This is a post that I had originally published on Medium on January 7, 2021. It has since fallen behind a paywall and so I am republishing it here.

I remember my first moments of 2020. I had slept badly and was up before our room had any sunlight to speak of. In the dark, I reached over to my nightstand and in fumbling for my glasses, pushed them over the edge. From the noise they made when they hit the floor, I knew I had broken my only means to read small print.

I thought, well, I hope that is not an omen telling me how 2020 is going to turn out.

When I retrieved the pieces from the floor, I found that the situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed. One lens had popped out and it didn’t look like the frame was damaged. Maybe the optometrist could make it right when the store opened up the next day. I found myself with nothing to do but wait and not-see-so-well. Until then, I wouldn’t be able to read from any books or screens. By the end of the day, I tackled one of my year’s goals and started clearing out the garage.

This became one of the lessons I have learned from my years of new year’s resolutions: if I want to organize the house, all I need to do is put away my glasses.

Look, I know everything is going sideways at the moment. As I am writing this, there is a group of white supremacists being ushered in and out of the US Capitol building by complicit police. Closer to home, because our provincial government didn’t want to get in the way of people’s Christmases, COVID-19 has overrun my community and is now so unchecked that it was reported today that the local hospital is setting up a makeshift morgue.

And yet, I’m going to still write about what I have learned about making progress on my new year’s resolutions. Because I need to be stronger than 2021 and I need you to be stronger than 2021 as well.

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that yes, most new year’s resolutions fail because they are largely indistinguishable from a list we would devise if we were asked to write down ways to punish ourselves. I also want to recognize that changing habits is very difficult. There are some strategies that have been known to help and if you would like to learn more, I recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear as it is one of the kinder books about self-improvement that I’ve come across. That’s the source you should go to if you would like to know more about the behavioural science of resolutions. What I have to offer is … well, I am reluctant to call them life-hacks so let’s call them strategic interventions.

30 Days to Find the Love

I discovered this particular strategic intervention in 2008 some time after I had bought Nike+ running shoes. These were Nike runners with a sensor embedded under the sole that could capture running activity that could be transferred to your computer via your iPod.

Many of our self-improvement technologies like Nike+ or FitBits are devised to monitor and report on our activities back to us. Sometimes the real value of this self-surveillance is that the device will be more honest than our own estimations of how far we walked today or how many hours we were on social media. But mostly these devices are marketed on the appeal that they can award badges to us so we can be proud if we meet a particular target or if we have been consistent over a set number of days or weeks.

But I have learned through personal experience that this is not how these types of devices really lead to new habits. The real mechanism at work embedded in Nike+ runners is that they try to generate enough novelty so you will dutifully keep running long enough to discover the joy in the running itself, which will sustain the habit from there.

You don’t even need a special device. You just need a reason to try something new long enough to feel some benefit from it. Every year, Adriene Mishler posts 30 days of encouraging yoga videos on YouTube during the month of January. I had tried online yoga sporadically in 2020 but it was only after I had managed to take on a 30-day challenge, when the consistent practice paid off and I started feeling really good from getting a daily full body stretch. I now do yoga to embody that feeling and not to increase a streak in an app.

Use Narrative to Keep the Novelty Going

In 2008, when I got my new pair of expensive runners, I set a goal to run a 5km race. Then, as soon as I achieved my goal, I stopped running.

When I started running again in 2020, I wasn’t going to be fooled again. This time around, I used the Zombies, Run! 5K Training App to get me up to speed so I can run until I finish the 8 long seasons of Zombies, Run! The Zombies, Run! app is a mobile exergame that positions the listener as the character of Runner 5 whose job is to run missions for Abel Township, one of the few last outposts of humanity after a zombie apocalypse. I’m telling you, running with Zombies, Run! as your soundtrack during a global pandemic feels so poignant. Is the perfect time to invest in a story in which you are running from zombies not just for your own sake but for the sake of the lives of characters that you learn to care for.

That being said, even the power of story could not compel me enough to get me outside and run in the cold of winter. But then something unexpected happened. My son decided to run in the winter to prepare for soccer in the spring. Now I have the pleasure of running three times a week with my son, even when it is wet, grey and miserable. We somehow find the strength not to let each other down.

Curiosity and Delight are Better Motivators than Guilt

In 2020, I noticed that I wasn’t eating enough vegetables. Since I was working from home, I really had no excuse not to eat more healthy lunches now that my working space was either steps away from — or sometimes literally in — the kitchen. I got it in my mind that what I should do is to make some spinach smoothies as a means to efficiently deliver vegetables into my body. I ended up making them only once.

Fast forward to the day after Christmas and I found the need to completely unplug from social media. I opened an exceedingly difficult jigsaw puzzle and for the next several days, I laboured over its pieces while listening to the podcast, Home Cooking. As I am listening, I find myself pausing the show so I can search and bookmark recipes just mentioned. I start incorporating little food tricks that I have learned from Samin and Hrishikesh to my existing lunches. I make tasty lunches that occasionally feature veggies. I stop thinking of vegetables as a vehicle for vitamins and start considering questions such as where I can find local beans that have been harvested last year. Last Monday I bought Samin’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and reading it is a delight.

Breaking the bad habits of 2020

As I have been writing this, I have been switching tabs to Twitter so I can bear witness to the terrible events of January 6, 2021. I know it is absurd to write about good habits of running and eating more vegetables when there are white supremacists and a global pandemic threatening the lives of good people.

We, collectively, have much bigger bad habits that need to be broken.

To do so, we must find the love, share our stories, weave our experiences together, and connect them to our land. our history, and a better future.

We cannot let 2021 break us down.