It’s the most wonderful time of the year—right before it’s the most restrictive.

Like many of you, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks subsisting entirely on a diet of butter, cookies, butter cookies, and every imaginable configuration of bread and cheese. I’ve put on real pants exactly three times. And last Thursday, I clocked sixteen hours on the couch.

And yet, also like you (I’m guessing), I write these off as last licks before beginning what’s sure to be my healthiest year yet.

January 1st kicks off a series of unoriginal austerity measures: Cutting out gluten and dairy and renewing my vows to vegetables. Cutting out sedentary pleasures and adopting a strict regimen of daily squats and sit-ups. Cutting out distractions and filling my free hours hustling to sell my book. Cutting out going out and spending more nights hibernating in—practicing hydration, sleep, skin care, and all of the trendy wellness virtues.

When I make these new year’s resolutions—ones I typically quit by mid-February, I always picture a version of my future self. She’s unrecognizably fit and fashionable. She’s got a crisp haircut, defined abs and invisible under-eye bags. She’s got fancy footwear and glowing cheekbones. She looks healthy, but is she?

Especially this time of year, when everything feels like an ad for finance planners and weight loss apps, it’s easy to think about health as the sum of our nutrition, fitness, financial security, and hours slept. But after spending five years investigating, I've come to define health as the sum of our connections. It’s the extent to which we know and live by what matters to us.

There’s some hard data as proof. Large-scale reviews associated the strength of our social relationships and our purpose in life with increased longevity and lower risk of premature mortality. Another analysis associated having a hobby with fewer depressive symptoms and higher levels of wellbeing. And the eighty-year-plus Harvard Adult Development Study found close relationships are the strongest predictor of our long-term health and happiness.

We know this from first-hand experience, too. Everybody who made a 2024 highlight reel knows their peak moments were marked not by trim bellies, but belly laughs. Not by money made, but memories made. Not by the glow of watching our own mirror’s reflection, but the glow of watching others’ milestones.

And yet, come January 1, we forget these intuitive truths, even as we so easily practiced them one week earlier. We cast aside shared joy as indulgent, and treat the isolation of restriction as virtuous. We get collective amnesia and realize, too late, that we were the healthiest not when we cut out connection, but when we embraced.

It turns out there’s a way to find the best of both worlds, and it starts with a better alternative to new year’s resolutions.

We get some hints from history, where our ancestors’ New Year’s resolutions looked more like community-vows than rites of self-discipline. 4,000 years ago, the Babylonians celebrated new year’s through Akitu, a 12-day festival designed for planting new crops and renewing promises to the gods. The Romans similarly used January—named after two-faced Janus, the god of doorways—as a time to both reflect on the old year, and promise good conduct in the new year. Some Christians still use New Year’s Eve as a time to gather, sing hymns, and together resolve to do better.

Call me ancient, but I think there’s some profound wisdom here—to ditch aesthetic causes, and focus, instead, on spiritual ones.

To be clear, I don’t mean spiritual in the God-y sense, per se; I mean spiritual as causes that “relat[e] to the human spirit… as opposed to material or physical things”. In other words, if we really want to be healthy, we should treat resolutions as things we do with other people. As something more like social prescriptions.

Why? Well, for starters, you might actually succeed; though surveys suggest only 8 percent of us successfully stick to New Year’s resolutions, social prescriptions for activities we find fun and meaningful are more likely to stick. It also helps that these social prescriptions, like salads and sleep, are objectively healthy. Their most common ingredients—movement, nature, art, and service —have been linked with reduced inflammation and rumination, less of the stress hormone cortisol, and more activity within pathways of mood-boosting neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.

And yet, what probably helps most of all is the way they come with accountability. Unlike New Year’s resolutions, social prescriptions don’t require a thick wallet or iron self-discipline to help us stay true to our word; they simply require the encouragement and shared mission of other people. In other words, e don’t have to buy another gadget to help us exercise or manage our stress; we can ask our doctors to prescribe us (or prescribe ourselves) a spot on a local sports team or art class that expects us there each Tuesday.

It may sound corny, but in a year where $40,000 Equinox memberships were named a defining health trend, it’s worth reminding what Sam Cooke says: “the best things in life are free.” True health and wellness is shared.

And so, maybe, instead of thinking about New Year’s resolutions as a list of bad things we cut out, we should think about them as an invitation to bring more good things in. A chance to renew our vows to what matters to us, together.

But don’t take it from me: take it from your future self. Come January 1 2026, when you look in the mirror, you’ll find yourself rested and fit and glowing not because you stuck to a list of restrictions, but because you were having too much fun to remember them. You’ll be healthy not because you ditched the most wonderful times, but because you built your days around prolonging them.

Want to give someone (or yourself!) The Connection Cure—the world’s first book about social prescribing?

Enter the Goodreads book giveaway! And if you haven’t done so yet, please remember to leave a Goodreads/ Amazon review!

Thanks for reading The Connection Cure! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.