What's Your New Year's Solution?

The thing about New Year’s Day is that there isn’t much left to do, what with Hanukkah and Christmas under your belt — and around your hips, thighs and abdomen.

Nothing much to do except update your New Year’s resolution list.

So there you sit, with your hand in a bowl of leftover onion dip, thinking about your life. And once you start dwelling, there’s no end to the remorse you feel over all the obvious bad things you do.

You eat chunks of real butter, and occasionally closet smoke.  Sometimes you aren't really listening when the kids talk to you; ditto that for the spouse.  There are days when regular exercise boils down to brushing in a circular motion twice a day after meals.  You've selectively taken all of Dr. Oz's best health tips to the extreme, and are now eating dark chocolate several times a day, sometimes drizzled over ice cream, or consumed in conjunction with your favorite red wine (for the antioxidants and resveratol, of course) or beer (thank you for being there, vitamin B6).

And now, just because the clock has struck midnight for the 366th consecutive day, you decide you’ve had it with your unhealthy lifestyle. Again.

Well, before you crush your last pack of Marlboro Lights or revive your languishing health club membership, I have to tell you something very important: DON’T DO IT!

That’s right. This year, I’m urging the public at large not to make a bunch of noble resolutions they will fail to keep.

First of all, take a look at the word “resolution.” Break it down, as your high school algebra teacher would say. Re-solution. Sounds to me like solving a lifetime of mistakes again and again, year after year. And the reason that we make New Year’s resolutions each and every year?

That’s right. We haven’t been using the correct dictionary.

So now that we’ve broken it down, let’s look it up. I’m using Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary:

“Resolution: noun; 1. the act or process of reducing to simpler form, as the act of analyzing a complex notion into simpler ones.”

You don't need to be Oprah to have an "Ah-ha! moment" after reading that one.

It seems we’ve been approaching this New Year’s resolution thing all wrong by asking, “What bad unhealthy habits can I break this year?” The obvious answer is: none of them. If making resolutions every year worked, we’d all be living a clean, sober, bad-habit-free life. We’d all be rich, due to our bountiful savings accounts. We’d have rippling abs, low cholesterol, and be working part-time as a volunteer at the local homeless shelter.

If only we’d looked it up sooner in Webster’s Ninth, we’d have known that to have a happier new year, all we have to do is reduce our lives to a simpler form.

Consider the stressors that lead us to overeating, overdrinking, oversmoking, overworking, oversleeping, underexercising and generally underachieving, especially when there’s something good on HBO. It’s really not the basics of life that lead to our frustrations — working or parenting or being married or being single. It’s the complications that get us.

We smoke because we think it calms our nerves. And our nerves are shot because we haven’t figured out how to simplify our lives. We drink too much because the buzz feels better than the burn we endure after working out. We settle in and watch others' lives pass before our eyes on the latest reality TV series because, frankly, we’re too tired to have a life of our own.

After clocking out, stoking the home fires, and scrambling after the loose ends du jour, we're lucky to make it up to bed before falling asleep on the couch.
We eat too much because it’s the only productive thing we can do when life feels overwhelming. We don’t need better eating habits. We’re all familiar with how to right our toppled food pyramids. We just need to be underwhelmed.

Workaholics know, deep down, that the only thing really gained by overworking are more reasons to overwork, leaving less time to enjoy the life you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

And often, we oversleep when we’ve spent half the night staring at the ceiling, counting our worries like sheep. So enough with the worries already.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this year should be the last year anyone will have to labor over which resolutions to make, keep and break. I urge you to start this New Year by getting your hand out of that bowl of onion dip in a hurry. It’s time to find your New Year’s Solution.

If it’s a kinder, gentler, simpler life you need, then figure out what you can do to simplify your life this year.

I should start by cleaning out all the closets in my house. Then, I’d have a place to put all the stuff that piles up everywhere which makes me feel overwhelmed by how messy things are in my world. That’s not just a metaphor. But I know that endless clutter isn’t the underlying reason for my other bad habits.

By definition, all I have to do is make it simple, once and for all.

So, here’s my five-step solution to reduce stress and guilt in 2012, which should do it, once and for all:

1. Prioritize my daily to-do list, making sure I never again lose sight of who and what is most important to me. Post it someplace where I can see it every morning, like the bathroom mirror, or near the coffee maker (or my dark chocolate stash). Read it aloud. Stick to it.
2. Hug the ones I love every chance I get. Then, hug everyone else within range. No one ever left this earth wishing they hadn't hugged so many people. Hugs are good. Go ahead; invade someone else's space if, like me, you're a hugger.
3. Be honest. About everything. Especially to myself.
4. When things feel overwhelming, take a deep breath and say out loud: “In the scheme of things, this is not a big deal. I can handle anything.” Then, go and handle it. Call for backup, if you need it. Lifelines are not just for people who want to be millionaires.
5. Lay off the onion dip. Your hips, thighs and abdomen will thank you.

Now it's your turn; what's YOUR New Year's Solution?