On this first day of 2025, we all make promises to ourselves: drink less, lose weight, play sports, stop smoking, spend more time with our loved ones… which we renew every year without keeping them for granted. most of us. To make real good resolutions, here is the advice of Michel Lejoyeux, professor of Psychiatry at Paris Cité University, who notably published in 2024 The adventure of good humor (Robert Laffont). The first thing to do, he explains on franceinfo Wednesday January 1, “it’s about having a moment in your day where you live in full consciousness. We're going to allow ourselves not to listen to Franceinfo for ten minutes, we're going to turn off our computer…”.
franceinfo: are good resolutions useful?
Michel Lejoyeux: It's totally helpful to make resolutions. They must be specific, simple, measurable, adapted to who we are and above all temporally defined. There are studies that show that a resolution reduces its impact by 50% from the second day. As of tomorrow, we will have lost 50% of our chances of implementing it.
Taking better care of yourself is a resolution that comes up often this year. How do we do it?
The first resolution is to have a moment in your day when you live in full consciousness. In my book, I learn the word “zoom”. We go for ten minutes, for a quarter of an hour, either while reading or helping someone, to be completely where we are. We're going to allow ourselves for ten minutes not to listen to franceInfo, we're going to turn off our computer…” Sometimes we do several things at the same time, we won't be able to save a moment to make an appointment with ourselves and with those close to us, we will resolve to change the times. Either we are in a working time, or we are in an intimate time devoted to others. This gives us the ability to fully live this present moment. , to also listen to their emotions, we will discover ourselves. Montaigne said: “Everyone looks ahead, I look inward”. We're going to look within ourselves a little bit without doing a lot of therapy and we're going to get better overall.
What else can we do?
Be focused on others and, deep down, express gratitude. It's very intimidating to say thank you and express positive emotions, it's much easier to be cynical, to be negative, to say horrible things about politics, about the passage of time. We will look for who deserves gratitude, perhaps every day, and we will be able to express it by telling them.
“A little gratitude exercise every day also helps.”
Michel Lejoyeux, professor of psychiatryat franceinfo
“Tiles” still happen to all of us, some more regularly than others. How do we do it in this case?
The “tiles” are unpleasant, we don’t try to make them positive. I don't have a miracle solution. We accept. In emotion, there is “motion”, so our emotions will vary. We will also accept the idea that a day is made up of positive moments and negative moments, but whatever the difficulties, we must be capable of this little moment of meeting with ourselves. And then let me remain a doctor for a moment: when we have a loss of energy, a loss of desire, a loss of self-esteem and a permanently negative emotion, then we will seek medical advice because it is far beyond a good resolution, it could very well be a medical subject, it could very well be depression.
