A ‘Do Less’ New Year’s Resolution

I don’t trust New Year’s resolutions. They’re usually just old self-criticisms dressed up in a clean January outfit.

Every year, the internet is full of people encouraging others to swear allegiance to the same tired gods: discipline, optimization, consistency, hustle. They promise that waking up earlier, working harder, being better will lead us to the success we crave. As if the problem with modern life is that we’re not pushing hard enough.

Here’s a thought that makes productivity culture deeply uncomfortable: What if the thing that’s breaking us isn’t laziness—but effort? What if the most intelligent, subversive, life-saving new year’s resolution you could make this year is to do less?

Not color-coded calendars. Not massive to-do lists that never seem to get smaller. Not the pressure to produce, create and generate more. I mean actually doing less.

The Cult of More

I’ll begin with a lesson that I learned five years ago. In an effort to grow our revenue, we hired a business consultant who set up a system to help our small team set goals, track them and adjust them the next year based on what we learned. The purpose was to keep our employees accountable, to encourage them figure out how to generate more growth for the company. After a year, and our once-supportive, creative and positive work culture turned tired, bitter and resentful.

Up until then, my brother and I (we own DoYogaWithMe.com together) made choices that honored our personal values, such as putting our employees’ well being before company growth. This is why we have never taken on outside investors. I even remember believing that rest had to be earned, optimized, and measured, in order to succeed, that pauses in work need to be “strategic.” Half way through the year, when some of our employees starting showing the effects of stress, such as anxiety and poor sleep, I didn’t know what to do (I’m sure you see the irony, since we are an online yoga company). We lost a good employee because of this. We realized that it was affecting our website and content, since it was geared more toward conversions, and our community started to notice and tell us about it. Our revenue started to steadily decline.

I realize now what a big mistake this was. We were buying into a harmful belief system that places productivity above all.

Doing Is Not the Same Thing as Living

During that period, I had stopped living my life, and instead, I managed it. Life became a series of tasks to complete, problems to solve, boxes to check. Even personal growth turned into a performance. Meditation became another thing to do on my list.

And underneath it all is a quiet, corrosive belief: If I stop, everything will fall apart. That belief keeps people grinding long past the point of sanity. Most importantly, it isn’t true.

The Nervous System Doesn’t Care About Your Goals

Your nervous system doesn’t care about your resolutions. It doesn’t care about your five-year plan, your inbox zero fantasy, or your productivity app. It cares about safety. And from a biological perspective, most modern lives look like a low-grade emergency that never ends. Always on. Always reachable. Always behind.

That state—constant low-level urgency—keeps the body stuck in survival mode. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that looks functional from the outside and feels awful on the inside. When this goes on long enough, anxiety stops being an emotion and becomes a baseline. Not because you’re broken. Because your system never gets permission to stand down. If you would like to learn more, check out my article The Science Behind How Anxiety Becomes Chronic.

Doing less is not a mindset shift. It’s a physiological intervention.

Why “Do Less” Feels Threatening

Here’s where it gets interesting. When people first try to slow down, they often feel worse before they feel better. Restlessness sets in. You feel irritated, guilty, a strange sense of danger. This is not a sign that you’re doing something wrong. That’s withdrawal. When a nervous system has been running on adrenaline for years, stillness feels unfamiliar, sometimes even unsafe. Movement becomes a coping strategy. Busyness becomes anesthesia.

So when you remove constant doing, the body says, Wait—what’s happening? This is why telling burned-out people to “just relax” is useless. They don’t need instructions. They need re-education at the level of the nervous system.

Doing less isn’t passive. It’s a very active retraining.

The Lie That Keeps Us Trapped: “I’ll Rest Later”

I often cringe when I hear people saying I’ll rest when work calms down, or when the kids are older, when I’ve taken care of this to-do list, or even worse, when I’m dead. That may be what it ends up being if you don’t do it now. Later is a fantasy.

Later is the carrot productivity culture dangles so you’ll keep running. The uncomfortable truth is that later rarely comes. Life doesn’t slow down on its own. You slow it down—or it slows you down through illness, anxiety, or collapse.

Doing less now is preventative medicine.

Doing Less Is Not Quitting (It’s Choosing)

Let’s be clear. Doing less does not mean:

• Giving up your responsibilities
• Abandoning ambition
• Becoming passive or disengaged
• Checking out of your life

It means you stop confusing pressure with importance. It means you ask different questions:

• What actually matters?
• What am I doing out of fear rather than necessity?
• Where am I pushing simply because stopping feels uncomfortable?

Doing less is not about shrinking your life. It’s about removing the noise so your life can be felt again.

What Happens When People Actually Do Less

I’ve watched this experiment play out hundreds of times.

People don’t become lazy, they become clearer. They don’t lose momentum, they stop wasting it. They don’t disengage, they show up with more presence and less resentment. And something else happens—something no productivity system can give you: The body begins to trust again. Sleep deepens, breathing slows, emotions move instead of getting stuck and anxiety loosens its grip—not because it was fought, but because the conditions that fed it are gone.

The Real Resistance is Existential

Most objections to doing less sound practical: “I don’t have time.” “My life doesn’t allow that.” “That’s not realistic.”

But underneath those is a deeper fear: Who am I if I stop striving?

For many people, doing is how they prove their worth. How they avoid difficult feelings. How they maintain a sense of control. Doing less threatens identity. That’s why it’s powerful.

A Do Less New Year’s Resolution

So here’s a different kind of resolution. Not a list. Not a system. Not a challenge. A stance.

This year, I will:

• Stop pushing when pushing isn’t needed
• Stop filling every gap with noise
• Stop treating rest as a weakness
• Stop confusing urgency with meaning

I will let some things remain undone. I will disappoint some expectations. I will choose depth over volume. And I will trust that my nervous system knows something my calendar does not.

How to Start Without Turning It Into Another Task

If you try to “do less” aggressively, you’ll just turn it into another performance. So don’t optimize it.

Try this instead:

• Take 10 minutes at the beginning of each day to work out a schedule that allows you to take significant, regular breaks
• Determine how tasks can be easy rather than hard – maybe it doesn’t need to be perfect?
• End your day before exhaustion, not after
• Notice the impulse to fill silence—and don’t
• Leave your yoga mat set up during the day; when you have a break, go to our Yoga Classes page; under ‘Class Length’ choose your available time; press play!
• Or sit and listen to one of our Guided Meditations.

That’s it. Just a quiet rebellion against unnecessary effort.

Be Radical in 2026

The future doesn’t belong to the most productive. It belongs to the most regulated. The people who can pause, who can feel, who can think clearly because their nervous systems aren’t on fire. Doing less isn’t trendy. It’s sane. And it might be the most radical act of self-respect you make this year.

So go ahead. Break up with hustle. Disappoint the algorithm. Let your life breathe.

Do less.