Resolutions, Regrets & Commitment
We can use resolutions as a buffer against our regret around what we didn’t accomplish in the last year without pausing to ask ourselves why we didn’t meet our goals or to process our emotions about the decisions we made (like if we made them from self-hate like weight loss goals). What we need instead of resolutions is commitment, and that starts with processing our feelings about what has been so we can create and commit to new goals from self-love and authenticity.
Tis the season where so many of our thoughts turn to making wildly perfectionistic fantasy based resolutions for the new year.
Studies show that only a very small percent of resolution-setters will actually keep our own resolutions and yet, we do this to ourselves year after year. We tell this ridiculous story that on December 31, I had XYZ kind of behavior I don’t like, for example: I was overthinking. I was over functioning in my family. I was taking on other people’s emotional wants as needs I have to fix immediately or sooner. I was spinning in the past, I had all my old people pleasing habits that had me putting myself last all year—all lifetime…. And January 1 Is the magical day in which it shall all be so wildly different.
If you’re nodding your head, then you know what this whole resolutions spiral is all about.
It’s all about setting ourselves up for an awful lot of ouch by believing that changing the date on the calendar means we will magically be different people with different behaviors who take different actions just like that. Poof. And what I’ve been musing on is how we can use resolutions as a buffer. You heard me right. Buffers are anything that we put between us and a feeling, the unintentional, unconscious distracting things, like overeating, overdrinking, over exercising, overthinking, doom scrolling that keep us from bumping into a feeling also known as actually experiencing it and processing it through our body.
And if you’ve been listening to the show, you know that when we push our emotions away, we can’t process them. They live on in our bodies.
As tension patterns, as habitual energies in our bodies, because science, that keep us swirling in the same old painful experiences of life, plus we spent 6 hours on the couch with Netflix on, mindlessly scrolling our phones at the same time, wildly not-present to life. And note that buffering is different from conscious distraction, which is a gift we give our nervous systems.
So back to buffering. Try as we might to push away the regret, resentment, frustration, the sadness, the grief, the anger, the insecurity, those feelings, those challenging emotions, will find their way to the surface. Sure, they may come out sideways, but to the surface they shall go. They’ve got wild buoyancy and so we can use resolutions, the promise of a shiny tomorrow, this story that now that it’s January, everything will be different as a buffer, a way to continue to not look at the feelings that kept us in our old action cycles.
So let’s slow down for a second. And let’s remember the central tenants of thought work, also known as the think feel act cycle. So the thought work protocol is based in cognitive behavioral theory. This is the understanding that for humans about 20% of our lived experience is top down from our brain into our body and posits that our thoughts create our feelings, and our focus here on Feminist Wellness is chronic habitual thoughts from our socialization, our conditioning, our family blueprints, those thoughts, left unchecked, run like cassette tapes in our mind, and they become and shape our identity, our experience of life and they create our feelings, you take action based on your feelings and create a result, an effect in your own life.
So if you have the thought: My partner is upset, and I can’t stand it when they’re upset I have to help them! It’s on me! Then you may feel anxious. So then you put your own needs aside, and that’s the action you take, and you jump in to fix their life for them whether they want it or not.
The effect of that in your own life is that you strengthen that neural groove, that old cassette tape in your head that says someone else’s needs are more important than your own.
So this is the think feel act cycle in a nutshell.
In Anchored, in my work, we take it a step deeper by bringing in somatics, or body-based practices along with a focus on our nervous system and the 80% of our life which is bottom up, which starts with the sensations in our body, which sends signals into our mind, and then we interpret those signals and that’s where thought work comes in.
That leads to the complete whole to look at on 100% of your human lived experience—your body, mind, spirit within the context of your socialization, conditioning and family blueprint, and when you buffer against your feelings you block yourself not only from understanding your own mind and body, you block yourself from changing and growing.
And so looking at this framework for understanding our lives, we can see it is so important that we pause and that we get in touch with our feelings. Either the feelings, the feelings that come from our bodies through our somatic felt experience of being alive, or the ones that are created from our by our brains. Either way, It’s the same neurobiology, same neuro chemicals—all this serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine, norepinephrine, noradrenaline, cortisol, swimming through our bloodstream, leading to the sensations that we have come to call a feeling an emotion.
And it is very human to want to buffer against our feeling when we don’t know how to process them, when we don’t have the tools to manage them, to address them, to feel them, when we are habituated to living from the neck up and don’t know how to feel our feelings while also feeling safe in the world and with ourselves.
From this place of buffering against our feelings, we set resolutions, grand perfectionistic prognostications of how This Year We’ll Do It ALLLL Perfectly.
Instead of really looking at why we’ve been living the way we have been in the last year and why we didn’t meet our goals last year either (I mean let’s be real here—hello pandemic…). So instead of looking at what’s real and giving ourselves the grace, the compassion and love we need (I said need!) in order to make lasting change, we jump to action.
We use resolutions as buffers against the regret of another year of not making the changes we want to in our lives.
We’re like, lemme slap these resolutions on it and then I won’t make myself feel so bad maybe…. A little distraction will do the trick…. Right?! Alas, not so much….
So what’s the remedy?
How do we stop doing this while also making the changes we want to make in our lives, to stop spinning in the constant anxiety of people-pleasing and the constant codependent drama of trying to get external validation? How do we start moving our bodies the way we want to, eating in nourishing loving ways, setting boundaries without the guilt?
Presence, self-compassion and commitment.
I start with presence and compassion because they are the antidotes to buffering. When you’re present with yourself and in your life, you’re not buffering, by definition. You’re holding space for yourself, you’re at home in yourself, you’re not trying to escape or evade yourself. You’re right here, present with you. And when presence is paired with self-compassion, which is the ability to show yourself understanding, acceptance, and love…. Oh my. What a beautiful thing.
With self-compassion for your inner children and all the survival skills you learned over the years, you can make a promise to not beat you up, to not be mean to you from your perfectionist habits, to show you the firm loving kindness that helps us to learn from the past and grow for the future.
From that presence and self-compassion you can get real with your feels, can let yourself feel them in a safe way, can process them through your body and can then connect back out with the world, a skill called pendulation.
We show up with presence and self-compassion and then we commit to ourselves, our lives, our futures, our goals.
So often what we think we need is motivation, which we expect to come like a lightning strike, so we wait around and wait around for it… but that’s not how it works. Sure, you can create motivation with your thoughts, absolutely. But motivation can be a fickle friend indeed my darlings.
What we need is to face what is through presence and compassion, take responsibility for ourselves with love and care, and we need to commit.
Commit to our goals, commit to our boundaries, commit to showing up to feel our feels and to live our lives the way we dream of.
Because motivation, whether intrinsic or extrinsic, often comes and goes, and if it works for you, great, but for so many of us motivation is not something to be counted on to see you through when the going get tough, when it seems easier in the moment to go along and get along rather than speak your truth, when that old desire to self-sabotage comes to pay you a midnight visit. Motivation as a noun is a great place to start from, and I’ll posit that the feeling and the verb that keeps you going is commitment.
Mi cariño, resolutions fade into the February snow.
But commitment? That’s the real deal.
And what does it take to commit? It starts for me with a promise to myself not to buffer with stories of change, stories about how I’ll totally start tomorrow… always start tomorrow, amiright?
It starts with really truly pausing to look at my thoughts and the feelings they create so I can sit with and process those feelings, the stories that created them and the actions I have taken in the past and want to take in the future, with presence and self-compassion.
And it starts with recognizing that we tell the story that we “need to make this change” because of how we believe that change will make us feel, and we often tell that same story when what we really want and need is nourishment, care, and safety.
So what does it take to commit?
For me it comes down to “I matter enough to me to nourish and take care of me” where nourishment can mean speaking my wants without guilt, exercising, doing daily thought work and somatic practices. Nourishment can mean asking someone I love to coregulate our nervous systems which means to connect heart to heart to calm our mindbodies. Nourishment can mean committing to only speaking to me in a kind and gentle way, and nourishment can mean going for realsies gluten-free cause that stuff makes me tired. Like whoa. So tired!
In my own life, I have recently made a Very Big Deal commitment to stop drinking yerba mate (the stimulant drink of my people) and to thereby completely eliminate caffeine, having ditched the coffee years ago. My commitment is to live a more authentic and intentional life in every way I can, and I know that while I love mate, and I believe in my Argentine heart that mate loves me back, my nervous system does not love mate.
I’m bringing this up because I am not motivated to Not Drink Mate, but I sure am committed to myself and the outcome of stopping. And to be clear, yerba mate is a vital part of my cultura, it’s a part of who I am or rather… have been. I am excited about that commitment and to meet the me underneath the mate. Does that mean I am happy about not doing a thing I want to do, no! But I’m committed to the bigger goal under the task at hand. The goal of stepping into ever greater intentionality, integrity, authenticity and just plain wanting to know me more.
Here’s the difference for me: resolutions are not usually based in deep work. Commitments are.
Commitment, to me, is a whole-hearted dedication that creates courage and determination, that empowers us to figure it out, to make it happen, with curiosity and even excitement.
Just because you’re committed to something or someone doesn’t mean you can’t be in a flow state with it, can’t decide to do it differently. For example, I am committed to exercising, to moving my body every day, and every day I ask my body if I want to Peloton, do a workout tape or yoga, go for a run or a walk or just stretch, because I want my body’s consent, my own daily buy-in because consent matters and because my commitment is to my body, not the how.
And a lot of people don’t like the word commitment because we can feel stuck in our commitments when we forget that we chose to commit! My tender muffin top! You chose that! You have agency! You decided to commit to XYZ, and you can choose to uncommit! You are, in fact, the boss of you. So there is nothing to fear about commitment cause it’s you ruling the roost here, darlin!
So you get to ask yourself some loving questions as you commit to the change you want to make in your life:
Check your thoughts:
- Why do you want to commit to this goal?
- What will future you think of your past commitment?
- What is your relationship to yourself & your goals?
- Do you believe you can carry your own plans out?
- What stories about your past commitments are you bringing in that may be blocking commitment now, like: I always bail or fail, I never follow through or whatever it may be?
If you find yourself saying those things I’ll invite you to use my fave trick The Power of Yet. You add a yet to it: I have never followed through on a commitment… yet. It does wonders for my brain.
And I’ll invite you to check out Minimum Baseline Thinking, all about how you can use teeensy tiny goals as a way to build trust in your capacity to show up for you and your commitments.
Next, check your intentions:
- Why do you want to set these resolutions?
- Why do you want to commit to this change?
- What do you believe you will feel if you do commit to this commitment?
Remind yourself that you can create that feeling for yourself now without doing the thing and can choose to do the thing from that place of wanting to, not from the place of believing that getting the thing will create feelings for you, your brain and body do that, sweet pea.
My beauty, commitment to self feels friggin amazing. When you choose you, day after day, when you show you that you matter to you, baby that’s when the magic happens.
By committing to one small change, even if it’s not to use resolutions or anything else as a buffer in your life, you start believe that it’s possible for you to keep choosing you, in every area of your life, in every relationship, every scenario.
You will choose you again and again, celebrating your commitment to the one life you’ve been for sure promised. And of course you’ll falter, of course you’ll take a day off from that intentional commitment, because that’s human, because science, and what matters is that you come back to you and you recommit: time & again, you get anchored in you, time and again, because my darling… you’re worth committing to.
I hope your new year is off to a beautiful start, and I hope you take some time to commit to you, today and every day.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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