An overwhelming number of people—91%, says one study—fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions. Still, a decent percentage of Americans continue to make one each year. But what if January 1 isn’t the best time to implement changes? What if we instead created a “winter arc” leading up to the new year instead?
That’s what a number of people on TikTok are doing right now—using the winter season as an excuse to embrace new wellness habits. “The winter arc trend is making visible what is typically invisible, which is that our life’s work is figuring out what is our life’s work,” says NYU Stern School of Business professor Suzy Welch, who teaches the course Becoming You: Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need. “It’s not something you do as a New Year’s resolution after a couple of drinks of champagne on New Year’s Eve. This is an arc, and winter lends itself to it.”
If you pay attention to it, nature can be a role model for change, says Welch, who also hosts the Becoming You podcast. “There is this period where animals go into hibernation,” she says. “They rest for when spring comes again. What the winter arc trend is trying to reflect is that there needs to be a period where we rest and reflect, so that we can spring forward, almost literally.”
Welch recommends taking a season to figure out who you are “standing still” so you can blossom into action with higher intelligence later. Winter is ideal because things often slow down. The days are shorter. Nature invites us to go inside, both physically and metaphorically.
“In many ways, it’s the absolute antithesis of the nonsense on New Year’s Eve where you say you’re going to make a resolution and keep it,” she says. “Of course, no one ever does. Instead, there should be an iterative process of reflection that takes some time. We’re making some very big decisions; we have to take that inward journey to figure out some very big stuff.”
Finding Your Purpose
The winter arc is the perfect time to discover your purpose, which can lead you to make the right changes, going forward. What you should do with your life lies at the intersection of what you want to do, what you can do, and what you should do, says Welch.
“What you want to do are your deeply held values and firmly held beliefs about the way the world works and who you want to be,” she says.
“Values,” however, is a word we often kick around without much thought, such as saying “family values” or “progressive values.” Welch says people also often mix up values with virtues. You can start to identify your values by answering these three questions: What do I want people to say about me when I’m not in the room? What would make me cry from regret on my 80th birthday? What did I love about my upbringing and what did I hate?
“Values are our creed,” she says. “They are what we want to be and why. We do not find that out by pondering or in conversation. There’s hard work.”
The next way to figure out your purpose is to tap into your aptitudes. “We can want to do something, but we may not have the inborn natural proclivity for it,” says Welch. “Not everyone can be an opera singer or a basketball player. The same thing is true about cognitive aptitudes. You have to know what you’re uniquely good at.”
The final piece of work is to understand what kind of work calls you, emotionally and intellectually, and that can pay you, according to your values.
“What’s so beautiful about the winter arc is it can be a period where we collect data,” says Welch. “What we should do with our lives is just not an impulse decision. It’s a decision that we make after doing an exhaustive search of the data around our values, our aptitudes, and our interests. And at the intersection of those three big data pools lays one thing: our purpose.”
The Risk of Not Knowing
If you continue to make uninformed New Year’s resolutions, Welch says you are at risk of ending up in a “velvet coffin.”
“This is when we make accommodations and excuses and we follow the path of expedience or expectations,” she says. “It’s pretty comfortable, but the next thing we know is that we’re laying in a velvet coffin of our own design. Then the lid closes, and we’ve just had a B-minus life.”
Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” asks, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Welch says most people fixate on “wild and precious”—instead, you should fixate on “plan.”
“You will squander your wild and precious life if you don’t do some planning,” she says. “Life will get away from you. You can’t just be reactive.”