January arrives with a cultural script about fresh starts. For people who hold themselves to high standards, the first weeks of the year tend to feel less like an open road and more like a performance review, conducted internally, by the least generous reviewer available.
The Accounting Nobody Asked For
Most high achievers arrive at the new year having already completed a thorough review of the old one. What got done. What did not. Where the distance between the intention stated last January and the reality delivered in December was widest.
That accounting is not even-handed, and there is a reason it tilts the way it does.
Why the Shortfalls Weigh More
Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer and Vohs reviewed the evidence for this asymmetry in Review of General Psychology in 2001, under a title that states the conclusion: bad is stronger than good. They presented it as a general principle holding across everyday events, major life events, close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions and learning processes.
Writing about it again two decades later, Baumeister noted that of the researchers who cited the work, “the majority of them simply confirmed that the usual pattern was there. Bad was stronger than good in their data, too.”
Two things that paper is not. It is a review of a general principle rather than a measurement of anyone’s year-end reflection, and it says nothing specifically about executives. What it offers is a reason to distrust the arithmetic. If a mind weights the bad more heavily as a matter of general design, then a year-end tally arrived at by feel is not a neutral instrument, and the heaviness of a January tells you about the weighting as much as about the year.
At executive level the asymmetry rarely gets named as a bias. It gets named as high standards, or staying hungry, which is how a measurement error acquires a reputation as a virtue.
Whose Standard Is Loudest in January
Hewitt and Flett conceptualised perfectionism in 1991 as multidimensional, separating self-oriented perfectionism from other-oriented perfectionism and from socially prescribed perfectionism, the last being the belief that others demand flawlessness from you. Later research has linked that third form to psychological distress such as depression; the 1991 paper did the work of separating the dimensions.
January is when the third kind gets amplified by the calendar. New targets land from the board. Peers publish their intentions. The year resets for everyone at once, which makes external expectation unusually audible and unusually easy to mistake for your own.
A standard you set is yours to revise. A standard you have absorbed from a room feels fixed, and the first useful question about any January target is whether anyone actually asked for it.
Where the Heaviness Can Lead
Maslach and Jackson identified three dimensions of burnout in 1981: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. Those dimensions are still the common reference point.
Worth keeping the term precise. The World Health Organization includes burn-out in the ICD-11 under code QD85 and states that it is understood as an occupational phenomenon, specifically that it is not conceptualised as a medical condition. A heavy January is not burnout. The third dimension, a reduced sense of personal accomplishment, is the one that a lopsided year-end tally feeds most directly.
The Goal-Setting Response, and What It Can Miss
The standard answer to a heavy January is a plan. Lists, intentions, personal objectives with quarterly checkpoints. There is nothing wrong with any of it, and for most purposes it works.
What follows is a reading rather than a finding. For someone whose sense of being adequate is already funded by achievement, an ambitious plan can quietly restate the premise: I am not sufficient yet, and this target is what will settle it. The target gets met. The settling does not arrive. A larger target follows.
There is no claim here that goals set from a secure footing are more effective, because the evidence for that is not in hand. The honest version is narrower and works better as a test anyway. Ask what happens if you hit the target and nothing changes in how you feel. If the answer is that the target was still worth hitting, it is a goal. If the answer is that you would need a bigger one, the target was never the point, and the plan is doing a different job than the one written at the top of the page.
A Different January Exercise
Given the asymmetry, there is a case for doing the year-end accounting on paper instead of by feel. Written down, a year tends to look different from the version that arrives unbidden at four in the morning, mostly because the written one has to include the entries the feeling skipped.
And if the heaviness is not lifting, or has stopped looking like a question about work, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here is a substitute for one.
What the January Pressure Is Measuring
If January reliably arrives as pressure, the useful question is what it is weighing. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it should. It takes about ten minutes. Begin your profile here.
If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.
References
- Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323
- Hewitt, P. L., & Flett, G. L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: Conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(3), 456–470. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.60.3.456
- Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Occupational Behavior, 2(2), 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030020205
Further Reading
If this resonated, these go deeper. You can also browse the full Research Library for all recommendations.
- The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown. On letting go of what you think you should be and embracing who you are, a quieter but often more transformative read than Daring Greatly.
- The Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson. A reframe of failure as a tool for learning, not a verdict on worth; essential for perfectionists who catastrophize mistakes.
- Emotional Agility by Susan David. On how to stop struggling with your inner world and start using it as information; particularly useful for high performers who’ve learned to override their feelings.
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