The thoughts start at the tail-end of November. I have achieved nothing this year. I need to sort my life out, urgently. I haven’t fulfilled any of the lofty resolutions I made in January and thus this entire year has been a waste.

It doesn’t matter how great a year it’s been (and 2025 was a really good one for me, personally! I got married! My first ever book was published!) – there’s something about the impending end of it that sends me into what I refer to as the ‘end-of-year spiral’, a whirling sense that I’ve accomplished nothing, I’m a failure and I should be ashamed of how lazy I’ve been all year. There’s other, non-productivity stuff mixed in there too; a sudden awareness of the passing of time and the nausea that inspires, the inevitable stress of Christmas, the FOMO of the festive season… it all conspires to make a very powerful panic and dread concoction.

I kind of assumed this was just a ‘me’ thing, but when I raised these thoughts in chats with friends and colleagues, I was surprised to find that the end-of-the-year spiral is a feeling familiar to many. “As we come towards the end of a year we often feel a sense of time moving on,” explains Life Coach Directory member Rebecca Norton. “This can prompt us to start reflecting about the last 12 months, and we may feel like, although time has moved on, we haven’t as much as we would like. Perhaps we feel like we are in the same position as last year and the good intentions we set in January went out of the window. As humans we have a tendency towards a negative bias so we may feel that we haven’t achieved as much as we would have liked, and the challenges and difficulties we experienced during the year tend to stand out. This can sometimes feel a little depressing.”

Simply knowing that other people feel the same has been helpful for me, but I wanted to get some more actionable tips to help tackle the end-of-year spiral. So, I asked a bunch of experts to share their best advice. Here are the steps they recommended.

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