You Don’t Need Resolutions. You Need Resilience.

Abandon goal-setting for something steadier.

I don’t know anyone moving into 2026 without a twinge of unease.

The geopolitical climate, the insane velocity of technology, the feeling that our bodies and brains are trying to adapt faster than they were built to.

If I’m being honest, I don’t celebrate the New Year. I acknowledge January 1st as a fixture of the Gregorian calendar, but I don’t feel my year begin until the spring equinox. Until the light comes back, the air warms, and something in me unclenches. I know that’s not everyone’s disposition. So if January 1st matters to you. If it feels like a doorway…I don’t want to take that from you. I just want to offer a different way of walking through it.

I don’t believe in resolutions. Not because goals are bad, but because January is a strange time to demand reinvention from yourself. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the days are short. It’s cold. Many of us are coming off travel, family dynamics, overstimulation, getting laid off or doing our best to metabolize the psychic static of living in the world right now.

Tectonic change is a lot to ask from a nervous system that’s already triaging how to survive the unknown.

January is ideal for something, though: noticing where you’re under-resourced and building resilience that can hold you for the long haul.

For me, resilience is interconnected with gratitude—though until recently, I shuddered at the idea of a gratitude practice. I never wanted it to become a way of bypassing what’s hard or what’s true. But recently I gave in, and I’ve realized: gratitude isn’t denial. It’s attention. And attention is one of the most powerful forms of resilience we have.

The mind will always offer you a list—what you haven’t done, what you should be doing, what you’re behind on, what might go wrong. If you let that list run the show, it will flatten your capacity to stay steady. Gratitude interrupts the spiral. It doesn’t erase reality, it widens it. It reminds you that more than one thing is true at once. That even in a hard season, there are points of support. Places where your life is holding.

There’s neuroscience backing this up. Gratitude activates brain regions associated with reward, enhancing feelings of contentment and emotional wellbeing. Regular practice can lead to long-term positive changes in the brain, supporting mental health and resilience. But you don’t need a study to know that redirecting your attention—choosing what you focus on, is a form of strength.

So if you’re feeling the pressure to reinvent yourself this week, consider this a permission slip: you don’t need resolutions. You need resilience.

If you don’t know where to begin, start small. Your breath. Breakfast. A bed to sleep in. Each is of those are things to feel deep gratitude for—if we pay attention. Gratitude helps you return to what’s real, what’s working. And that especially now is what we need. Presence.

There are many ways to develop a gratitude practice. You can do it daily or weekly—don’t fixate on the method, just commit to a process that works for you. I love how it feels to write, so I use a physical gratitude journal with built-in prompts—daily, at night. It helps offset any anxiety I’ve built up throughout the day and ground my gratitude in fact.

I know there are apps and specific journals people swear by, so if you have gratitude tools you love, I’d love to hear about them.

Sending you softness and resilience as 2026 unfolds.

🍊🧡