New Year’s Resolutions: How to Avoid the “F*%k! It’s February and I’ve Failed Already!”
The turn of a new year can land in many different ways. For some, it arrives softly, wrapped in time off, warmth, and a sense of pause. For others, it barely feels like a break at all. Holidays can be restorative, disorienting, joyful, lonely, chaotic, or all of these at once. Some people move through them in blissful denial, postponing difficult thoughts until later. Others spend the weeks juggling logistics, timetables, queues, bookings, suitcases, and the invisible labour of keeping families moving, only to return to work, school, study, and deadlines feeling like they need a holiday from the holiday!
But in the quieter moments the break has given us, or perhaps it is when our day-to-day life resumes, attention often shifts to the question of how we are actually going. We reflect on the state of our mental health, our relationships past and present, our work, our parenting, and the griefs we carry for people, places, and versions of life that didn’t eventuate. Anxiety about the year ahead can begin to build, alongside the familiar pressure to finally get it together, to do better, be better, and make this the year things change. Enter, once again, the old chestnut , the ritual of new year resolutions - so earnest, so hopeful, and so forgotten about by February.
It’s in this space that questions about support tend to surface. Not necessarily because something is “wrong”, but because something matters, feels unfinished, or needs care. The idea of therapy often enters here quietly, as one possible place to finally face the thing that you have been avoiding, to bite the bullet, face your fears, muster the courage, find the time, slow down, reflect, decide what you want more of and less, start this, stop that, break the cycle/pattern/habit, set boundaries, say no, embrace yes, create opportunity, be better, do better, and, for the love of God, change!
It’s not surprising then that is in February that I usually see a spike in appointments. Both new clients and old clients coming back. I think it’s because by February we are usually well and truly back into the hard slog of work, school, family dynamics, and relationship patterns. There is a sense of “Oh fuck here we go again” or “I can’t face another year of this shit”, or perhaps “It’s February and I’ve already failed at that New Year’s resolution”.
So I’m getting on the front foot. As I write this it’s not quite mid-January so let’s reassess your feelings about therapy, about change. Some feel relief and curiosity. Others feel guilt for having put off starting therapy or for having drifted away. Some feel flat, unsure whether therapy is still doing anything at all. And if therapy didn’t work what hope is there? All of these responses make sense. Therapy sits inside a real person with a real life that keeps moving, getting busy, getting heavy, sometimes getting better without us quite noticing how. Let’s take a look at how you can make therapy work for you this year.
Getting the most out of therapy rarely means doing it “perfectly”. It means staying in some kind of relationship with your inner world, your needs, and the supports you use to navigate them. That relationship changes over time. So does the role therapy plays.
I’ve been workshopping a simple cognitive planning framework that can help people reflect on their therapy, whether they’ve been coming regularly, have taken a long break, or are only a few sessions in. The aim is not to add pressure or another self improvement project, but to offer a gentle structure for thinking about where you’ve been and what you might want next. Something you can hold lightly, rather than something you need to achieve.
The framework I’ve landed on uses five words. Reflect. Reinforce. Release. Renew. Return. Five is enough. Any more and it starts to feel like homework. And let’s be honest, if you’re a client of mine you will already know that my neurodiverse brain won’t be able to remember my own bloody framework if it’s any longer.
REFLECT is about looking back on the last year or the last stretch of therapy with honesty rather than judgement. This might include noticing what you worked on, what shifted, what didn’t, and what surprised you. Often people are quicker to notice what hasn’t worked than what quietly has. Reflecting might mean recognising that you now set a boundary you couldn’t set before, or that you understand your patterns more clearly, even if they still show up. It might also mean naming that therapy felt stuck, too intense, or not quite right. All of that belongs in reflection. Therapy is not a pass or fail exercise. It’s a process of contact with yourself as well as developing a relationship with your therapist. What is the relationship with your therapist like? What feels right? What doesn’t? If something doesn’t feel right this is a great opportunity to action some change - identify what it is that doesn’t feel right, have the courage to bring it up with your therapist, advocating for our needs can take practice, voicing our feelings towards someone is uncomfortable and the therapeutic relationship is perfect for fumbling through these awkward and difficult conversations. The converse is true too. Naming what feels good and is working can reinforce what it is that we need. Which nicely Segways into the next point…
REINFORCE is about deciding what is worth continuing or strengthening. Some people think of this as recommitting, but that word can feel heavy, like a contract. Reinforce is softer. Stronger. It might mean reinforcing the skills that helped, the insights that mattered, or the parts of you that showed up even when things were hard. For long term clients, this can be an important moment to pause and acknowledge growth that has become so familiar it’s easy to overlook. For newer clients, it might mean noticing early wins or moments of relief and anchoring them before moving forward.
RELEASE is often the hardest and most relieving part. This is about letting go of what isn’t working. That might be an old goal that no longer fits the life you’re actually living. It might be a belief about what therapy “should” look like. It might even be the idea that you must keep pushing in therapy at all costs. Sometimes release involves naming that therapy became too much, that life intervened, that a particular approach didn’t land, that therapy became too confronting, or that we used old behavioural patterns to avoid getting the help we needed. Releasing doesn’t mean giving up. It means making space. Therapy that adapts tends to be therapy that lasts.
RENEW is about intention rather than pressure. It’s not about fixing yourself for the year ahead. It’s about noticing where your energy wants to go now. That might be towards stabilising, resting, regulating your nervous system, or building more capacity before doing deeper work. For some people, renew looks like shifting focus from insight to action. For others, it’s the opposite. Renewal can also mean resetting expectations. Therapy doesn’t always need to be intense to be effective. Sometimes the most useful work is quiet, slow, and supportive. Even silence in sessions, just sitting in the presence of a supportive ‘other’ can be exactly what is needed.
RETURN is the final piece, and it matters. Return doesn’t mean you failed by stepping away. It means you’re allowed to come back, to therapy, to your goals, or simply to a conversation about what you need now. Return might be booking a session after six months away. It might be coming in specifically to say “I’m not sure this is working” or “I don’t know what I want from therapy anymore”. That kind of conversation is not awkward or inconvenient for a good therapist. It’s meaningful work in itself. Learning to name what isn’t helping, what you want more of, or what feels missing is a powerful act of self advocacy.
I want to speak directly to a few different groups of people here.
If you haven’t been to therapy in a while, you don’t need a good reason to come back. Life gets busy. Therapy can stir things up. Mental health can dip. Sometimes people pause because they’re coping better and sometimes because they’re coping worse. All of these are valid. You’re allowed to return just to talk about the pause. You’re allowed to return even if you’re unsure whether you want to continue. That conversation alone can be clarifying and grounding.
If you’ve been in therapy for a long time, this kind of reflection can help prevent therapy from becoming background noise. Long term work benefits from moments of recalibration. Noticing what you’re proud of, what still feels tender, and whether the focus still fits your life now can bring new energy and direction into the work.
If you’re early in therapy, you don’t need to wait until something is “wrong” to talk about how it’s going. Checking in on pace, focus, and expectations early on can help therapy feel more collaborative and more responsive to you as a person, not just a set of symptoms.
Therapy works best when it is something you actively shape, rather than something that just happens to you. That includes being able to say when it’s not helping, when you want something different, or when you need a break. These conversations are not signs of failure. They are signs of engagement, agency, and growing psychological flexibility.
If this reflection brings up a sense that you’d like to return to therapy, renew your focus, or simply talk through what you want your mental health support to look like this year, you’re welcome to book an appointment. That appointment doesn’t need to be about “doing the work” in a heavy sense. It can be about orienting, reviewing, or deciding what’s next.
If you’re unsure whether therapy with me is the right fit anymore, that’s also something we can talk about. Having an open conversation about fit and needs is a valuable skill that carries well beyond the therapy room.
Support doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It can be thoughtful, flexible, and responsive to where you are now. If you’d like to book an appointment new clients can do so here. Existing or returning clients can book using the online portal here.
