If You’re Not Ready for New Year’s Resolutions, Try This Instead

January has a way of making people feel behind before the year has properly begun. Even if you resist it, there’s a low hum of expectation in the background — conversations about goals, questions about what you’re changing this year, lists forming almost by default. The start of a new year is meant to feel like the thrill of new beginnings, but for many people it lands more like a dulling pressure.

A lot of people arrive here in January wondering whether New Year’s resolutions ever really worked for them. Whether it’s worth writing them down again. Whether this is the year they finally follow through — or whether they’re already tired of trying to become a better version of themselves before the year has even settled.

If that sounds familiar, it’s worth saying this clearly: not feeling ready doesn’t mean you’re unmotivated. It often means you’re paying attention to where you really are right now.

Resolutions are built on an idea of certainty that most of us don’t actually have at the start of a year. They assume we know what needs changing, that we’re ready to commit to it, and that progress happens best when we draw a sharp line between who we were and who we’re supposed to become. But life doesn’t tend to work in clean breaks. We carry the previous year with us — its questions, its fatigue, its unfinished business — and January doesn’t erase any of that.

That’s one reason resolutions can feel fragile. They ask us to decide too much, too soon, at a moment when many of us are still finding our footing, and in the middle of the grey days of winter too.

There’s another way to begin, one that doesn’t require reinvention or resolve. Curiosity.

Curiosity doesn’t ask you to map the year ahead. It doesn’t demand a plan or a promise. It invites you to notice what’s already happening and stay in relationship with it. Instead of asking what you should change this year, curiosity asks what’s worth paying attention to right now. Instead of pushing for answers, it allows you to explore.

This matters because curiosity works with real life, not an idealised version of it. You can be curious about when you feel most yourself and when you feel depleted. You can notice patterns in how you spend your time, what you avoid, what you keep returning to. You can start to understand what supports you and what quietly drains you, without turning those observations into a verdict on who you are.

For many people, the desire behind a resolution is something simple and human: to feel more confident, to enjoy life more, to feel steadier or more successful in a way that actually fits. Curiosity doesn’t get in the way of those hopes. It gives them room to grow.

One of the most freeing things about curiosity is that it removes the pressure to be ready. You don’t need a word for the year. You don’t need a perfect starting point. You don’t need to know where you’ll end up. You can begin with interest instead of intention, learning as you go rather than judging yourself for not having it all figured out.

That’s often where meaningful change starts — not from fixing yourself, but from understanding yourself better. From noticing what matters, what’s shifting, and what might need a little more care.

If you’re questioning whether New Year’s resolutions work, or whether there’s a gentler way to start the year, this week’s episode of A Thought I Kept explores curiosity as a way of approaching life without pressure. In this conversation with Rebecca Frank, wellbeing editor of The Simple Things, we talk about navigating January without having to change everything about yourself — and how curiosity might offer a different, and steadier, place to begin.