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The success of New Year’s resolutions, like promises to cut back on drinking or binge-eating quarts of Talenti, is famously fleeting. Of course, changing behavior can sometimes change brain chemistry and your social world, thus easing your life. More typically, though, at least in my experience, even if you’ve resolved your way to going to the gym twice a week, or stopped procrastinating, a new problem will soon emerge, or a variation on the old one. Like one of my friends who managed to stop giving the kind of advice that infuriated her grown daughter, but then obsessed about how her daughter holds her at arm’s length. Better? Not really.
If you anticipate that happening, you might want to try a different approach: rather than trying to decree bad behavior away, investigate it. Ask yourself what you feel like just before doing what you’d rather not, or not doing what you should. Where in your body does the (undoubtedly uncomfortable) feeling settle? The hard part is to let yourself feel it, which will hopefully reveal the emotional state underlying it, like depression, anger, or anxiety. There are others but these three cover a lot of territory so they’re a good place to start. For how such a New Year’s investigation might work, I offer up one of my own from the last few years.
The behavior I wished away—excessive preparing and compulsive organizing—traced back to anxiety, which I felt in my frantic energy, insomniac exhaustion, and hyperfocus. To investigate further, I had to ask myself: why was I so anxious?
I’m the kind of person who never turned in a late term paper. Yet, I can make myself crazy over whether a dinner for friends will be done in time or be edible. I go over what I have to do in each minute of preparation. I examine the recipe repeatedly. I lose sleep. Imagine what I’m like with my work.
Thinking analytically, as I’ve learned to do, means that after recognizing the core feeling, you look for its antecedents.
What I found in my examination of my torrential anxiety is that it began when I was a small girl. I remembered going to a new school, which might’ve been exciting except I was way too anxious. I didn’t know how to make friends, I didn’t know what was expected, I felt overwhelmed and inept. There was good reason for that; there usually is. Until I was 5, I’d lived in a small apartment with my mother, brother, and father, who died. We never spoke of this loss. No comfort was offered. My mother just struggled on, going to work to pay the rent. Then, suddenly (as I experienced it), we moved to a new apartment, with a new father, and a new school. The curtain dropped on the past and I was meant to start my new life. But obviously it was too new and too incomprehensible for my 5-year-old skills. Without help from my parents, who I guess were trying to adapt to their own new married lives, I was incredibly anxious. I didn’t know how to be this new man’s child, how to live in this new neighborhood, how to be in school (which I hadn’t attended before), or how to understand my past.
My guess is that anxious children aren’t all that easy to like, which must have been why I didn’t make friends or find myself beloved by my teachers. That lasted pretty much until I hit adolescence, when I applied all the ingenuity that I had (and fortunately I had lot more by then) to figure out how things worked and find a place for myself. Apparently, however, I never got over the awful anxiety of not knowing how to do things and having to do them anyway.
Did my investigation help? Yes. After that, when I’ve felt or still feel the anxiety that leads to sleepless nights and worried days, I remind myself I’m not that 5-year-old any longer. It may seem obvious, but not to my unconscious. So, I stay with that idea for as long as it takes me to believe it.
