Ask Dr. Andrea is a series from The Lily with Dr. Andrea Bonior, a licensed clinical psychologist and advice columnist. She will be answering questions about relationships, mental health, work-life balance, family dynamics and more. If you have a question for Bonior, please send us an email.
Dear Dr. Andrea,
Every year, I talk about making changes. Not New Year’s resolutions, really, but new goals and directions. It’s a good time to take stock, I think, from one year to the next. I’ve done this for a long time, and I always feel pretty motivated. Inspiration and energy have never been that lacking for me, but clearly the follow-through is a problem. Because I must admit looking back, I don’t seem to have changed much and I wonder if I’m fooling myself.
I’m 32 and still sort of stuck in a job that doesn’t really suit me and that I don’t necessarily want to be my career. I still don’t really make time for dating, even though I do want to find someone eventually. And I still haven’t created the kind of home for myself I really want, or made long-term financial plans and goals, or done any of the things that I figured would solidify my adulthood. I get better about certain small things, I guess, as I do think I’m more mature and have healthier behaviors day-to-day. But the bigger stuff matters just as much, if not more. Does anyone really make true changes in direction? If so, how do they do it? Or is this just my life?
— Stuck in place, I guess
You’re certainly not alone. And I hope you’ll give yourself some grace when thinking about this. You entered your 30s during a pretty dark and dysfunctional time in the world, and if you failed to, say, bulk up your retirement savings or go out and meet the love of your life during it, there is a list of about a dozen socially distanced and economically uncertain justifiable reasons for that.
But let’s stop with the false distinction between the big stuff and the small stuff. You actually have tackled some pretty big stuff really well — improving your health, growing more mature. That these things involved simple day-to-day behaviors shouldn’t diminish them. In fact, small daily steps are what the big stuff is made of; they are one and the same. No matter how lofty or profound a big goal, it can usually be broken down further into specific daily actions. And in fact, doing that is typically the only realistic way that the big stuff gets done, even when that stuff seems more ingrained or personality-related. There is no being a kind person without small, seemingly minor interactions full of warmth and generosity. There is no being a hard worker without random 20-minute periods of choosing to set aside social media scrolling and get something else done instead. And so on. As Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”
So, what does “being an adult” look like? How can you break it down into daily actions? For the areas you mentioned — setting up your house, building financial security, searching for a partner, finding a more fulfilling career path — there are plenty of options. Maybe it’s making a savings account that a few dollars a day automatically go into, or spending an hour a weekend committing to meet someone new — online or in person. Maybe it’s devoting 10 extra minutes a day to decluttering or decorating, or holding yourself accountable to 20 minutes a day to do research on careers, schooling and job openings.
Think about the changes you have made — how did you make them? What worked, and what didn’t? Behavior change is most likely to stick when the actions are as specific and realistic as possible (“Put $25 a week into a new savings account,” rather than “Be better with money” or “Don’t buy anything unless I really really need it.”) And, crucially, the goals should be about the effort itself — the daily actions — rather than the outcome.
Finally, you also might want to examine whether your goals are truly in line with your values. A lot of time when we get stalled, even when we think we’re doing everything we should be doing to set ourselves up to meet our goals, the problem is that deep down, the goal turns out to not really mean that much to us, or it’s something we think we “should” be doing but ultimately don’t really care about. Or maybe on some hidden level, meeting the goal scares us. Certainly, we can all agree there’s something fundamentally anxiety-provoking about being an adult in today’s world, so a little hesitance to race toward that identity makes sense. Facing and managing what you may be afraid of can help remove barriers you didn’t even know were there.
