The Vibes Are Off During the First Week of the Year
The transition to the new year brings a dreadful whiplash from rest to productivity.
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Every new year, as the fireworks and midnight make-out sessions turn into resolutions to journal consistently or bury your cigarettes in the trash, as you stride into the first week of the year full of good intentions, you may notice a sinking sensation: The vibes are just … off. Perhaps you were impatient with colleagues back in the office, or you struggled to text anyone back, or you found yourself elbow-deep in the trash digging out your cigarettes (sadly, they were unsalvageable). The holidays may have left you grumpy and exhausted from late nights drinking and unprocessed family tensions. Yet, when the new year hit, you were fire-hosed with messages from gyms and dentists about making 2024 the best year of your life. Or maybe you had a relaxing, magical holiday, and the new-year push for productivity is dragging you reluctantly out of your cozy cave.
New Year’s is an inconsiderate holiday. It demands renewal where very little exists. Your job isn’t any less boring in 2024 than it was in 2023. After a few days of intense cardio yoga, your body likely feels creaky and yanked. You may yearn for the rest you received during the last week of the year (a week that Helena Fitzgerald aptly dubbed Dead Week). Even if you don’t make resolutions or buy into the hype of the new year, getting back to regular life while the self-improvement frenzy unfolds around you can be pretty jarring. What most of us experience during the first week of the year is not a transcendent evolution into the lives we’ve been longing to lead but a clash between expectations and reality. Call it New Year’s Whiplash.
After the relative calm of the week after Christmas, the beginning of the new year is an adrenaline shot of optimization that hides indistinguishable days in the guise of a fundamental transition. My body doesn’t know that the calendar flipped. Last week, it was watching Friday Night Lights on a Tuesday morning; this week, it’s taking Zoom meetings.
Most of us have experienced the disorientation of returning to work after a blissful vacation, but that feeling is relatively contained, limited to you and your family. The first week of the year, that dread is communal. Dead Week, as Fitzgerald wrote in The Atlantic, is “the closest thing we have in our society to some kind of a communal pause.” Then we face a collective return: to work demands, to school assignments, to little voices in the back of our mind reminding us to work out for an hour or drink a smoothie instead of eating a muffin. New Year’s Whiplash is a predictable consequence of trying to meet competing, overwhelming demands.
For a while, I referred to this feeling as a Regression Hangover. Every year, after a week back home with my mom, sleeping in my childhood bedroom and eating breakfasts reminiscent of winter breaks past, I would return to college or to work, my life sorely lacking the pancakes and afternoon naps that structured my time at home. I boomeranged from adult to baby and back again in a matter of days. I would blame the temperamental mood that followed me into the new year on regressing too hard, too quickly, without leaving myself ample time to transition back into adulthood.
But not everyone has a chance to regress during the holidays. Parents who visit their parents can end up in a position of intensified adulthood, looking after their aging parents and children. For them, naps are scarce; the pancakes aren’t flipping themselves. Many retail employees work through the holidays. Following a measly day or two off, they’re shuffling back to registers and facing down avalanches of returns. And then there’s everyone else: people who live too far from home to return, the queer folks like me watching Carol with chosen family, and your run-of-the-mill misanthropes.
Even if the new year is an artificial fresh start, it can still serve as an opportunity for renewal and change. I’m not against resolutions. This year, I’ve resolved to engage with more art that baffles or surprises me and to spend less money at restaurants. However, I haven’t been baffled once yet in 2024. I’ve only eaten two dinners at home—and one of those was takeout. The changes I expected haven’t materialized. And they don’t for most people: One estimate suggests that 80 percent of resolution-makers ditch theirs by February.
Overcoming the New Year’s Whiplash requires patience and acceptance. When reality clashes with expectations, perhaps we should change our expectations. Accept that you won’t drop old habits over the course of a week or even a month. Resolutions will (probably) not be kept; it’s just going to be cold and dreary until spring. Instead of using the first week of the year to better yourself, notice and embrace how it exposes a fundamental truth of being alive: Even when everything changes, everything stays the same.