your Year)

I used to be a resolutions person, proudly listing all the ways I was going to be a brand new person come January 1st. (Ha.)

But these days I do things differently.

And it’s working out so much better for me. 💃

Why resolutions fail to work for me

Before I turned 40 I had a midlife crisis of sorts. I mean, I’d done it all – I went to college, got myself a good career, bought a house, married the man I loved, had a baby… I even started my own business and moved continents. 🌎✈️

So what was left?

How do you look forward to something when you feel like you’ve already achieved everything you set out to?

What do you do when you have no idea what you want anymore?

Long story short, I went through a major depressive episode but re-found my spark when I came out the other side. (Shoutout to therapy and meds. 💊)

I learned that there’s still so much to do and see and experience, and my life has changed immensely since then.

And that’s one of the main reasons resolutions have never really worked for me – a lot can happen in the space of a year, and I’m never the same person exiting a year as when I entered it.

If you’ve also struggled to stick with resolutions, let me tell you what’s been working exceptionally well for me.

What works better for me than resolutions

I won’t keep you hanging, it’s monthly experiments. 🧪

I’d tried resolutions and couldn’t get them to stick. I’d tried quarterly goals and still found myself falling short.

But here’s the thing…

It wasn’t that I didn’t have the discipline to stick with something for that long. It was simply that I didn’t always WANT to.

I started to think about why it was that I couldn’t seem to stick to all my resolutions, or why some stuck while others fell by the wayside.

This is what I came up with:

The 2 reasons most resolutions fail

1. The thing you’re chasing isn’t right for you, or
2. The thing you’re chasing isn’t right for you right now

Let me explain.

We’ve all had a dose of grass-is-greener syndrome, where something seems all shiny and exciting… until we step into it. Until we see the effort that’s required. Until we see the sacrifices that need to be made.

We all want the highlight reel, but we don’t always want the hard work.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We can’t all be Olympic athletes 🏃‍➡️, or world-class cooks 🧑‍🍳, or Nobel prize winners 🥇… or even more mundane things, like gardeners 🧑‍🌾, or crafters 🧶, or bookworms 🤓.

We can’t do everything, so it’s totally fine to let most things fall by the wayside. At least for now.

And that leads me to the second point…

Maybe you ARE meant to change the world with your new invention, or revolutionise the healthcare industry (please do), or star in a blockbuster movie.

But just not right now.

I don’t know about you but there are certain habits I’ve tried to adopt over the years that never seemed to stick, no matter how small they were.

Flossing my teeth was one. 🦷

Time and time again I’d try. I’d do it for a few nights, or even a few weeks… and then fall off.

Sound familiar?

But then one day I read an article that said that you’re about 30% more likely to get heart disease if you don’t floss. 😳

I have flossed daily ever since.

Let’s face it, we all have things in our lives we’ve been doing for years and years. Habits and routines and acitivites.

So it’s not that you CAN’T stick with something over a long period of time. You totally can.

Maybe it’s not that something will never work for you, maybe it’s just that it won’t work right now, for whatever reason.

(Listen, I’m not saying you can stop flossing. Don’t send your dentist after me.)

Essentially, when you get right down into the weeds, either the burning desire isn’t there to carry you through, or the timing isn’t right.

Why experiments are better than resolutions

Experiments, by their very nature, allow you to test things out. It’s that simple. 🧑‍🔬

You go into things with a hypothesis (“I can go to the gym 4 days a week”, or “I’d really like cooking”) and you see how it plays out.

There’s no pressure to succeed. There’s no obligation to stick with something until the end of time.

You lead with curiosity. 🤔

I started 2025 thinking, “It might be fun to open a home bakery”, and “I’d like to learn to crochet”.

I honestly don’t know how far I’d have got if those were “shoulds”.

If I felt I HAD to open a home bakery (with, of course, the implied goal being that I’d have to make a successful business out of it), I’m not sure I would have even started. Or, if I did, I don’t think I’d have continued once I saw how much time and money needed to be invested in it upfront.

Similarly, with crocheting, if I’d felt an obligation to do it, my frustration levels for those first few projects would have completely put me off because I’d have felt I was failing.

But when it’s an experiment, there’s no failure, there’s just successfully disproving a hypothesis.

You can re-start the experiment with different variables and see if the next one works out, or you can let it go, satisfied that you got an answer one way or another.

Turn your “I must make a success of this” into “Ooh, let’s see where this leads”. 🕵️

So let’s talk about exactly WHY these work so well, and then I’ll share how I keep track of all these experiments (and, if you’re really super duper interested, what my experiments will be for January).

How monthly experiments improve your life tenfold

It’s a sad truth that time seems to speed up as you get older. Like, I’m sorry but my mind is still grappling with the fact that it’s no longer the 90s. Can we just WAIT A MINUTE WHILE I CATCH MY BREATH? 😮‍💨

But good ol’ science stepped in with the answer as to why this is the case and, as a result, pointed to a stunningly simple solution.

Yup, you can actually slow down time. 🕰️ Or at least make it feel that way.

You see, when you experience something new, your brain is forced to sit up and pay attention. It needs to focus. It needs to be firing synapses and filing away precious new memories.

That’s why summers when you were young seemed to last forever. There were so many new things to experience and explore!

As you grow older, you do and see the same things. You have the same routines and habits. Your days start to look and feel the same. And so what does your brain do?

It checks out. 😴

It goes into autopilot mode, just barely doing enough to keep you going through the motions. But otherwise it’s basically asleep at the wheel.

Hours blur into days, which blur into weeks… months… and before you know it, years of your life have passed by and you barely have any memory of it.

So how you do get off this sad but speedy train and start truly relishing life again?

The secret to slowing down time

If you want your life to feel vibrant again, you have to introduce novelty.

Give your brain a good shake. Do something out of the ordinary. Force it to sit up and take notice.

And it doesn’t have to be anything major. We’re not talking about selling all your earthly belongings to go live in a monastery.

It could be as simple as trying a new recipe, visiting a different park, popping into a new shop…

It’s anything that switches your brain back on. 📶

If you’re doing the same thing every day, your cranial filing cabinet is gonna be pretty empty.

But when you keep trying new things, that filing cabinet’s gonna fill up fast and you’ll have a lifetime of memories to look back on. 🗄️

How I’m setting myself up for success in 2026

In short, I’m using a vision board. And if you’ve tried these in the past and they haven’t worked for you, hear me out because SAME.

I got so sick of creating vision boards that never amounted to anything. Like, where was my castle tucked away in the woods with the gothic windows and the bountiful garden?

NOWHERE. 🤷

I know vision boards work really well for others, and can serve as a great source of motivation.

For me it was a constant reminder of everything I didn’t (and probably would never) have.

(Cue the world’s smallest violin. 🎻)

So last year I switched things up.

Instead of putting some far-off fantasy on my vision board, I created one with images I knew I could achieve THAT MONTH.

To give you an example, here’s my vision board for January 2025:

Guess who achieved absolutely everything on that board? THIS GIRL. 💅

Again, this was a matter of experiments. These were all simply things I wanted to test out that month. If they worked, great. Lots of them made it on to my vision boards for subsequent months (like crocheting).

If they didn’t work out, it was A-OK because at least I’d tried them.

And then I just created a fresh board for the following month.

Frankly, I was a fan, and it’s something I’ll be continuing in 2026. (Scroll down for more on that.)

So if, like me, the “traditional” vision board doesn’t float your boat, try the monthly experiment board and see if it doesn’t fill your life with a little more magic. ✨

My theme for 2026

I’ve never been a huge word-of-the-year person. I was either all in on resolutions, or I was all out. Words felt frivolous. Meaningless.

But this past month one particular phrase kept popping into my head – gentle expansion.

I’m no longer in a season of life where I want to “go big or go home”. (Home sounds just lovely, thanks. Pass me my fluffy socks.)

But I still don’t want to become stagnant. 🙅

I’m a different person now than I was a year ago. And I’ll be a different person again a year from now.

Sure, at my core I’m still the same, but the activities I engage in, the places I travel, the people I meet, the things I experience, the books I read, the struggles I face, the lessons I learn…

All of them help me grow and evolve. 🌱

2025 (and everything post-40, frankly) taught me that I still have so much life to live.

I definitely want to continue expanding my horizons, expanding my knowledge, expanding my skills, expanding my comfort zone…

But I don’t want to do it in an aggressive way.

The gentle, iterative, intentional approach is what I’ll be taking.

My January 2026 experiments

I love hearing about other people’s goals because one, I’m a Nosey Nelly, but two, because sometimes it serves as inspiration for things I might like to try out myself.

If either of those sounds like you, you might enjoy my list of experiments. These are in no particular order:

January experiment #1: Birdwatching

While I was staying with my in-laws for Christmas they gifted me one of those fancy bird feeders with a camera attached. (They had an extra.) It helps you watch and identify birds and ooh, we’ve got some beauties around here. 🐦‍⬛

Moving to the US meant encountering lots of new birds and animals I’d never come across before, and we get a lot of wildlife in our back garden.

If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know that each spring/summer I share stories about birds that have made nests around our home and laid eggs, and then I update as the chicks grow. 🪺🐣🐥

It’s truly one of my favourite things, as is seeing the bright red cardinals in the winter trees.

I don’t think I’m going to be a hardcore birdwatcher (though never say never), but I’m going to hang the bird feeder in our garden and see what stops by for a snack.

It probably won’t turn into a lifelong passion, but it will bring a little extra joy into my life.

And that’s definitely worth the experiment.

January experiment #2: Crochet clothing

Crocheters, don’t strike me down but I generally dislike crochet clothing. (I know, I know. I’m sorry.) Personally I tend to stick to plushies because they’re a lot more forgiving when it comes to sizing.

However, I saw this “cloudigan” and it’s starting to change my mind because LOOK AT HOW PRETTY IT IS.

So this is going to be my month to make a start on it. ☁️

Am I going to FINISH it in January? Not unless I crochet like a lunatic. In fact, this might be a year-long project, depending on how difficult I find it.

But this is an EXPERIMENT. I can try it out and see how it goes.

Worst case scenario I learn something new.

Best case scenario I level up my skillset and crochet confidence, and can rock this comfy cardigan.

January experiment #3: Get my YouTube groove back

It’s been a hot minute since I was churning out consistent content. I’m still not sure I’m ready to dive back in but I’ll give it a whirl. 📹

Full transparency: My bank balance is mainly dictating this one because OOF, my income needs a BIG boost.

My first video of 2026 was a New Year’s Day vlog where I touched on the topics in this blog post, if you wanna have a gander:

Maybe these will become lifelong endeavours, and maybe they’ll never see the light of day again.

All I know for sure is that I’ll be ending this year with a few new skills and a boatload of memories. (Yup, I’m gonna need a bigger boat. 🚤)

Do you think you’ll give monthly experiments a go? And if so, what will yours be for January? (Nosey Nelly here wants to know.)

Make sure to log them all in your ‘My Life Story’ digital planner. That’s what I’ll be doing so I have a record of everything to look back on.

And I’ll share my adventures along the way if you want to stick around. 🥰

Happy 2026!

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