Beyond Resolutions: What Are We Optimizing For?
With the new year, many seek control: new planner, new habits, a better self—new year, new me.
Clinicians and health care professionals aren’t immune. Productivity metrics, billable hours, client loads, publication goals, and “work–life balance” tweaks fill our resolution cycle. Artists and creatives do the same: new output targets, new platforms, new ways to “make it work.”
These efforts are understandable. But in a community like Creativity and Madness®—where psychology, inner life, and the arts meet—another question arises: What are we optimizing for? Better metrics and routines, or a more honest and creative way of living and working?
When Optimization Flattens the Inner Life
The resolution mindset tends to treat the self as a project to be worked on or fixed. For those of us steeped in clinical training and evidence-based practice, this can feel familiar and comforting.
But when we treat ourselves as something to manage, distortions result:
Burnout, grief, moral injury, and creative depletion get reduced to negative self-talk: “not disciplined enough” or “not efficient enough.”
Imagination narrows. The focus shifts from “What is meaningful?” to “How can I keep up?”
The inner life becomes background noise, noticed only when it interferes with performance.
For those whose work relies on symbolic thinking, emotional presence, and creativity, this flattening erodes the very capacities needed in therapy, clinic, or studio.
From Resolutions to Relationships
Instead of resolutions, focus on relationships. Rather than “What will I fix about myself this year?” consider:
What is my current relationship to my work? Is it collaborative, extractive, over‑identified, or avoidant?
What is my relationship to my own inner world? Is it ignored, managed, listened to, or mined for content?
What is my relationship to my imagination and art? Are they ignored, sources of nourishment, tools for survival, products to deliver, or a mix of all the above?
Relational questions invite complexity. They recognize symptoms, creative blocks, and fatigue exist within personal history, institutional pressures, cultural trauma, and the psychic load of caregiving and witnessing.
For many, these are familiar tools—narrative, image, countertransference, the unconscious. Using them for New Year reflections turns clinical and creative practice inward.
Three Invitations for a Different Kind of New Year
Instead of more goals, these invitations offer open frameworks for 2026, leaving room for the unknown and imagination.
1. Curate the Ecology Around Your Work
The imagination is shaped by what surrounds it. Many clinicians and health care professionals live inside an ecology of electronic medical records, crises, fragmented systems, and time pressure.
As the year turns, ask yourself:
What do I want more of in the ecosystem of my work? Slowness, art, conversation, nature, study, silence?
What might I limit to preserve some space for myself to feel and think?
Consider:
A regular practice of engaging with the arts that is not related to productivity. Such as enjoying film, poetry, visual art, or live performance.
Protecting pockets of unstructured time in the week where nothing needs to be produced or justified.
Remember: clinical and creative capacities often depend on our environment, which we can intentionally adjust.
2. Let One Living Question Guide the Year
Instead of making a list of resolutions, choose one question to accompany you through the year. For example:
How do I care for others, without disappearing myself?
At this stage, what does “good work” mean to me? What does self-care feel like?
Where is my creativity? And what am I afraid that might cost?
Write the question somewhere you will see it, like on your desk, in a supervision notebook, or at the front of a sketchbook. Let it quietly inform:
How you show up for and listen to others.
Your own reactions to art, culture, and the news.
The projects, collaborations, and boundaries you choose.
Over time, this question can help you organize and focus on meaning rather than sheer output.
3. Choose a Word of Intention for the New Year
Identify a word with a special meaning to guide you intentionally in the new year.
Let this word guide 2026.
Share your word with others to help hold yourself accountable and be a model for others to do the same.
Keep your word as your own special reminder of your dreams.
Some examples are Balance, Grace, Generous, Kind, Playful, Spontaneous, and Brave.
4. Create an Honest Artifact of This Moment
At some point early in 2026, consider making something to capture what it feels like to inhabit your role right now. Consider:
A single page of free‑writing about “a day in your life.”
A drawing, collage, photograph series, or brief piece of music or movement.
A letter to your future self about what you hope you will remember from this moment in your career.
The purpose is not to produce something refined or to share. The point is to:
Witness your current experience without needing it to be inspirational or resolved.
Give form to your feelings and thoughts that might otherwise remain blurry.
This process may happen once or several times a year, as a way to notice how your inner world has shifted in response to the demands and discoveries of the year.
The New Year as Shared, Not Solo, Work
One of the chronic distortions of professional and creative life is the belief that difficulty is a sign of personal failure. “If I were more resilient, more organized, more grateful, I would not feel this tired or be this conflicted.”
Yet the themes that show up for many clinicians and creatives around the new year, like exhaustion, reevaluation, ambivalence, and longing for more honest expression, are rarely just personal challenges. They are often signals of a wider mismatch between human needs, relationships, and our environment.
These themes invite opportunity for reflection, both collective and individual:
What kind of professional culture are we participating in, and what would we like it to become?
How can the study of the psyche, medicine, art, creativity, and relationships help us remain clinically effective while also being genuinely moved, responsive, and personally fulfilled?
Resolutions have their place. But perhaps the more fitting practice for those who want to improve the balance between health care for others and self-care is not to engineer a “new you,” but to make room for a better version of yourself. A version of yourself that is authentic, internally authored, and capable of meeting your professional, personal, and interpersonal needs with clinical rigor, imaginative depth, and authenticity.
by Dr. Amy Vail and Alli Fischenich