The psychotherapist named ways to avoid sabotage when setting goals for the New Year.

The period of New Year's promises and plans for a "new life" is often accompanied by internal sabotage, when a part of the psyche resists even the desired changes due to an innate craving for stability. On January 6, Maria Ignatieva, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and director of customer support for the Yasno service, told Izvestia.

According to her, any changes are perceived as stress, which naturally leads to procrastination, doubts and forgetting about intentions. To avoid this, it is necessary to set realistic and clearly defined goals.

"The first rule is realism: the goal must be achievable in the foreseeable future. For example, instead of an ambitious plan to become CEO within a year of changing profession, it is better to break the path into stages: to settle into a new role, achieve the first results and then apply for a promotion," the specialist advises.

Each stage you reach will keep you motivated. It is extremely important to set specific deadlines, because the abstract "this year" gives the psyche a loophole for endless postponement. It is much more effective to plan for a medical check-up in February or completion of the course by April, turning the intention into a task with a deadline.

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Ignatieva emphasizes that there are no universal goals: when setting them, it is necessary to take into account individual characteristics, strengths and available resources. For example, an attempt to master quantum physics in two weeks by a person with a humanitarian mindset is more likely to lead to frustration than success.

It is also important to separate goals and desires: the goal is formulated specifically (to achieve a certain income, to learn a language up to the B1 level), requires priority attention and is divided into steps, while the desire ("I would like to earn more") it can wait or transform later.

At the beginning of the year, enthusiasm often pushes for simultaneous changes in all areas of life, which leads to a dispersion of energy and a lack of meaningful results. The therapist recommends choosing two or three key goals and focusing on them, and putting the rest aside for later.

"The New Year as a symbolic boundary can really become a starting point for change, but not because of the magic of the date, but because it allows you to stop and rethink the direction of movement. The main thing is not to fight with your own psyche, but to learn how to negotiate with it, taking into account its protective mechanisms and limitations," concluded the psychotherapist.

On December 15, Irina Krashkina, a psychotherapist at the Academician Roitberg Clinic, Candidate of Medical Sciences, in an interview with Izvestia, called the New Year's gift a language through which attention and participation can be expressed. The choice may be based on the recipient's hobbies, practicality, emotional value, or the effect of surprise.

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