There’s a particular kind of optimism that shows up in late December.
Somewhere around the 28th, in the quiet stretch between the holidays and the new year, people decide that January is when things get sorted out. New routine. New practice. New version of the day. It feels genuinely possible, because you’ve just had a few slow days and the year is turning over.
Then January arrives, and almost none of it survives past the second week.
I’ve watched this happen for years, including in myself. And what I’ve come to think is that the problem isn’t January. The problem is that December was the wrong place to start planning and the wrong place to start anything.
This week, on the other hand, is about right.
Why December Is the Worst Month to Begin
Think about what actually happens between now and the end of the year.
Travel. Hosting. Family in the house. Other people’s schedules overriding yours. Later nights, different food, disrupted sleep, and a calendar that fills up without your consent. Then on top of all that, the light keeps leaving earlier until the solstice.
It’s the least stable six weeks of the year. And it’s precisely when most people either abandon their practices entirely or wait to start new ones.
Both are understandable. Both leave you arriving in January with nothing.
The Case for Right Now
This week is one of the last genuinely ordinary weeks on the calendar.
Your schedule still looks roughly like your normal schedule. The house is still your house. Nobody’s arriving. The disruption is visible on the horizon but it hasn’t landed yet.
That’s the ideal condition for establishing something, because a new practice needs a few uninterrupted weeks to stop requiring a decision every time. Start now and you get five of them before the real chaos. By mid-December the thing isn’t something you’re trying to do — it’s just something that happens.
Start in January and you’re building from zero, in the dark, with nothing behind you.
Build the Floor, Not the Ideal
Here’s the shift in thinking I’d suggest, and it’s the whole point of this piece.
Don’t design the practice you want. Design the one you’ll still do on December 23rd with family in the guest room and a full day behind you.
That’s your floor. Not your goal — your minimum. The thing that happens regardless.
For most people the honest floor is shorter than they’d like to admit. Nine minutes. Eleven. Something that fits in the gap between the day ending and whatever comes next. That’s fine. A floor you actually hold through a hard month is worth far more than an ideal you abandon in the first week of it.
And here’s the part people miss: the floor is what you rebuild from. If you keep one small thing through December, January isn’t a fresh start — it’s a continuation. You’re not standing at zero. You’re standing on something.
What to Actually Set Up This Week
Pick one practice. One. Not a morning routine and an evening routine and a new approach to sleep. One thing, in one place in your day.
Attach it to something that survives the holidays. This is the key decision. Don’t attach it to your commute, or the quiet house at 4pm, or anything that disappears when the season changes. Attach it to something that happens in December too — after dinner, before bed, when the house finally goes quiet.
Make it shorter than you think it should be. The instinct is to set an ambitious length because you’re motivated right now. Resist it. Set the length you’d do on a bad day, because bad days are what December is made of.
Decide what a missed day means. Now, while things are calm. I’d suggest it means nothing at all. You missed one. You pick it back up tomorrow at the same time, without commentary. The thing that ends practices isn’t the missed day — it’s the story that gets attached to it.
Run it for the next five weeks without changing anything. No adjusting, no optimizing, no upgrading because it’s going well. Just repetition until the decision disappears.
Where Sound and Vibration Fit
The reason I point people toward this as a holiday-season anchor is that it asks so little.
Most practices require something from you at the start — focus, intention, the right frame of mind, a willingness to sit with your own thoughts. During a calm month that’s manageable. During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, with a houseful of people and a day’s worth of noise still running in your head, it’s a real barrier.
A session doesn’t ask for any of that. You lie down and receive it. The vibration gives your body something concrete to settle into, so you’re not negotiating with your own attention first.
That’s what makes it hold up in a chaotic month. Not that it’s better than other things — that it’s available on the days you’d have talked yourself out of anything else.
A 22-minute session is where I’d point most people when there’s room. An 11 or a 9 is genuinely useful when there isn’t. Through December, the shorter ones will probably carry you, and that’s exactly what they’re for.
The Thing About January
Every year, millions of people decide that the first week of January is when they’ll become different.
It almost never works, and the reason isn’t weakness. It’s that January asks you to generate every bit of momentum yourself, from a standstill, in the coldest and darkest week of the year, with no structure behind you.
The alternative is unglamorous. You start now, when nothing is forcing you to, with something small enough that it survives a hard month. And then on January 1st, while everyone else is beginning, you’re already nine weeks in.
That’s not a transformation. It’s just a thing you’ve been doing for a while.
Which, in my experience, is the only version that lasts.
inHarmony products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Individual experiences vary.
