Stephen McGinty: New year, same old habits

SCOTS have always been ahead of their time. Or at least in comparison to our southern neighbours and on the question of when to mark the New Year.

For it is a fact of which I was previously unaware that until the year 1600, the New Year began not on the 1 January but on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation when Mary, after a visit from the Angel Gabriel, conceived the child that would become Jesus. So, for example, the 24 March, 1589, would be followed by 25 March, 1590. It was Pope Gregory XIII who swept away the old Julian calendar in 1582, replacing it with the modern Gregorian calendar in which 1 January would be the first day of the New Year as Julius Caesar favoured back in 46BC.

The Roman emperor’s idea was that, since January derived its name from the God Janus, who had two faces and so was able to look both back into the past and forwards into the future, it was the perfect month to begin a new year. James I decided that Scotland would follow the new calendar in 1600, but England and Wales were a little tardier and it was not until September 1752 when an Act of Parliament, “An Act for Regulating the Commencement of the Year; and for Correcting the Calendar now in Use” officially signalled the switch to the Gregorian calendar. Yet, it does seem to be that parliament was way behind the public, with everyone already considering 1 January the natural pistol shot for starting the New Year.

However, the key question is would it be easier to stick to our New Year resolutions if we started them in the lighter nights of late March when spring, with all its promise and possibility, was just around the corner, instead of what we currently strive to do, which is attempt to kindle a new flame of hope and change amid icy downpours, sleat, snow and violent gales? Well the dark nights certainly didn’t do Samuel Pepys any good, a man who also stands as clear evidence that whatever the English parliament may have thought about the official date of the new year, the average Englishman had his own ideas. For on 31 December, 1661, he wrote: “I have newly taken a solemn oath about abstaining from plays and wine, which I am resolved to keep according to the letter of the oath, which I keepe by me.” Like all resolutions it didn’t last as he was soon jotting down in his diary his attendance at the opening night of Romeo and Juliet then, afterwards, Measure for Measure.

Historians believe that we have the Babylonians to thank for the annual chore of reflecting on our character and vowing to do to better. In ancient Babylon, each year, the King had his cheeks slapped in an act of contrition for past failings. A cuneiform tablet reads: “They shall speak the recitations” which is believed to be a great-great-great ancestor of a our current resolutions. Now the Babylonians also celebrated the New Year in spring and so the most popular resolution was to pay off debts and return any borrowed farming equipment.

Yet cynicism about the ability to keep a New Year’s resolution has walked step by step with those who advocate its benefits. In the late 18th century, Philip Stanhope, the earl of Chesterfield said to his son: “The New Year is the season in which custom seems more particularly to authorise civil and harmless lies. People reciprocally profess wishes which they seldom form and concern which they seldom feel.” While William Hazlitt, the Victorian essayist, explained: “The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savours less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation.”

There were those, however, who believed in the moral benefits of annual scrutiny of one’s conscience. In 1863, Robert Chambers, the Scottish publisher, argued that “New Year’s Day is surely the most appropriate time” for the “recommendation of resolutions of improvement for the year to come”. He also quoted from Mirror of the Months, a contemporary publication: “Every first of January… is an imaginary milestone on the turnpike track of human life: at once a resting place for thought and meditation, and a starting point for fresh exertion. The man who does not at least propose to himself to be better this year than he was last, must be either very good, or very bad.”

The New Year’s resolution, or, to be more accurate, resolutions – because when we knuckle down to it who wants to settle on just one – is not a successful method of self-help. Research by Marti Hope Gonzales, an associate professor of psychology at Minnesota University, found that by mid-February, 80 per cent of people had either broken their resolutions or were unable to even remember them. These findings were mirrored by Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, who studied 700 people and their attempts to achieve their New Year’s resolution and found a failure rate of 78 per cent.

Yet what he also discovered was that of the 20 per cent who did actually achieve their goal, there were certain specific components to their success. First they broke the goal down into smaller chunks and told friends of their plan in order to benefit from peer support. They also rewarded themselves after each milestone, concentrated on how their resolution was benefitting them and, also, kept a diary detailing their progress. Research supports the idea that if we do wish to embark on a New Year’s resolution we should restrict it to a single goal and not expect too much.

I understand the desire to make a New Year’s resolution. It makes sense. A fresh year, a fresh start. There is something about 1 January that gives us a sense of anticipation and possibility and, for most of us, a feeling of hope. We’ve trekked through 12 months of dark slush, but, at the moment the new year lies ahead of us like virgin snow, full of possibility and the opportunity to head off, with deliberate steps, in a bold new direction.

But the very reason that a New Year’s resolution feels good now is the same reason why it is so difficult for us to succeed then: procrastination. If there is one element, one rusty cog in the human psyche, that stalls the majority of plans and hopes, it is that dark human condition whereby we don’t decide not to do something, (which would at least allow us to turn our attention on to a different matter), but that we will do it, only we’ll do it tomorrow. Or, in this case, on Tuesday morning.

I can’t think of a single change to our character, or behaviour, that is, like the long jump, requiring of a lengthy run up. If there is something about ourselves that we dislike or believe can be bettered, we should have it within our power to do so immediately, or at least begin to try to change immediately.

I have no doubt how hard any kind of personal change can be. Routines and patterns of behaviour are like tracks in our brains into which we easily slide and getting out of those worn grooves can be exceedingly difficult, but we don’t need a specific date to help us begin.

In fact, we need a date to allow us to savour the false satisfaction of “deciding” that we are going to do something without the troublesome burden of actually doing anything. There are psychologists who believe that the reason people don’t change is that, deep in their unconscious mind, they don’t actually want to change, that the status quo, however it is, the ordinary today as it were, is preferable to the fear they have about a better tomorrow. I don’t know if I agree, but what I do know is that this year I think I’ll pass on any official New Year’s resolutions. Or, at least, continue to refine them until 25 March. Then start the next day.