When I saw that the main characters in Inside Out were a person’s emotions I knew that I absolutely had to go see it. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact several times I was moved to tears by how familiar the experiences were, and by this hugely important, complex, and rarely-expressed message being communicated so simply and profoundly in a ‘kid’s film’.

If you’d rather not be spoilered for the movie then please do go see it before reading the rest of this post. Also do be aware that it may well tap into lots of different emotions as you’re watching it – if you’re anything like me – not just the joyful ones. As we’ll go on to see that may not be a bad thing!

The rest of this post is divided into three sections:

• Experiencing all of our emotions
• Shutting down our emotions
• How to sit with our emotions: A practical guide

Experiencing all of our emotions

Inside Out follows an eleven-year-old, Riley, and her emotions – Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear – as her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Previously her inner world has been dominated by Joy. Joy has made it her business to ensure that Riley remains as happy as possible, building up a store of mostly joyful memories which have, in turn, shaped her personality. However, following the house-move, many of these memories become tainted by Sadness – who can’t seem to stop herself from touching them and turning them blue.

In her attempts to prevent Sadness from causing any more damage, Joy manages to get both of them ejected from the control room to the outer reaches of Riley’s inner world. This leaves Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge while Joy and Sadness try everything they can to get back before Riley runs away from her new home.

The message of the movie is that we require all of our emotions: not just the so-called positive ones. We soon realise that Joy’s tendency to ignore and suppress Sadness is actually getting in the way of them finding their way home. It seems like things work pretty badly when just one of the emotions takes charge, and much better when they all work together through being equally valued.

One of the most poignant moments in the movie is when Riley’s old imaginary friend is devastated to realise he’s lost his last chance ever to be with Riley. Joy’s attempts to cheer him up or force him to keep going fail. However, when Sadness sits with him and shows that she understands how hard it is for him, he’s able to experience his own sadness, to cry, and eventually he’s ready to move again.

The theory that kept coming back to me as I watched the movie was Emmy Van Deurzen’s compass of emotions. In this, Van Deurzen imagines the emotions on a wheel which we travel round all of the time, moving from ‘high’ feelings like joy and pride, through anger and fear to low feelings like sadness, and then up the other side through envy and hope, to joy again.

Critically, Van Deurzen argues that we need to be able to experience all of the emotions to go around the compass like this. If there are emotions which we shut down or avoid then we’re likely to get stuck in certain places. Paradoxically, as in Inside Out, if we disallow one emotion – like sadness – we’re likely to become stuck and find that we stop experiencing joy much too. If we lose the capacity to experience some of the emotions entirely – as when Sadness and Joy are lost in the film – we risk falling into depression and all of our emotions becoming shut off. This is rightly depicted as the darkest moment in Inside Out.

It may not be that we always move in the same direction on the compass, or that certain emotions always follow others. Indeed, as Inside Out shows, we can often experience seemingly opposing emotions at the same time (e.g. joy and sadness, anger and hope, fear and determination). Indeed, when the first memory comes in that reflects these kinds of mixed feelings we see that it is perhaps even more beautiful and valuable than some of the ones which reflected only one of the basic emotions on its own.

Shutting down our emotions

The problem is that, through our lives, most of us learn that certain emotions are not acceptable: either to express or – often – even to experience.

This is what moved me to tears several times during the film as I remembered moments in my own childhood and adolescence when – like Riley – I learnt that certain feelings were unacceptable. It made it even more powerful that – for me like Riley – a critical time was the sudden experience of starting a new school with strange and different rules. However, of course, these moments are different things for different people, they happen at different points in life, and they can be gradual, or sudden, or both.

The film underlines what a terrible impact such messages can have as elements of Riley’s personality – that we’ve previously enjoyed watching – turn grey and gradually disintegrate entirely when her emotions are lost. Most devastating for me was the moment when Goofball Island disappeared. Now that it wasn’t safe for Riley to experience all of her feelings there was no way that she could goof about in the way she used to as a child.

Where does this shutting down come from? We can see it on multiple levels like those I wrote about in the recent zine that I posted about here.

On the outer level our wider culture gives us strong messages about which emotions it’s okay to feel and which it isn’t. Generally in western cultures we’re encouraged to have happiness and ‘positive’ emotions and not ‘negative’ ones. The British ‘stiff upper lip’ also discourages expressions of fear. And messages also differ depending on our individual identities, with certain emotions being seen as more or less acceptable for people of certain genders, classes, ages, or nationalities, for example.

On the next level in, our communities and institutions also reinforce many of these messages. In the movie we see how, in her new school, it isn’t acceptable either for Riley either to show too much enthusiasm for the things she’s passionate about, or to show sadness about what she’s lost. The cool girls will judge her for it. It’s easy to find ourselves joining in this kind of tone-policing in our communities – of whatever kind – whereby certain emotions are deemed unacceptable to admit to or express – for certain people or across the board. It’s worth being mindful of this whenever we find ourselves judging how somebody ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ feel about something.

At the interpersonal level we learn a great deal about acceptable and unacceptable feelings from our close relationships, particularly from the family and friends who are around us growing up. In Inside Out Riley’s parents inadvertently give her the strong sense that they appreciate her being happy and strong during the house move. She takes this as a message that it isn’t okay to be struggling in any way about it. Riley is even described as their ‘happy girl’: fixing her in this way. We then see how Riley’s – and Joy’s – attempts to keep her joyful tragically have the opposite effect. By trying to sustain her joyful persona in the face of great pain she actually becomes angry, anxious and cut-off, and risks losing the love of her parents as they don’t recognise her any more. In another key moment Riley’s old friend doesn’t seem to realise how envious Riley will be of her new friendship. When envy doesn’t feel acceptable, Riley goes straight to anger, and ends the friendship.

How to sit with our emotions: A practical guide

Fortunately for Riley, Sadness and Joy are able to make it back to the control room – once Joy recognises the value of Sadness. Then Riley is able to take the risk and show her parents how sad and frightened she is. Even more fortunately, perhaps, her parents are able to accept her emotions, to share some of their own, and to let her see that they love her as much when she’s sad as they do when she’s happy.

Most of us are not so lucky. Our parents – and the other close people in our lives – live in the same wider culture as we do with all of its crappy messages about unacceptable feelings. They’re also part of institutions and communities that have done a number on them. And they’re in their own family systems wherein certain emotions have been deemed too dangerous or threatening. So they may well have responded to moments like Riley’s by giving us a clear message that our fear, sadness, anger, joy, disgust, or other feelings, were not something that they could be around, or even that they couldn’t love us if we expressed them.

We will have internalised this. Either we’ll have managed to find a way of shutting down those emotions entirely, or – perhaps – in trying to shut them down we’ll have managed to make them shout even more loudly so we’ve become defined by them. Or a bit of both. There are so many ways that this can go.

The urgent question is what we can do now. Here we are, as adults, with all these imbalances, exaggerations, and silences in our emotional states. What can we do about it?

The answer that many different therapies, meditation practices, and belief systems have come up with is the idea of ‘sitting with’ our emotions. I’ll briefly describe one of these practices – a person-centred therapy technique called focusing – here, but there are several similar practices in other therapeutic and spiritual approaches if this one doesn’t work for you.

Focusing reveals perhaps the main flaw which I found in Inside Out which is the fact that the emotions are located in Riley’s brain and not in her body. It’s good that Inside Out doesn’t buy into the popular idea that emotions and rationality are separate things. Instead it expresses the existential view that we’re always in emotion: propelled towards things or away from things by our feeling states. However, the film does buy into another ‘dualistic’ split: that of separating the mind and the body, and seeing the mind as the most important bit. Actually, this kind of focus on the mind can be part of how we lose touch with our emotions: We stop being able to tune into our bodily sensations and the important things we can learn from these about our feelings, and instead try to figure things out, or fix things, on a purely intellectual level.

In focusing practice the attention is right on these bodily states. It’s most basic form goes like this:

• Sit comfortably and quietly and bring your attention slowly to your body and how it’s feeling.
• Ask what wants your attention. Focus in on any sensation that you notice in your body (a tightness of the throat, a clenched stomach, or a sense of emptiness, for example).
• Say ‘hello’ to that sensation: welcome it warmly, like Sadness sitting down with Riley’s imaginary friend.
• Really listen to the sensation, try to find the best way to describe it (e.g. it’s like a dense ball stuck in my throat).
• Check back in with the sensation to see whether that description fits well enough, or whether you need to change it or add to it (e.g. it’s not just stuck, it’s like it’s rammed in there, like a cork in a bottle).
• Sit with the feeling, with interested curiosity, not trying to change it, or to force it to communicate: just being with it gently and curiously. Try to understand it from it’s point of view. Notice any words, images, or metaphors that come to mind. In focusing books and websites you can read about different questions that you could ask it at this point, if it feels okay to do so.
• When it feels ready to finish you can express gratitude to the feeling, and to your body, and reassure it that you’ll keep coming back to listen to it – and other feelings – in this friendly way.

Going back to Inside Out this is a lot like Riley actually giving kind attention to each of the emotions inside her whenever any of them want her attention, instead of putting one of them in charge, or trying to get rid of others. However, when we do this practice what we often find is that the feelings we become aware of are the ones that are preventing us from feeling other feelings (like Joy in the movie). You might start feeling a sensation of fear or sadness, for example, and then a strong feeling of anger or disgust at yourself for having that feeling. When we have these feelings-about-feelings the thing to do is to sit with them just as gently and curiously as with the original feeling. It can help to remind ourselves that – like Joy in Inside Out –  these feelings are trying to keep us safe, even if what they are actually doing is the opposite.

Of course, given how many years most of us have spent suppressing and avoiding certain emotions, it can take a while to open up this kind of line of communication. Practices like focusing can feel very unfamiliar at first and can take a while to get the hang of. There are ways of doing them with a friend, or with a therapist, if that feels easier and more supported than doing them alone.

However I am convinced of the power of these kinds of practices. Elsewhere I wrote about what happened last year when I sat and noticed a couple of feelings that usually felt too overwhelming, or too insignificant, to sit with.

Earlier this year I went to a focusing workshop. In the first practice I found it fascinating to see how my own throat tightness shifted and opened up when I finally gave it some gentle attention. In the second practice I used focusing to go back to a specific memory when I hadn’t treated myself very kindly. sitting with the memory I suddenly became aware of a side of myself that I hadn’t seen there before: A playful side of myself that wanted to do something silly and outrageous to cut through the situation. I got a strong image of Mr. Tickle from the Mr. Men books. So much so that I went out a bought myself a Mr. Tickle mug the following week. Perhaps my own Goofball Island hasn’t been completely destroyed after all!

Find out more

The ideas in the post are also presented in my Staying with Feelings zine.

You can find out more about the compass of emotions in this book and video by Emmy Van Deurzen.

A great book about the messages we receive about emotions is Transforming Emotion by Glenda Fredman.

If you want to find out more about focusing practising, The Power of Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell is an excellent introduction to it (and nowhere near as wacky as it looks from the cover!) There are also lots of resources on The Focusing Institute and British Focusing Association websites.

Note: Some of the images in this post are Copyright (c) 2015 The Walt Disney Company and Pixar Animation Studios, to whom I express my grateful thanks.

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For the last few months I’ve been thinking a whole lot about the social side of mental distress. It feels really important to me to recognise how our suffering is embedded within our relationship dynamics; our workplaces, communities and other institutional systems; and our wider society.

I often notice what a relief it is for me – and my friends and clients – when we realise this social element to our suffering: particularly how the self-criticism that we do so constantly is something that everybody else does as well, because we’re all in this self-critical culture. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with us. It’s understandable.

This week I’m speaking at a few conferences which touch on themes of inequalities, individualising and intersectionality, and on mental health and mindfulness. So I thought – instead of the usual stand-up presentation – I’d make a zine that captures my experiences of these things, and makes some suggestions about how we might creatively engage with them.

It was also a good opportunity – for me – to get back into making comics: something I’d love to do more of, especially now I’m working on a comic introduction to queer theory with a professional artist. Here’s one of the comics I made for the zine. You can download the whole zine at the end of this post if you’d like to read it more clearly.

For my zine, the comics really helped me to understand how intertwined all these social levels are – as are the inequalities that we suffer from, and benefit from, and the ways in which we are individualised and individualise others.

You can download the zine as a pdf by clicking on the link below. I’d suggest printing it out as a booklet to get the full zine experience – or just reading it online. There’s also a whole book on mindful therapy by me here (including more comics!) if you’re interested in reading further on the topic.

SocialMindfulnessZine

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Such a great way to end 2014.

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I imagined that I would post something terribly wise about how I held this ‘big birthday’ thing lightly: Questioning the arbitrary cultural meaning given to decades whilst finding my own way to mark the passing of time.

Reflecting back on how difficult I’d found my thirtieth birthday, I knew that this one would be different. Look at how much I’ve learnt since then. I sensibly spread out the celebrations so that I wouldn’t feel the weight of expectations on one day. I met up with different people, and spent time alone, instead of putting pressure on one person to be responsible for making it perfect for me. I reminded myself that any specific age is pretty meaningless given the impossibility of knowing what percentage it is of the whole of your life.

…

If I knew one thing clearly at one o’clock in the morning, as I entered the second hour of a two hour crying jag that took me from my birthday into the first day of my forties proper, it was this: I couldn’t write that blog post.

So I wrote this one instead.

You can’t step outside of culture

The thing is that all the while that I was challenging those cultural rules about birthdays and decades and everything on the surface, another hidden part of me was buying into them all. For the past year a part of my mind has been scrutinising myself and my life, trying to determine whether I’ve done the things I should do with my thirties, and whether I am well placed to head into my forties. For all my questioning of checkpoint approaches to life, I secretly nurtured my own set of ideals through which to judge my success.

I had some idea that I could come up with the perfect rituals for life and have them all in place by my birthday. I wrote lists. The same old suspects: eating healthily, exercising more, meditating daily. Also writing more, seeing more friends, doing more activism. In fact so many things that it would be impossible to do them all without suddenly needing no sleep. There’s an idea: add ‘getting up earlier’ to the list. It felt like going backwards, suddenly caring about things like how I look and what my job title is, despite everything I know about how unimportant such things are.

Any time I felt depressed (which I tend to do for a few days every month or two) I’d become convinced that some more radical change must be needed and would flail around, turning the tremor into an earthquake.

Despite everything that I know about projects of ‘self-improvement’ fuelling, rather than alleviating, the self-criticism that plagues us, part of me convinced myself that that wasn’t really what I was doing. Because underneath it all was that seductive possibility: maybe this time I could really get there: to the point at which you are only the ‘good’ parts of yourself and none of the ‘bad’.

My friend Ros says something very wise: You can’t step outside of culture. And however much I want to exempt myself from this stuff I can’t. I’m in a culture that says that I should scrutinise and compare and evaluate myself and then work constantly to try to fix the lacks and flaws and imperfections. Resisting that is hard, probably impossible. It’s going to sneak back in.

What we can do

But perhaps what we can do when it sneaks back is to notice it. Just as we notice on birthdays that the more we attempt to engineer a perfect day the further it gets from perfection, so we can notice that the more we try to perfect ourselves the worse we tend to feel and the further away we drift from what we were aiming for in the first place.

Another thing we can do is to refuse to be yet another point of comparison against which others can evaluate themselves. That’s a big reason why I wanted to write this post rather than any number of others I could’ve written about my birthday, editing out the crying jag and the messiness and the desperation.

Like most people, I suspect, I learnt early on that (1) there were parts of me that really weren’t acceptable, and (2) the thing to do was to hide them from everybody. And, eventually, I became pretty good at presenting the face to the world that I thought people wanted to see, and withdrawing into myself whenever things got so tough that the unacceptable parts threatened to spill over.

But that strategy means that you constantly give yourself the message that the ‘bad’ bits really are bad (so bad that you need to hide them). And it means that other people assume that you don’t struggle and therefore feel worse about themselves. And it means that anyone you can’t hide from (the people you live with, for example, or the people who you land on when you eventually do crash) are put under a lot of pressure. They are the only people you’re letting in, so you desperately want them to help you whilst also resenting the fact that they’re seeing you this way. And probably they’re quite isolated too if they are aware that you don’t want anybody else to know that you get like this.

Opening up

So what is the alternative? The alternative is to be open about this vulnerable, exposing, raw, painful stuff. Because that means that you give yourself the message that you have this stuff and that you are still okay. And it means that other people can see that you struggle too and it’s not just them. And it means that the weight of it all isn’t just on you, or the one person who you let in.

Instead of embarking on constant projects to eradicate the ‘bad’ stuff, you can put the same time and energy into accepting that it’s part of you and that’s okay. In fact opening up about this stuff means that you are more able to connect with other people than when you’re busy putting up the shutters, and pulling on the armour, and ensuring that you remain in a safe place where nobody will see you struggle.

When we withdraw and erect all these barriers we end up in more pain ourselves. We’re also more likely to hurt other people as we bump against them in all that armour, bruising them and encouraging them put up their own defences to avoid getting hurt.

The alternative is gradually softening instead of hardening: opening up instead of closing down.

And at the same time that I’ve been secretly engaged in this project of ‘maybe I can have it all fixed by the time I’m forty’, on another level I’ve been learning this stuff about opening up. When I’ve felt hurt I’ve been experimenting with responding differently. Instead of crumpling or lashing out, I’ve been trying to reflect (often for several days because it doesn’t come easy) and then to open up with people about where I’m at.

Sounds great in theory: utterly terrifying in practice. The old habits kick in all the time. For every time I manage to stay with the tough stuff and open up about it, there’s a hundred more where I take the old escape routes (withdrawing, blaming someone else, distracting myself). I’ve had forty years of practice at that.

So I won’t be writing a post in a decade’s time, or a decade after that, where I’ve reached some point of complete openness and self-acceptance (if indeed I’m fortunate enough to make it to those future birthdays). If I post honestly at those times then I suspect it will be about being just as messy and confused and struggling as I am now. Accepting that instead of trying to be something different by then is kindof the point.

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As you can see, the session gave me an excuse to delve a little deeper into the history of self-help books, to understand more why they came to be the way they are and what is so problematic about that. I also managed to chart one potential future trajectory of self-help, building on this criticism. For this I particularly considered the writing of Oliver Burkeman: one of my favourite discoveries over the last couple of months thanks to his entertaining and radically different approach. I’ll outline some of his ideas here so that you can see what an alternative to conventional self-help might look like.

A bit of history

Examining the history of self-help we can see that books in this genre have tended to be of two types. The first type – empowerment self-help – emerged in America after the great depression and drew on the New Thought movement which believed in the power of positive thinking. Such books held out the promise that by imagining good things and striking the right attitude people could bring what they wanted to themselves: wealth, friends, success, etc. The second type of self-help became popular in the late sixties and seventies. Know as victimisation self-help, books in this category tend to blame the wider world for any problems that individuals have. Akin to the twelve step programmes for addiction, these books are concerned with reassuring readers that their difficulties are not their fault but down to something beyond their control like having toxic parents or a disorder or disease of some kind. Power is located outside the individual.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a backlash against victimisation self-help and a return to an extreme form of empowerment self-help which argued that any problems were down to the individual and could be fixed by positive thinking. For example, a quote in the bestseller The Secret by the author’s fellow self-help writer, Bob Proctor, says “Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of all the money that’s being earned? Do you think that’s an accident? It’s designed that way. They understand something. They understand The Secret, and now you are being introduced to The Secret.” The Secret in question is the New Thought law of attraction, that successful people bring positive things to themselves merely by thinking about them.

Clearly both these forms of self-help are problematic, and together they set up a false binary around human struggles which is similar to the either/or view of mental health which I’ve discussed elsewhere. It seems that we have to believe either that we are personally responsible for all our problems but that we can fix them by changing ourselves, or that the world is responsible for all our problems but that we are powerless then to do anything about them. If we buy into the empowerment way of seeing things then it easily slips into victim blame, whereby we regard everyone, including ourselves, as to blame for any problems in life. If we buy into the victimisation way of seeing things then we have to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us and give up any sense that we could do anything about our difficulties.

A third way? Oliver Burkeman

In recent years it seems that a few authors have been looking for a kind of third way of doing self-help: a way that involves breaking out of this problematic binary. What I have called anti-self-help self-help starts from a criticism of the assumptions of the self-help movement in general. It asks questions about whether it is actually good to strive for the things that self-help suggests that we strive for: happiness, wealth, success, a romantic relationship, etc. Are these good things to have and, even if they are, is striving for them the best way of going about it? Anti-self-help self-help locates any problems that we have in the wider society that surrounds us, the messages we receive from it, and how we relate to these, rather than seeing us as isolated individuals responsible for everything that happens to us. But, at the same time, it sees us as actively engaged with this wider world and able to engage with it in different ways, rather than as powerless.

A great example of such anti-self-help self-help is the writing of Oliver Burkeman. Like his Guardian newspaper column, This Column Will Change Your Life, his first book, Help!, presented an analysis of existing self-help books, attempting to pull out actually useful suggestions from the overwhelming mass of contradictory messages that he found. His second book, The Antidote, builds of the criticisms of self-help that he came to when writing Help! and suggests a radically different approach. Positive thinking, argues Burkeman, actually makes us suffer. The empowerment self-help movement has got it completely wrong. What he offers in its place refuses the disempowering position of victimisation self-help, but instead embraces the potentials of what he calls a ‘negative path’. This draws on a cluster of approaches taken from philosophies from Buddhism to Eckhart Tolle, the Stoics of Ancient Greece to the Mexican Day of the Dead. What these have in common is that they all do the opposite of ‘positive thinking’, instead turning to face the difficult stuff of life.

Thus Burkeman argues for the benefits of meditating on the inevitable fact of our own mortality. He critically evaluates the way in which we tend to react to ‘bad things’ in our day-to-day life, and considers alternatives where we recognise our own role in categorising what is good and bad and trying to get all of the former and none of the latter. He explores meditation and building the capacity to be with difficult feelings, turning towards the things that scare us rather than away from them. He considers the power of just getting on with tasks we are avoiding, rather than assuming that we have to ‘find our passion’ or ‘get motivated’ before we can do anything. He explores the value in considering the worst that could happen (and whether what is happing is ‘just bad’ or ‘absolutely terrible’) as well as asking yourself whether you have a problem right now, in the present moment. He questions who this self is that we are trying to improve through self-help, and wonders whether it might be more useful to reflect on whether such a thing really exists in any meaningful sense, rather than assuming that it does and engaging in a futile quest to make it better.

I loved The Antidote because it resonates so well with the answers (and – perhaps more usefully – questions) that I have come to through my own journey through the ways in which psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and sociology have understood human suffering and what can be done about it. Like my work, the book is particularly rooted in Buddhist philosophy and it is very nice to see that engaged with so thoughtfully, rather than just being offered as another set of techniques to make people happier.

The anti-self-help self-help manifesto

Where to from here? I would like to see many more anti-self-help self-help books which start from a critical stance towards the self-help industry and offer something more valuable to people who want to think about how they are living and how they might do it differently. Such work would, I think, share some of the following things in common:

• A critical stance towards conventional self-help
• A critical stance towards normative taken-for-granted ideas about what makes a good person and a successful life, and whether happiness and wealth are the best things to be striving for
• An informed understanding of the problems with telling people that they are flawed in some way and need to change by striving after something different
• Drawing on research evidence from psychology and sociology, as well as philosophical understandings from across the globe (not just the ‘west’), in order to suggest what might be helpful to people
• Locating people’s problems in the inter-relation between them and the world around them rather than entirely internally or entirely external – regarding people as biopsychosocial beings rather than focusing on one of those aspects (bio, psycho, social) to the exclusion of the others
• Suggesting ways forward which involve engaging with the world differently, and recognising how difficult this can be and arguing for wider social change, rather than putting all responsibility on the individual
• An ethical commitment to putting something different ‘out there’ even though the publishing industry conservatively continues to try to publish the same kinds of messages as before

I’d be very interested to hear from others who are trying to write blogs, books, articles, etc. in this vein, and to continue to discuss whether a ‘negative path’ or ‘anti-self-help’ does present a valuable third way.

Find out more

There is more about self-help with useful links to other work here.

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In the interview below I suggest that it might be better to consider alternative ways of making changes. I also put forward a few ideas for kinder resolutions if New Year does feel like a good time to start doing something different.

According to research by allabouthealth.co.uk, three-quarters of the 3,000 British adults they surveyed will break their New Year resolution by the second week of January. What is it about this time of year that makes us more susceptible to breaking those promises to ourselves?

It is not so much that the time of year makes us susceptible to breaking promises but rather that it is the time of year when we are encouraged into making promises. The ways in which we make New Year resolutions often set us up to fail, so we end up feeling bad about ourselves.

Why do we make New Year resolutions in the first place?

We make resolutions on New Year because there is a strong culture of doing so. When we’re surrounded by magazine articles, TV programmes and advertisements about resolutions, all promising the possibility of a ‘new, happier, more successful you’, it’s easy to feel like we have to join in.

The other reason that New Year resolutions appeal to us is that we are generally encouraged to feel that there is something wrong with us that requires fixing. Consumer culture relies on us believing that we’re lacking in some way in order to sell us products. We need to compare ourselves against others and find ourselves wanting in order to believe that we need to look better, be more popular, own better gadgets, and sign up to various diets, dating sites, or gyms. Self-help books, makeover TV programmes and women’s and men’s magazines also sell us the message that we must engage in processes of self-improvement.

New Year resolutions feed us the hope that an overnight transformation might be possible on all of the things that we spend the rest of year worrying might not really be okay about ourselves.

Would we feel better about ourselves if we kept to them?

I think we’d feel better about ourselves if we didn’t make them in the first place! Many New Year Resolutions come from a place of feeling sad, angry or anxious about ourselves. When we make them and break them we end up layering further tough feelings about ourselves on top of the ones that we already have, including guilt, shame and self-loathing. Resolutions become an additional stick to beat ourselves with: we are only okay if we keep this – very challenging – promise to ourselves. If we then fail to keep the resolution we’re likely to feel even worse.

Is there anything we can do to enable us to keep to them for the next twelve months?

The first thing to do is to think about why we are making these resolutions. Do they come from a place of wanting to shift our lives in ways which will be positive for us, or is it more about thinking that we’re not really okay the way we are? If the latter, then we might decide to focus our resolutions more on being kinder to ourselves rather than on trying to change.

Ironically many of the things that we make resolutions about (losing weight, getting fit, changing job, finding a relationship, etc.) rarely work when we try to do them in a harsh self-critical way.
For example, it is only when we let go of desires to look better and aim to be kind to the body that we actually have that we are able to tune into what it needs regarding food, and what kind of physical activity we actually enjoy and therefore have more likelihood of sticking to. It is only when we are kind to ourselves that we can cultivate the kind of confidence it takes to apply for jobs or meet new people.

We need to remember that we are all complex, multi-faceted, people rather than trying to force ourselves into a narrow model of perfection. We have all kinds of things about ourselves that are great, as well as those that are more problematic, just like everybody else.

If we do want to use New Year as a time to prompt changes in our lives then another thing we need to do is to really understand what has been stopping us from making those changes before. This involves recognising that we are sensible people who wouldn’t do (or not do) something unless there was some good reason. Finding the sense in why this change is so difficult, scary, or threatening is the first step towards making it, because then we can do it in a much kinder way and address those blocks that are present.

You don’t avoid exercise because you are lazy, rather it may be that your past experience with physical activity has been negative, or you struggle to feel that it is okay to take time away from work or other commitments. You don’t avoid promotion because you’re an idiot, rather it is perhaps that you are scared of failing, or of taking that step and having the pressure on you to keep succeeding. Understanding these reasons rather than just labelling ourselves as stupid, crazy or rubbish, is vital.

What would your top five tips be to people to help them keep their resolutions?

• Don’t feel pressured to make major resolutions just because it is New Year. Rather spend plenty of time thinking about things you want to change and do it when the time is right for you.
• Make kind resolutions from the assumption that you are okay just as you are.
• Don’t use resolutions as a stick to beat yourself with. If you lapse that is okay, just see it as useful information about why this is so tough for you.
• Make the first step be about awareness. Try to understand why the change is difficult and why you want to make it so much. You need to understand yourself before you can change things.
• Resolving not to make resolutions is always fine, and a good model for those around you who are inevitably struggling just as much as you are.

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