Richard Hogan: Forget resolutions, think about revolutions for 2025

Richard Hogan. Photograph Moya Nolan

We’re nine days into January. Nine long bloody days, with the length of nine cold wintery nights. December feels like a lifetime ago.

All those plans, those cloyingly sweet songs of mistletoe and wine, the presents, the food, the parties.

The Christmas season can really take its toll on the old immune system. All the obligatory visiting we have to do. Not to mention the perfect breeding ground for germs.

A mildish December, punctuated with a cold snap at the start of January. No wonder so many of us were sick.

If you’re like me, you’re probably just getting over that terrible dose. An awful dose, it was.

Everyone in the house got it, except for the teenager who is up in her room social isolating from the rest of her embarrassing kinfolk.

Nothing to do with the illness going around, just the illness of adolescence. But we have stumbled into January, nine days to be exact, and how are the old resolutions holding up?

It’s hard to change habits when you’re rundown or just getting over an illness. So for many of us, we struggled to implement our new year’s resolutions.

But maybe we need to rethink this whole new year resolutions thing anyway. Maybe it’s time to change how we think about bringing lasting change into our lives.

I’m sure you launched out on resolutions this time last year, and here you are again trying the same old failed intervention.

Isn’t insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different outcome?

What would you say if I told you, resolutions are designed to make you even more unhappy and hopeless than you were before you started out purging all those bad habits from your life?

In my work, I meet so many people this time of year who feel profound shame and guilt because they have fallen back on old habits they tried to break.

Samuel Johnson tells us, ‘the chains of habit are too weak to be felt, until they are too strong to be broken’.

When we try to break a lifetime of habit, we often try to change too much too soon, and the habit remerges quickly because it has been so present in our lives for so long.

People often think, ‘right it’s January, now that’s the end of eating too much and I’m not drinking until February’.

But January is the cruellest month. It’s too much of a full stop. If you have a dry January, and a typhoon February, what was the point of that?

Anyone working in the fitness industry will tell you it’s not the volume of the weight you lift, in one go, that builds muscle but the consistent application of lifting.

It’s not about getting rid of everything in one go, because that is unsustainable. But about building some good habits into your life so the old bad ones slowly disappear.

Stacking good habits on bad ones will make sure the bad ones fade. Think about it like this, if I say; ‘that’s it now no more chocolate, I’m never going to eat anything bad again’.

Hello boredom my old friend. It’s also unsustainable, and when you do inevitably break it, you will feel like you are powerless to change. 

But instead think, ‘I’m going to start walking more in the evening, and when I build that up I’m going to do a little jogging’, now what do you think happens to that craving you had for chocolate at 7pm?

Well, in my experience once you start to bring something healthy like a 2k walk into your evening routine, the old bad habit of eating empty calories or being on your phone too much fades because you have stacked a good habit on top of the bad one.

You feel good about yourself. There is nothing as rewarding as working in the interest of your future self.

And nothing ensures falling back on old bad habits than starting out from a position of self-loathing. The starting point of any habit change is not hating who you are at this point, but celebrating that, and slowly working towards someone you can be in the future.

That is how you bring healthy change into your life. I am not who I want to be right now, but that’s okay, I’ll get there. I often help clients to see that maybe they are frightened of change because they only know self-loathing and disappointment.

They are fearful of who they might potentially become. The launching out, the failure and resulting feelings of inadequacy and insecurity are knowable.

But what would I feel like if I broke that, and actually changed how I think about myself and changed how I behaved?

Think about your own belief systems, what is it that truly stops you from bringing change into your life?

This is an important question to answer before you ever think about changing. We can all bring better habits into our lives. 

Rather than thinking in resolution terms maybe start thinking in revolution terms.

I can become who I want to be, it will take some time but I’ll get there, that’s your revolution.

Also have some fun while you are getting there. Happy New Year.

2025 has your name written all over it. Go out and grab it.