Skip the resolution. Keep a practice.

By now a lot of January resolutions are already wobbling. Run every day. No drink. Meditate for an hour. Get up at five.

I don’t think the people making them are weak. I think the plans are too big. They depend on willpower, and willpower is the first thing to go when you’re tired, stressed or a bit low. Which, in January, is most of us.

Make it smaller than you think

What lasts, in my experience, is a practice small enough that you can do it on your worst day. Not your best day. Your worst one, when you’ve slept badly and the kids are ill and you’re already late.

For most people that means two or three minutes. It sounds like nothing. That’s the point. You’re not trying to change your life on a Tuesday morning. You’re just doing the small thing again.

A useful question before you pick one: what’s the smallest version of this I’d still do if everything went wrong today? Start there, not with the version you’d do on holiday.

Why the breath

You can do this with anything, but I like starting with breathing. It needs no kit, no app and no time slot. You’re doing it anyway. And when you’re wound up, the first thing that changes is usually your breathing. It goes short, high and fast, and you stop breathing out properly. A few slow breaths out usually brings me down a notch.

Try this for the rest of January

Pick one moment you already have every day. Before you open your laptop, when the kettle goes on, when you sit in the car before you drive off.

In that moment, take five slow breaths, each out-breath a bit longer than the last. That’s it. Light-headed? Go back to your normal breath.

Put a tick on a calendar when you’ve done it. If you miss a day, don’t start again from zero. Just do it the next day. A month with a few gaps in it is still a month of practice.

Some days you’ll feel your shoulders drop. Some days you’ll feel nothing and wonder why you bother. It’s worth carrying on anyway. What matters is that it becomes something you do, not something you think about doing.

After that

Once it’s a habit, you can make it longer if you want to. Or you can keep it at five breaths for years. I’d rather you did something small for a long time than something big for a fortnight.

If you want help building a practice that fits your actual life, that’s a big part of what I do in one-to-one breathwork coaching. And if your resolution was really about focus at work, have a look at flow state coaching, which uses the same small, repeated practices.