New Year's Resolutions: Focusing on What's Important

In the new year, people often think about self-improvement and new year’s resolutions — losing a few pounds, for example. But though people have the best of intentions, these goals can send them in the wrong direction.

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, Pico Iyer wrote a piece — “Healthy Body, Unhealthy Mind” — touching on this very issue. Iyer writes about his efforts starting in his fifties to wean himself off of Big Macs and start to exercise. He admits, however, that he was ignoring what he took in emotionally. While he wasn’t gorging on calories, he was “gobbling down” a junk-food mental diet of useless information and gossip.

Iyer labels himself an “externalist,” or someone, he says, who “will dwell at length on everything he can see, in order to distract himself from the fact that it’s everything he can’t see on which his well-being depends….He interprets health in terms of his body weight, wealth in terms of his bank account and success in terms of his business card.”

So many of us work hard not to define ourselves solely by these external markers. Indeed, many people find themselves in therapy when they feel they are not measuring up on these counts. Weight and bank balances fluctuate — it’s risky to rely on them as measures of self-esteem. Part of the work in therapy involves helping someone find value in less concrete areas. With weight in particular, it can be tempting to focus on a number — a calorie count, a carbohydrate gram, a scale number — but when the number doesn’t go your way, it can be devastating. It helps to widen one’s lens beyond the concrete.