What I'm Vowing to Do in 2026 to Change My Life

My New Year's resolutions are all focused on the same thing.

By

Michele Weldon

 
Lily Qian

My New Year’s resolutions this year are all about being intentionally very low-key. More specifically, being purposefully low-conflict.

I will no longer honk or gesture at a driver dangerously swiping into my lane. If I am head-butted in a work meeting, I will not respond in kind. None of these emails I used to regret immediately after angrily responding in a family feud, I will wait to have calmer discourse. An insensitive action from a friend won’t rile me.

Life is too short for that kind of voluntary mess.

At 67, I have a newly robust resolution to release myself from harsh rounds of back-and-forth in all arenas I can. So I don’t start a tussle or provoke an existing one — like scolding the line-cutter at the pharmacy — I step back and look for alternative paths and solutions, not ways to stir up a storm.  

My recent second encounter with breast cancer (I am totally cancer-free today), shifted me into bearing an extremely low tolerance for self-created discord. This means I do not create, or react to, rifts induced by friends, family and colleagues. The strangers who swear at me to hurry up and turn right already do not get a response. I breathe deeply.

“You get emotional and physical benefits, and can improve your health dramatically when you respond to conflict in a different way,” Jennifer Goldman-Wettzler, author of the  2020 book, Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself from Conflict at Home and in Life,” told me in an interview.

“It is such a waste of time when you’re stuck in conflict,” says Goldman-Wetzler, 51, who advises CEOs and executive teams on conflict reduction.

The first step to changing your reactions, she advises, is to notice how you deal with conflict. “Do you avoid it and shut down, blame others, blame yourself or relentlessly seek to collaborate even if they do not want to collaborate with you?” asks Goldman-Wetzler, who also wrote, Emotions in Long-Term Conflict.

Once you have that answer, she suggests, “Challenge yourself to do something different than you’ve done before, something productive and constructive.”

It means be creative.

This is happening at a point in history when we receive daily avalanches of high-stakes news locally, nationally and globally. The tension we feel some days in crowds of people is palpable. While we cannot directly control many political systems that impact us directly and indirectly, we can control our responses to those systems, by getting involved in issues that matter to us and calmly messaging in all our communication.

When the external world appears to be high-conflict, the decision to lessen conflict in our personal and professional lives becomes a priority. This choice to lower stress in interpersonal interactions is important as we age and realize that we have a limited amount of time to live, to be with loved ones and to be productive.

As time goes on, it is becomes inevitable that we will receive  surprise health diagnoses, and grieve for deaths of friends or partners. We cannot control these changes; we can control our reactions.

According to 2024 research in The Journals of Gerontology, “Longitudinal studies show that overall sense of control is high in younger adulthood, remains stable throughout midlife, and declines in later adulthood.”

Because of this, socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) holds that older women and men value social relationships more. “As a result, older age is often related to higher rates of satisfaction with friends and family, higher levels of positive experiences with family members, and higher levels of perceived social support,” this research shows.

This type of support is helpful in stretches of high stress. A registered nurse, mother of two grown children, and grandmother of one, Mary White, 62, is going through a difficult divorce after almost 35 years of marriage.

Her 90-year-old mother, who had been dealing with ovarian cancer, recently passed. Her 91-year-old father is experiencing age-related memory loss. One of seven siblings, she helps a few nights a week with overnight caretaking for her dad.

Dealing with this barrage of difficulty that is out of her control, she looks to controlling her own reactions and behaviors calmly.

“Minimizing conflict in my life has become a very important goal,” White says. “I’m using a technique of pausing before responding or not responding.” This way she doesn’t send a hurtful message that causes a rupture with family, friends—or her soon-to-be ex.

“Reducing conflict is so beneficial and it makes you feel better,” says White, who has lost 25 pounds since November 2024, when she first separated from her spouse.

Therapy, exercise and medication are helpful, White says, as are breathing techniques and surrounding herself with a positive support network of longtime childhood friends and  college roommates in her inner circle.

A recent international study reinforces this, showing that the impact of quality “interpersonal interactions contribute to older adults’ life satisfaction.”   

Recently I had an extremely upsetting encounter with a young client. She targeted me in a group email to the entire work team, claiming everyone involved in the project felt this way. Her note was ageist and unkind, accusing me –complete with name-calling--of making errors that I was not responsible for making.

My initial reaction—after the gasping disbelief—was to lash out and debunk her email to the group. But I waited and let others respond before speaking with the team manager privately about the note’s inappropriateness and inaccuracy.

It is best to pause and deeply listen, reverting to empathy instead of a knee-jerk reaction to an offensive action. One friend routinely responds to aggressive, terse communication with a simple, “OK, heard.”

Because I’m trying to stay cool, I vow not to counter-attack, and as my late mother would say, “Don’t bark back at a barking dog.” My late father was big on the mantra, “Choose your battles.”    

“We don’t want to fully eliminate conflict because it is not really possible,” says Goldman-Wetzler. “The purpose is rather to learn how to deal with it in a way that feels most comfortable to us.”

I hear that.

Michele Weldon is an author of seven award-winning nonfiction books, journalist, emerita faculty at Northwestern University, senior leader with The OpEd Project, TEDx speaker, and editorial director at Take The Lead. Her most recent book is The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living. She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, USA Today, Time, CNN, Cosmopolitan, Forbes, MSNBC, NBC Think, Chicago Tribune, Slate, and more. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, NBC, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” NPR and many other outlets. The mother of three grown sons, she now spends her free time oil painting in oils.