2025 New Year’s resolutions: Back to Mindfulness, the ‘Time Since’ method, and neglecting OCD rituals

I have decided on my New Year’s resolutions for 2025 and I thought I would share them with you since, in case you haven’t noticed, this philosophy blog is a lifestyle blog. These resolutions are just as much philosophical experimentations as the other practices I talk about here, so I think it might interest you.

First, Some Good Advice I’ve Heard

    A good piece of advice I have heard about New Year’s resolutions is that it is more effective to have one resolution per month instead of resolutions for the whole year. Unfortunately for me, I cannot follow this advice, because I am already busy dedicating every month to a new philosophical exercise for the grand experiment that is this blog. That said… I suppose that another way of thinking about it is that I am already following that advice very well! And this one-practice-per-month method really worked for me in 2024! So I am both eager to do more, and worried that I might break the balance by adding too much on my plate right now.

    Another good piece of advice I have heard is that it is useful to vow to add something to your life instead of vowing to remove something from your life. I think this piece of advice is useful because there is something about vowing to remove things from your life that essentially amounts to “I have no plan, but I must trust my will power”, and that is just plain foolish. You can also have that attitude with positive resolutions (for example “Read More”, which is also too vague) but I think there is something about denying yourself stuff (“eat less candy”) that really triggers the imagination and passes for a good plan, when it is, in fact, not a plan at all. Instead of coming up with a plan to create the conditions for positive change, we just make ourselves feel really guilty, hoping that it will bring about positive change (it doesn’t).

    I guess all this good advice is built on the back of a sceptical take on New Year’s resolutions: the entire idea of being “really really really resolute about something in the moment, and thus imagining yourself spreading that ‘resoluteness’ over the span of a year” is flawed. It encourages a fantasy that distracts you from having an actual plan for how to achieve what you want to achieve. You cannot rely on willpower like that. Personally, I think it is unfortunate that this scepticism often turns into a complete dismissal of the whole project of resolutions. I think resolutions are great if you make the effort to come up with a plan that actually has a chance to work.

    The following resolutions that I came up with for myself, I find them a little “risky” to be honest. In the sense that they seem to me to have a little bit of that “no but seriously, I AM RESOLUTE” energy that isn’t as helpful as it sounds. But given the context of my philosophical experiments for the blog (and how well that has gone for me), I think I could pull them off.

    I hope my plan is smart enough to work.

Here goes. My resolutions:

1) Number one priority: every day, 20 minutes of formal mindfulness meditation. I am aiming for an unbroken streak of 20 minutes every day for a year.

    In 2024, I have let anxiety get the best of me many times. I think I have been the victim of a confusion: since my life is going so well and since I am so happy, I tend to neglect this medical condition that I have.. this anxiety disorder that manifests in nearly all the ways an anxiety disorder might. Every time I think about my anxiety disorder, my first thought is “well… is it really that bad? my life is going so well!” and that is kinda beside the point! Reflecting on life satisfaction, life experience and life orientation, is not the best way to reflect on my medical condition. So I have been letting my anxiety fester, because I have wrongly assumed that the best way to think about it is to do very simple math: to subtract all the bad things from the pile of good things, and if there are more good things left it must mean that I can afford not to worry about treatment for my very real & very debilitating mental illness. Very bad reasoning!

    So I have been slacking. I do meditate a lot, mindfulness meditation included, but I tend to meditate informally (“on the go”) as a reaction to unpleasant experiences or as a way to enhance pleasant experiences. (unless I am trying a meditation technique for the blog) There is another way to meditate: formally (removed from the stream of daily life, doing nothing else than meditation, and with a healthy emphasis on building up your ability to focus). I think formal meditation will do me a world of good. I think it might decrease my anxiety baseline. I need to start seeing it as medication for my anxiety disorder, and as a service to my partner who lives with me, and ultimately also as my most basic task as a way-of-life philosopher. I am so lucky in that way: the art of mindfulness meditation happens to be my job! So no excuse to neglect it.

2) Use the “Time Since” app religiously, everyday.

    Time Since is an app that I really like (this is not a sponsored post). Basically: you create a list of items, and for each item it tells you how long it has been since you last performed it. So you might write “Read fiction”, and then every time you read fiction you inform the app that you have done so. But in the meantime, it tells you “it has been 3 days since you last read fiction”. You might also write something you do not want to do like “Purchase Funko Pop” to encourage yourself to not do it anymore : “you haven’t purchased a Funko Pop in 50 days.”. With this app, you decide when you receive notifications about those items to know you haven’t done them in X number of days (you customize the relevant number of days).

    I really like this app because it gives me data that nudges me towards doing more good things. It is a somewhat different approach than having a plan like “I want to read fiction every week” because it is less normative and cumbersome (I have too many plans like that already, this blog included). It merely informs you how long it’s been since X and then it’s up to you what you want to do with that information. I really like this idea of not relying purely on a quantity-based plan, and instead mixing together ideas of quantity & quality. It is the quality of the experience that matters ultimately – not how much you read fiction but how well you read fiction – yet having a measure of quantity can help you tell a story about quality. In the same way that if you have not seen a friend in a certain number of months, you might decide that you have “lost touch” with the friend and that it’s time to reconnect. Data helps you tell the story.

    Final advice: the free version of the app is very limited, and so I had to buy the app to really use it. It was 2 euros or something like that.

3) Everyday, neglect one OCD ritual.

    As I am dealing with my very debilitating anxiety disorder, I am dealing with many OCD rituals that grow like the many heads of a hydra. I have found one thing that helps a lot: if I force myself to neglect one OCD ritual from time to time, it helps me move on from a lot of other OCD rituals. I have discovered this while experimenting with Anti-Curiosity Exercises.

    By “neglect the ritual” I mean that most of my body is telling me “you are being foolish, you are not checking in the correct way that the door is locked, you are being so negligent that you might as well not have checked it at all, so check again!” and instead of agreeing or disagreeing with that statement, I just go “okay, I will be negligent then” and I tear myself away from the situation, forcefully and counter-intuitively, feeling sloppy and messy while I walk away. I have found that this cuts off the head of the hydra and cauterizes it so that it does not regrow, whereas trying to agree or disagree lets the rituals multiply.

4) Journal everyday.

    We’re talking about the kind of journaling where you just spew all your anxieties onto the page so that they do not swim around in your head anymore. You then restructure your thoughts in a better way. It is an incredibly useful practice. I have been slacking here too, even though I badly need this to treat my anxiety disorder. And over the course of the past years I have discovered new ways to do it and I have had a lot of fun with them (see: befriending the ancients, or contemplating death).

Conclusion.

    Here you go. We will see if my plan works. I consider these four resolutions to be yet another philosophical experiment that I will carry out throughout the year. So I will definitely report back to you! See you then!

(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. In the previous episode, we Walked the Land as a kind of ecological exercise. Before that, we experimented with Intuitive Action. And before that, we made friends with dead philosophers. We’ve been going for a year now, take a look around the blog and see what you like!)

(01/01/2025)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille