For a Happier New Year, Focus on Your Loved Ones

Experts share how shifting from self-focused goals to thinking about others can have a positive impact on the year ahead.

My New Year’s resolutions have always had one thing in common: They’ve been all about me. Some years I’ve vowed to pick up my high school French again; some years I’ve sworn off impulse shopping; and some years (OK, every year) I’ve promised myself I’d go to bed earlier. The goal, though, has always been the same: to become a better, happier version of myself.

But while there’s nothing wrong with self-improvement, experts say that focusing on our relationships with the people around us may go a long way to making us happier.

“Our society has treated happiness as a highly individualistic pursuit — the idea being that it’s something that you make for yourself, that you get for yourself, and you do it all alone,” said Stephanie Harrison, founder of The New Happy, an online platform that uses art and science to change how we think about happiness, and author of “New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That’s Got It Wrong.”

We tend to set our sights on self-focused goals, Ms. Harrison said, “almost plucking them out of thin air, thinking, ‘OK, this will be the thing that makes me happy.’” Instead, she suggested, pivot to “think about happiness as something we create together and for each other.”

There is ample research — including one of the longest-running studies on human happiness — to show that our interpersonal relationships are crucial to our well-being, protecting against depression, bolstering our physical health and making our lives more meaningful. As you think about your goals for 2025, here are some ways to center your relationships with your friends, family and co-workers.

Emma Seppälä, a psychologist and research scientist with academic postings at Yale and Stanford, can summarize decades of happiness research in one sentence: “The happiest people, who also happen to live the longest and healthiest lives, are the people who live a life characterized by compassion, balanced with self-compassion.”