The beginning of the year has become the temporal landmark for setting out new goals and making promises of transcending our old faulty selves. But this practice is accompanied by the all-too-familiar disappointment of broken new year's resolutions. Rebecca Roache warns about the oppressive perfectionist ideology animating this ritual, offering an alternative, kinder approach to self-improvement.

On 1st January 1863, Mark Twain wrote, ‘Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual’. Presumably, like the rest of us, Twain signed up for a cheap new year gym membership deal and then never went back after mid-January.

There are good reasons for cynicism about new year resolutions. There’s the thought that, if you’re willing to wait until the new year before you implement some positive change, then making that change can’t be very important to you. And the thought that if you’re serious about self-improvement, you’d be thinking about it throughout the year, not just at the beginning of January. Another reason is that tying your good intentions to the new year is a good way to set yourself up for failure. If you’re going to make improvements, isn’t it better just to get on with them quietly when the time is right, whether or not it coincides with the new year? And at least in the Northern Hemisphere, January already comes with its own sets of challenges: it's cold and dark outside, the festive season is over, and the daily grind is back with a vengeance. Why make life even harder for ourselves by throwing resolutions into the mix? There is, however, a way of committing to change that doesn't follow the Mark Twain recipe for disappointment.