The New Year's Ritual That Will Actually Help Your Well-Being
The New Year’s Ritual That Will Actually Help Your Well-Being
Rituals help us to process and mark the events of our lives, and one of those is surely on your mind this week: concluding 2020, the most hated year of all time, and kicking off a new year. 2020 has been a real mess, running the gamut from very stressful all the way through to extremely traumatic. You might be feeling the very normal craving to process this time and shut the door upon it, moving into the year with fresh energy and intentions. (You might also not be at all up for this yet, which is also completely okay and understandable!)
If you are craving a ritual, you might also be tempted to turn to our traditional year-end practices: listing off our achievements and setting New Year’s resolutions. Unfortunately, these rituals don’t help our long-term well-being in the best of times. Today, I’m going to teach you a brand new science-backed ritual that will actually help you to begin to process 2020 and set yourself up for greater happiness in 2021.
The power of rituals
There’s nothing like a fresh start. Because we don’t actually ever get a fresh start in this lifetime, humans are adept at adopting something called ‘temporal landmarks’, which are psychological markers that we use to separate one period of time from another. Not only do these help us to organize our memories and experiences (splitting our memories into groups like ‘the time I lived on Greenwich Street’ and ‘when I had black hair’), but we also use them to help us to fabricate false starts. We’re so good at this that we actually are more effective at achieving our goals when we leverage a fresh start.
Rituals can help us to mark the end of one time and the beginning of another, creating a temporal landmark that separates ‘old me’ from ‘new me’ or ‘that time’ from ‘this time.’ They’re extremely powerful: studies have found that after a breakup or a loss, people who engage in a ritual report feeling less grief than those who just wrote about the experience.
Be careful what you ritual
And yet, our existing New Year’s rituals are insufficient, and often even harmful, for our well-being. The two most common rituals in Western culture are:
To list out our achievements and wins (
To set resolutions for the year to come
Unfortunately, these two rituals point us away from happiness when they focus our attention explicitly on our extrinsic goals and our achievements. Sometimes, that list of achievements is even compiled and sent out in a card to everyone we know. Usually, our New Year’s resolutions are all about how inadequate and horrible we have been the prior year, and how to become a “brand new you”. (And most of them — estimates say 80%! — end up failing, making us feel even worse about ourselves when that happens.)
Extensive scientific research has found that it is not our achievements that make us happy. It is our relationships and the way that we serve other people that leads to our true, long-term health and happiness. But we spend our reflection time and our goal-setting energy focusing on how we will achieve more and how we will fulfill our own needs, without ever paying attention to the true drivers of happiness.
This year, try this instead
The purpose of the listing of achievements and the setting of goals is spot-on: reflection and goal-setting are key ingredients to our well-being. But we do it focused on the wrong thing: our external achievements.
Instead, we need to use those two muscles of reflection and goals to orient us in another direction, towards what will make us truly happy: using our gifts to help other people.
Here’s how to do it.
Grab a piece of paper (or your laptop, disconnected from the internet!) and set aside about 30 minutes sometime in the next week to answer the following questions:
What are you proudest of this year?
This question will help you to focus on your growth and to pinpoint the values that matter most to you.
Imagine that you are looking back at 2020 from the distant future. How would you describe how you grew during this year?
This question will help you to gain perspective on how these challenges will shape you and to start to take control of your life’s narrative, which is a key enabler of post-traumatic growth.
Who do you want to be next year?
This question will orient you towards how you want to show up in the coming year, rather than on what you feel compelled to achieve to be deemed ‘worthy’ by society’s standards.
How will you serve others next year?
This question will help you to consider how you want to find or expand your own New Happy, the scientifically-proven path to happiness of sharing your gifts to make the world a better place. It will also point you towards goals that are intrinsically motivated, rather than extrinsically motivated.
What daily activities will help you to be the person you want to be?
This question helps you to turn from the abstract to the practical and ask, what does someone who embodies my best self do every day? Whether it’s moving your body, spending time on your hobbies, or prioritizing your well-being, identify 3-5 daily activities that you can practice that will help you to embody this self.
Never before has there been a year like 2020 that so many people are keen to put behind them — but don’t turn to past rituals that won’t serve you. Instead, use this new ritual to mark the end of this devastating, challenging, and traumatic year, and to move into next year with hope and optimism.