Have you just tried making a New Years resolution?
People like to say “have you just tried making a New Year’s resolution”.
I have. Many times. And I meant it every time. Not casually, not as a vague intention, but as something that felt urgent and necessary. These were not half-hearted wishes. They were absolute decisions. I need to stop this. I need to fix this. This cannot continue.
What none of them were, in reality, was sustainable. They did not come with a structure that could survive normal life. They came with intensity and conviction, and the belief that wanting something badly enough would be sufficient.
What I eventually noticed is that it always follows the same arc. It starts with a surge of certainty rather than a plan. An absolute goal that feels urgent and non negotiable. I need to stop this. I need to fix this. This has to change now. The clarity comes from intensity, not from design, and in that moment it feels decisive. It feels like control.
If you know someone that might benefit from reading this, please share
Then I start. Day one works. Day two often works even better.The early success feels validating and the optimism rises quickly. If this feels manageable now, imagine how it will feel once it is established. This is usually the point where I tell someone and turn a private experiment into a public commitment. I’ve done it. This is easy.
Not long after that, something small disrupts the system. Poor sleep. An intense day. A change of routine. Nothing dramatic. Just real life. I miss a day, or shorten it, or push it to later and then do not come back to it, or I simply just forget entirely. I still believe in the plan, so I tell myself it does not matter and try to restart from exactly where I left off. But the conditions that caused the miss do not disappear. They accumulate. The effort starts to feel heavier, the friction increases, and what was simple becomes something I have to talk myself into. The internal story shifts from I can do this to why is this hard again.
This is the moment. The point where the resolution quietly dies. Not with a decision, but with avoidance. I stop tracking. I stop checking. The plan moves from an active project to background shame. All the people I enthusiastically told about the success were left thinking that I’d nailed it. That pattern has repeated often enough that it is no longer theoretical for me. It is data.
One reason it happens is that I am almost always wrong about effort and time. I underestimate how much energy something will take, or overestimate how much I will have available, and I genuinely believe the plan is realistic when I make it. This shows up everywhere, from DIY jobs at home to complex work projects.
People often describe time as something you can see stretching out in front of you, with tasks and milestones spread along it. That is not how it feels for me. Time feels more like a wall directly in front of me, with everything I need to do stuck onto it at once. All the tasks feel the same size and the same distance away. This is something many people with ADHD recognise as time blindness, not an inability to tell the time, but a difficulty sensing how effort and duration unfold.
Because of that, planning becomes less about sequencing and more about picking the next thing on the wall that delivers enough dopamine to get started. When I make resolutions, I am planning from how I feel in that moment, not from how my days usually go. The plan quietly assumes good energy, decent focus, and minimal friction every day. It works beautifully on my best days and collapses on my normal ones.
Another reason is demand. Looking back honestly, almost all of my New Year’s resolutions were shoulds. They were never really about what I wanted. They were about fixing something I was ashamed of, becoming more normal, more disciplined, more acceptable. Going to the gym to get fit was not about movement or health. It was my idea of how normal people get fit. It was borrowed behaviour, not something that fit me. What actually works for me is being outside, walking, moving through space, regulating at the same time as exercising. But that never made it into a resolution because it did not match the image I thought I was meant to live up to.
The same was true of drinking. Stopping drinking was framed in my head as not wanting to be the person who needed a drink every night to calm down after work. Not turning into my father who struggled with alcohol most of his life, until he went tee-total and told us at every opportunity how many hundred days it had been. What I did not understand then was that the drink was doing a job. It was reducing sensory and emotional overwhelm, which looking back I now think that was what my father drank too. So the resolution was not forward-looking. It was corrective. Fix this. Stop that. Be better. Once a resolution takes that shape, something in me resists. Even when I agree with the goal. Even when it matters. The moment it becomes about meeting an external standard, the motivation drains away. That resistance is not rebellion for the sake of it. It is self-protection. My nervous system does not respond well to internalised pressure, even when it is self-imposed.
For a long time, the clearest example of all of this was smoking. Every year I tried to stop. It mattered deeply to me. I knew it was bad for me. I hated myself for being addicted. I believed I had to stop. What I did not understand was that smoking was not just nicotine. It was regulation. It gave me a reason to leave overstimulating offices with harsh lighting, constant noise, and people everywhere. It gave me a predictable break, a moment of calm as the nicotine hit, a pause in an otherwise frantic day. It also gave me something else I did not recognise at the time. Scripted social interaction. Smokers form a bond. You stand outside together, complain about the weather, talk about work without having to be interesting. For an autistic person, that kind of interaction can feel like friendship. It is structured. It has rules. You are an outsider together because you have been made to go outside.
Every time I tried to quit cold, I removed all of that at once. The nicotine, yes, but also the regulation, the escape, the scripts, the sense of belonging. No wonder it never stuck. When cigarettes went, gum failed. When gum failed, I moved to vaping. That felt healthier, or at least less visibly harmful. Looking back, it worked as a stepping stone as it allowed me to maintain the structure and routines that smoking had always provided, and allowed me to reduce the nicotine to zero over time. I tackled the nicotine addiction that way, slowly over time until it was gone, leaving just the rest.
Even though, vaping seeped into everything and became unconscious, like a stim. I caught myself once in a meeting, realising I had reached for it without thinking. The moment I noticed, my entire body dropped. Shit. Can’t do this. Guilt. Embarrassment. Self-hate. The familiar internal voice telling me I was useless and that I had to stop, even though I knew I had said that countless times before. I wasn’t addicted to the nicotine anymore, just the scaffolding of vaping.
What finally changed things was not another resolution. It was understanding what I was actually doing. I realised the behaviour was two separate things, a need for regulation and an addiction to nicotine, bundled together for years. Once I separated them, everything shifted. I did not throw the regulation away. I kept my breaks, kept the ritual, bought a Komuso Shift to help with anxiety, found myself reaching for it as automatically as I had reached for my vape. I added walking. I kept the same exits from overstimulation. I dealt with nicotine separately, with patches, no drama. I quit quietly. No announcements. No deadlines. No threats to myself. No succeed or fail framing. It worked. I have not gone back to nicotine, or vaping, and I will not. It has been a couple of years now, the longest I have been free of it since I was fifteen. The difference was not willpower. It was replaced by healthier things that made me feel more alive, not less, gradually, gently, and without pressure of all or nothing thinking.
I saw the same pattern in other areas of my life. For years, one of my recurring resolutions was to get my finances in order. This is almost absurd on the surface. I work in finance. I build systems that analyse and manage investment portfolios. I know more about this stuff than most people, including many of the professionals paid to manage other people’s money. That was part of the problem. There was too much knowledge, too much choice, too much complexity to collapse into something simple and honest. Being asked whether I had low, medium, or high risk tolerance felt impossible to answer because I knew exactly what those labels hid. I could not make decisions that felt true, so I made none. The resolution stalled before it started. Not because I did not care, but because I could not find a first step that did not feel overwhelming.
Instead, I compensated. I worked harder, earned more, told myself I would deal with it later. That became a merry-go-round. Money not working for me, so I worked more. Working more left no capacity to think clearly, so I worked more again. That pattern did not look like failure. It looked like productivity, until it did not. I have burned myself out more than once that way, pulling weeks no human system can sustain.
All of this has taught me the same thing. Most of my resolutions failed because they were built on an adversarial relationship with myself. They assumed I needed to be pushed, corrected, overridden. They treated my nervous system as an obstacle rather than a source of information. They ignored energy variability, executive dysfunction, recovery, the tension between order and novelty, and demand. January makes this worse by asking me to start at the lowest energy point of the year and act as if my capacity has magically reset. It treats consistency as a moral good rather than a contextual one.
What I am trying to do differently now is not to force myself to break the cycle, but to change the shape of the graph. Lower peaks. Shallower troughs. Systems that can shrink rather than collapse. Plans that expect dips rather than being surprised by them. Success measured by recovery, not streaks. This looks boring. It does not make for good New Year content. There is no heroic transformation arc. But it is honest, and I have finally learned that it works.
Part of that honesty is accepting a simple truth that New Year culture quietly avoids. No one gets out of this life alive. There is no perfect diet, no perfect physique, no perfect level of fitness, no perfect career waiting at the end of the road. There is no finished state where you can finally stop adjusting. Even goals like getting thin are undefined. There is no end point to being thinner. You can always go further, restrict more, optimise harder.
When goals are vague and infinite, they are impossible to satisfy. When they are specific and grounded, they become workable. Eating one less chocolate bar a day. Cutting out one drink a day or a week. Adding one more portion of vegetables. Walking instead of forcing the gym. Small changes that are clear, survivable, and measurable. Those changes stack. They give feedback along the way. They build a sense of achievement rather than deferring it to some imagined future.
There is no perfect future self waiting to be unlocked. There is only a series of small choices made in the body you have, with the nervous system you have, in the life you are actually living.
If I were coaching someone on this, I would not start with goals at all. I would start with capacity. I would want to understand what their nervous system is doing right now, not what they hope it will do in an ideal future. How regulated they feel, how much energy they realistically have, what is already demanding their attention. Change that ignores context almost always collapses. I would lower the emotional stakes immediately, removing succeed or fail framing, streaks, and all-or-nothing language. The moment change becomes a test of character, it becomes brittle.
The first step would be deliberately small, almost unconvincingly so. Something that could be done even on a bad day, when tired and unmotivated. Not because small steps are virtuous, but because they are survivable. I would help them to design the step to reduce friction rather than add it, with fewer decisions, less setup, and lower initiation energy. If something relies on remembering, planning, or perfect conditions, it is already too complex.
I would help them to expect variability. Missed days would be part of the design, not treated as a rupture. A pause would not require a restart ritual. After a dip, the question would not be why did you fail, but what changed. Reflection would be light. Not obsessive tracking, just enough noticing to learn what helped, what made it harder, and what felt sustainable.
I would be explicit about the tension between order and novelty, especially in those of us that are ADHD and Autistic.Any change would need enough structure to reduce chaos and enough flexibility to prevent boredom and resistance. Most importantly, I would help frame change as something that integrates slowly, not something that proves itself quickly. If something only works when life is calm, it is not ready yet. If it survives stress, fatigue, and distraction, then it is doing its job.
Lowering the barrier to success also means lowering the barrier to failure. If stopping feels catastrophic, people cling or avoid. If stopping feels neutral, they can return without drama. That is what made giving up nicotine stick for me. There was no pressure, no identity shift demanded up front, just readiness, gentle stacking of new and slightly better habits, and permission to keep what I actually need and drop the things I don’t.
If I were coaching someone, I would want them to leave with less urgency, not more. Fewer promises. More trust in themselves. A sense that change does not have to be forced to be real. Because the goal is not to start well. It is to continue without punishing yourself when your nervous system does exactly what it has always done. That is how change actually sticks.
I write about these experiences because I spent years thinking I was broken, when what I actually needed was language for how my nervous system works.
I write one thoughtful piece a week for people who find themselves overwhelmed by things that everyone else seems to cope with. If this resonated, subscribing just means you’ll get the next one quietly, without pressure or expectation.
And if you read this and didn’t subscribe, that’s okay too. If this helped you feel a little less broken, even briefly, then it’s done its job.
Barkley, R. A. (1997). ADHD and the nature of self-control. Guilford Press.
Komuso Shift - https://uk.komusodesign.com/products/the-classic-shift
