It’s mid-February, and if you’re like most people, those ambitious New Year’s resolutions have quietly faded away. The gym membership has seen little to no action. The guitar sits in the corner, abandoned. The bookmark remains lifeless at chapter two of your extensive reading list.

This isn’t a failure of willpower. I’ve come to realise we’ve been getting our timing wrong all along. The real opportunity for change isn’t on 1st January – it’s right now, at the end of February, as Lent begins.

Lent, the ancient Christian practice of giving something up for 40 days is a better framework for making changes that stick. And you don’t need to be religious to benefit from its genius.

The fatal flaw of New Year’s resolutions

Most New Year’s resolutions focus entirely on addition. We want to add healthy eating, add a new skill, add quality time with family. It’s a lovely shopping list of aspirations.

But what we consistently forget is this: you can’t add a new life without subtracting from your current one.

Planning to learn guitar or finally get fluent in French? The time has to come from somewhere. You don’t have spare hours lying about. You’ll have to steal them from Instagram scrolling or true crime documentaries or whatever currently fills your evenings.

Want to exercise regularly? You’re going to have to sacrifice the snooze button, or your evening Netflix ritual, or those extra pints at the pub on Friday night and the Saturday lie-in that comes with it.

This is why most resolutions fail. We focus on what we’re gaining without honestly confronting what we need to lose. We try to squeeze new habits into lives that are already full to bursting. Something’s got to give, but we don’t want to think about what.

What Lent actually gets right

Lent is the 40-day period before Easter in the Christian calendar, rooted in the idea of sacrifice and preparation – a commemoration of Jesus spending 40 days in the wilderness.

What’s brilliant about Lent is that it’s built around the very thing we avoid with New Year’s resolutions: giving something up to make space for something new to emerge.

The whole point is subtraction. You give up chocolate, alcohol, social media, complaining—whatever feels meaningful to you. And in that gap, in that newly created space, something else can grow.

It’s not about deprivation for the sake of it. It’s about acknowledging a fundamental truth: if you want to change, you need to create the room for that change.

The timing is actually perfect

There’s another reason Lent works better than New Year: late February is simply better timing.

By the end of February, you’ve gotten into the swing of the new year. The chaos of January – the return to work, the post-holiday comedown, the weather that makes you want to hibernate – has settled. You’re back in your rhythm. You’ve got more headspace.

January is rubbish for starting anything. You’re recovering from Christmas excess, the days are dark and freezing, everyone’s broke. It’s the worst possible moment to overhaul your life.

Late February? You’re ready. The days are getting longer. Spring is on the horizon.

And there’s a bonus. When you give something up for Lent, you’re not doing it alone. You’re joining a global tradition, a shared rhythm of sacrifice and renewal. This energy carries you forward in a way that a New Year’s resolution never quite manages.

The magic of 40 days

Forty days is perfect for habit formation.

Research on habits suggests you need somewhere between 21 to 66 days to form a new behaviour, with the average being around two months. Forty days sits right in that sweet spot – long enough to rewire your brain, short enough not to feel impossible.

This is the clever bit: the defined endpoint is a psychological hack.

When you say “I’m giving up wine for Lent,” you’re not saying “I’m never drinking wine again forever.” You’re saying “I’m not drinking wine for 40 days.”

That’s manageable. Your brain doesn’t freak out because it knows this is temporary. “It’s just for Lent” removes the pressure of forever.

By accepting it’s temporary, you often make it permanent.

Because what happens at the end of those 40 days is fascinating. The thing you gave up doesn’t have the same pull anymore. The new habit you created in its place feels normal now. Going back to the old way actually feels like the sacrifice.

You’ve created new neural pathways. You’ve built new routines. What felt like deprivation at the start now feels like preference.

The subtraction principle in action

Let me give you some concrete examples of this subtraction-addition pairing:

Learning guitar

• Give up: Passive Netflix binges, mindless Instagram scrolling, the myth that you don’t have time
• Gain: Thirty minutes of daily practice, the satisfaction of competence, creative fulfilment, the ability to play songs that mean something to you

Reading books

• Give up: Phone in the bedroom, TV as background noise, fragmenting your attention across seventeen apps
• Gain: A relaxing evening reading ritual, deeper thinking, mental wealth

More time with family

• Give up: Working late out of habit, weekend work emails, commitments that drain you
• Gain: Proper family dinners, weekend adventures, happier children

See the pattern?

How to use Lent as your reset

You could start a 40-day reset whenever you like. But there’s something particularly powerful about doing it now, during Lent.

You’re moving towards spring, towards Easter, towards renewal and rebirth. The natural world is waking up around you. The days are lengthening. There’s a momentum to it that January simply doesn’t have.

Here’s how to make it work:

1. Identify what you actually want to add to your life.
Be specific. Not “be healthier” but “swim three times a week” or “cook dinner from scratch four nights a week.”

2. Honestly assess what needs to be subtracted to make space for it.
What are you currently doing with the time, energy, and mental space that this new thing will require? That’s what you’re giving up.

3. Commit for exactly 40 days – these 40 days, through Lent.
Put it in your calendar. Mark Easter as your endpoint. Tell someone about it. Make it real.

4. Make the subtraction as concrete as the addition.
Don’t just say “I’ll try to spend less time on my phone.” Delete Instagram for 40 days. Turn off notifications. Put the phone in another room at night.

There’s real power in naming it properly. “I’m giving up X for Lent” is so much stronger than “I’m trying to cut down on X.” One is a commitment. The other is a wish.

What I’ve learnt from my own experiments

When I tried to “get healthier” in January, it lasted about two weeks. Too vague, too cold, too overwhelming.

When I gave up alcohol for Lent a few years ago, something unexpected happened. The first week was annoying. The second week was easier, and so on. By the end of 40 days, my relationship with drinking had shifted. I went back to it, but differently – more intentionally, less habitually.

Now I have started my new Lent sacrifice: scrolling before bed. Instead I’m reaching for my book (The Handmaid’s Tale in Spanish – which will probably take me 40 days to read!).

I remind myself that forty days is long enough to rewire my brain, and the temporary framing stops me from sabotaging myself with “I can’t do this forever” panic.

What will you give up?

So here we are, at the end of February. The failed resolutions of January are behind us. Spring is coming. You’ve got your headspace back. And you’ve got the chance to be part of something bigger than yourself.

Real change doesn’t come from adding more and more to already-full lives. It comes from creating space first and seeing what grows there. Lent gets this right.

What would happen if you gave something up for 40 days? What would you choose? What would you make space for?

You can’t add a new life without subtracting from your current one.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk