Is that sweat or tears on my yoga mat? Ask me again in the new year

3 weeks ago 3

Opinion

September 17, 2025 — 7.00pm

We’re nowhere near the new year, but the resolutions are already beginning.

Did that r-word stress you out? You’re not alone. As we crawl out of the frigid short days at this time of year, the last thing we should be thinking about is the clock ticking over on December 31. But that’s exactly the mindset a certain corner of the internet has settled into.

About a month ago, conversations on TikTok began revolving around something called “the great lock-in”. With a third of the year still to come, people around the world declared, now was the time to set a fresh batch of goals and commit yourself to them anew. A lot can change in four months, if you want it hard enough. If you “lock in” from September 1 and establish good habits, you’ll be unrecognisable by the new year.

On one hand, it felt like business as usual for our optimisation-obsessed culture. You can’t just play a fun word game any more, you have to win Wordle every day for fear of breaking a streak. What’s the point in going for a run if you’re not logging it on Strava or having it count towards some virtual medal in the Apple Fitness app?

Exercising joins reading books, eating well and drinking litres of water a day as core tenets of a system called “75 Hard” – so named because it demands daily perfection, and any lag means the counter starts back at zero. Rest is for the weak, going out for a drink is failing when perfection – which in this context means dry chicken for dinner instead of an occasional martini – is possible. This is hard stuff, it shouts.

Any “challenges” based around exercise tend to naturally lean towards a certain kind of militant tone. It’s like we’re all contestants on The Biggest Loser and the Commando lives in our phone, yelling at us until we can’t tell if the moisture on our yoga mats is sweat or tears.
Fear-based encouragement tends to have the opposite effect on me. But positive motivation and goal-setting? Now that’s another story.

Some have mentioned the grown-up “back to school” energy of the lock-in (especially those in the United States, where schools actually do go back in September). Buy a new planner, start a new habit-tracker, design a schedule that actually aligns to your weeks and months. People with order-obsessed minds appreciate the symmetry of a month starting on a Monday, which made September 2025 the ideal month to kick off a new weekly structure in earnest.

No matter how silly or childish it might sound, both of those appeal to me. I love ticking off a to-do list, cracking the spine on a new journal and setting a goal in my crosshairs. Also appealing is the discrete nature of the time period. Four months? That’s long enough to feel like genuine change can happen, but short enough that there’s a deadline, a ticking clock, encouraging me not to dawdle or waste time.

In the cosy corner of my algorithm, it’s a little less “change the way your entire body looks by getting shredded in the gym” and a little more “design a personal curriculum of things you might like to learn over the next few months”. It’s self-motivated and internal, but with a finish line to work towards.

The goals I’ve set for myself are partly about exercise and saving money – what can I say? They’re classics for a reason – and also about reading. Fifteen books by the time the fireworks go off seems a viable metric.

They’re about donating and selling the objects in my home I don’t wear or use. Listening to records rather than streaming songs on shuffle. Practising French on the app I paid a bit too much money for after my debut trip to Paris. And writing 10,000 words of the novel I’ve claimed to be working on for the past seven years. Perhaps one of my goals should also be to tell the truth more. If only there were an app to track that one …