Why January 1st Isn’t It: The Body, the Season, and the Real Work of Change
Every year, without fail, we have the same discussion, first with ourselves, and then with everyone around us. You know the one, “New Year, New Me!”. January 1st rolls around and suddenly we’re supposed to wake up as a brand-new person: a new body, a new mindset, a new life, a new level of discipline…and I’m going to call it exactly as I see it.
It’s bullshit.
Not because growth and change are bullshit. Not because wanting more for yourself is misguided. But because the entire “New Year, New Me” system has been turned into a corporate grab designed to make you feel like something is wrong with you so you’ll spend money trying to fix yourself. It’s gym memberships, supplement subscriptions, detoxes, meal plans, wellness programs, and fitness challenges. It’s a culture that convinces you transformation is something you can buy and that you should be able to radically overhaul your entire existence in a single night, just because the calendar flipped.
Then what happens? Inevitably, it comes crashing down.
For most people, that crash happens somewhere around the 2nd Friday of January (known in the industry as Quitters Friday), and you end up sitting there wondering, “Why can’t I ever stick to anything?” Or worse, “What is wrong with me?” But the thing is, I don’t think anyone really understands why it keeps happening, because most of what we’re sold around New Year’s resolutions isn’t about understanding ourselves. It’s about forcing ourselves. It’s about willpower, discipline, and doing more, trying harder, becoming stronger. That’s why every January feels like a temporary high followed by the same old crash-and-burn cycle.
So I want to talk about why January 1st isn’t it, and I want to do it in a way that actually makes sense. Not from a motivational poster perspective. Not from an influencer perspective. But from a physiological perspective, a seasonal perspective, and a deeply human perspective.
Because there are real reasons resolutions fail.
And yes, I’m going to be honest: some of it is your fault, and some of it is not.
Part One: Your Body (And Why the “Fresh Start” Backfires)
Let’s start with the part that is your fault.
Most of us bite off way more than we can chew. We decide that starting January 1st, we’re going to crash diet, hit the gym every day, stop drinking soda, drink a gallon of water, sleep eight hours, meditate, journal, read ten books, stop doomscrolling, meal prep, and become the kind of person who has their life together and we’re going to do it all at once. The problem is not that these are inherently bad goals.
The problem is that what you don’t realize you’re doing is you’re tripping your physiology into fight-or-flight. You’re taking a body that is already under stress and piling on more stress, and then you act surprised when your body pushes back. Here’s the part that isn’t your fault: your stress response has not evolved much at all since primitive times.
The stress response was designed for acute danger. It was designed for the moment when you look up and realize, oh shit, I’m about to be eaten alive by a saber-toothed tiger.
In that moment, your body needed to take over. You needed a flood of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol to surge through your system so you could quick, fast, and in a hurry get out of the situation. And the idea was that once you escaped the danger, your body would return to normal. You’d settle back into homeostasis. You’d calm down. You’d recover.
That worked beautifully when stress was occasional and life-or-death.
Modern stress isn’t occasional. Modern stress is constant.
And it’s not a flood, it’s a leak. It’s a drip. Your stress response doesn’t get to turn off, because life doesn’t turn off. We’re stressed when we’re stuck in traffic, when we’re late, in the school drop-off line, when deadlines stack up at work. We’re stressed about money and bills. We’re stressed about being everything to everyone while the social networks that used to help people survive (you know…community, extended family, support systems) have largely been broken down.
So for a lot of us, the stress response is always on. Maybe not fully activated like we’re running from a tiger, but always humming under the surface as gently as the buzz of electricity that is always in the air.
And that’s where habits come in.
Your brain relies heavily on habits because habits are shortcuts. Habits are the quick decisions you can make without having to think about them. This matters, because the brain does not like to expend energy unnecessarily. Executive functioning is exhausting. It takes energy. It requires attention, focus and decision-making. When you are under constant stress and constantly meeting demands, you burn through your mental fuel fast. So the brain creates habits to preserve energy. Habits are automatic, familiar, and (above all) don’t require a constant mental debate.
But when you change your habits, now you have to think. You have to make conscious decisions like choosing the salad over the pizza, the gym over the couch, water over a sugary drink, or going to bed over staying up scrolling. That constant choosing uses the prefrontal cortex which is your executive center. This is beyond tiring…it’s outright draining what little energy you have left at the end of the day.
Then on top of that, your brain likes to be happy. It likes reward, comfort, and those familiar routines. So when you interfere with that routine, your brain starts throwing a tantrum. It starts saying, I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. This is stressful. This is uncomfortable. I want to go back to what makes me feel good.
So now you’re stressed, your brain is expending more energy, your habits have been disrupted, your comfort has been disrupted, and your body interprets that as danger, even if you’re not in actual danger. When your body is in a prolonged stress response, it starts shutting down things that it deems unnecessary for survival.
Digestion…dulled.
Immune function…buh-bye.
The prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain you need to make good decisions and hold new habits, gets put on energy saver mode.
The more stressed you are, the more you start functioning from the lower parts of the brain, areas associated with emotion and survival. That’s why we end up crying a few weeks into January. That’s why we end up bingeing and emotionally collapsing.
Because at a certain point, your nervous system says:
I cannot do this anymore.
Then your resolutions fall apart, not because you are weak, but because your physiology is doing what it was designed to do.
Survive.
Part Two: The Season (And Why Winter Is Not a Launchpad)
Sorry to say this but that’s only part one.
Part two is this:
January 1st isn’t it because nothing grows in January.
Winter is not a season for growth, blooming, or expansion. If you live in the western hemisphere, January is literally the dead of winter.
Where I am in South Carolina, my yard and anyone else who doesn’t have TruGreen, is brown. The garden is dormant. If you’re in New England, where I lived for ten years, you’re under feet of snow. Nothing is growing. There is no blossoming. Nature is not out here reinventing itself on January 1st.
I think this is the part that modern society has forgotten. We live in a culture that insists on go-go-go all the time. We have lost our seasonal rhythm. We have lost the natural pauses that used to be part of human life. Historically, winter was the time when people settled in. They stocked food, gathered wood, and stayed warm. They burrowed down…slowed down. You see this in animals too. Even bears hibernate. Everything in nature responds to winter by pulling inward.
But here’s the part that matters, and this is where Ayurveda comes in:
Winter is not a time of doing nothing.
Winter is not dead, lazy, or meaningless. Winter is a time of deep internal work, re-ordering, and transformation.
In nature, the seeds from last summer’s harvest have fallen. If you’ve ever gardened, you know exactly what I mean. Every year, I plant morning glories because I love them. When the flowers wither, they leave behind these hard little husks. Inside those husks are the seeds. So I gather them. I sprinkle them around the areas where I want the morning glory to grow again. Then I take the vines down and lay them over the seeds to create a kind of nest, their bed, a little shelter.
What’s so interesting is that the seed is not just sitting there. It’s not “doing nothing.” The seed is preparing and organizing itself to take root. It is following a natural order so that when spring comes, growth becomes possible.
That is what winter does. It slows things down so that the deeper work can happen. So that things can restructure and life can re-organize itself into a form that can support growth later.
That is why January 1st is not about action. You cannot plant a seed and demand it sprout overnight. You cannot force growth out of season.
So maybe January isn’t for launching. Maybe January is for:
Noticing.
Identifying
Taking stock
Observing what needs to change
Becoming aware of what has been feeding the imbalance in your life
Part Three: The Real Work of Change (And Breaking the Cycle for Good)
In my book, Breaking the Cycle, one of the things I say is:
You can’t change what you haven’t identified.
I think that’s one of the biggest reasons people fail at New Year’s resolutions. Most people aren’t starting from self-awareness. They’re starting from someone else’s blueprint. They’re listening to influencers, wellness experts, and fitness gurus. Those people tell you what to do and how to do it but most of that advice is about fitting more in. More routines. More restrictions. More pressure. More discipline.
It often happens without ever meaningfully cleaning up the internal landscape that keeps pulling you back into the same habits, the same patterns, and the same cycles.
This is where Ayurveda is so honest and so simple. Ayurveda talks about causative factors: the things you are doing that are creating the imbalance.
This is something I teach in my course all the time:
I can give you the best diet, the best exercise plan, the best supplements, the best routine… but if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’re never going to get better.
You cannot out-supplement or out-discipline causation. You have to identify what is feeding the imbalance and start there. The reason that’s so hard is because habits are deeply ingrained. They’ve been reinforced again and again and again. Under stress, the brain will always fall back on what is familiar and easy. That’s why the same patterns show up. That’s why you always fall back into the sugary drinks, or the fast food, or the late-night scrolling, or the emotional numbing.
It’s not because you’re weak.
It’s because your nervous system has learned that those habits feel safe.
They’re predictable.
They require less energy.
They’re comforting.
They’re automatic.
So of course, the moment stress rises, you return to them. Now the question becomes:
How do you break the cycle?
You don’t break it by overhauling your life in one night.
You break it through small, meaningful changes…slowly, progressively, and intentionally.
For me, one of the things I noticed this week is that I want to lose some weight. No, not for a beach body but because I want to be healthy and I want to feel good in my body.W hen I sat in the stillness of winter and really looked at myself, I realized a few things.
I need to cut out sugary drinks and drink more water.
I need to move my body more consistently.
I need to feed myself emotionally and spiritually too.
For me, that means more music and less doomscrolling. It means making time to paint instead of spending hours playing video games. Not that there’s no room for those things,there is, but I want to take more time feeding myself what I know is healthy for me physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
I’m not trying to do all of that starting tomorrow. I’m starting small.
Today, instead of playing more video games, I put on music in my headphones and started painting a picture for my sister that she requested. It felt good and nourishing. It felt like I was choosing something that actually supports me. I also pulled out a cup that I really like so that I can start putting water in it and keeping it with me. Because the truth is, if I don’t make it easy for myself, I’ll fall back into the lemonade and juice again.
I know myself.
So I’m not relying on willpower. I’m relying on support. Just like gardening, you don’t flood the garden and expect it to grow faster. You don’t overhaul everything at once. You water slowly. You pay attention and adjust. My ivy needs more water than my aloe. My orchid needs a very small, specific amount. And I meet each plant where it is. I respond to what it needs. I take it slowly. To be honest, we need to take that same approach with ourselves. So here’s what I want you to do instead of a New Year’s resolution:
Pick one thing. Just one.
One meaningful change. It can be simple or it can be big, but don’t pick five. Pick one.
Once that one thing gets easier, stack the next. And once that gets easier, stack the next. Before you know it, you won’t need to reset every January. You won’t need to reinvent yourself every year or make dramatic declarations and crash-and-burn cycles.
Because by this time next year, you won’t have to make New Year’s resolutions.
There won’t be anything left to resolve.
If you want support breaking that cycle, not through shame, not through discipline culture, but through real self-awareness and sustainable change, that’s exactly why I wrote Breaking the Cycle. If you’re ready to move beyond the January crash-and-burn cycle and start changing your habits in a way that is actually sustainable, you can find a physical copy of Breaking the Cycle on Amazon. It’s written for women who are tired of motivational noise and ready for meaningful inner change…one small step at a time.
