I’d absent-mindedly smoked a cigarette and picked at some leftover cake before realising that it was January 1 and I’d broken two of my resolutions - shun the weed! Shun the carbs! - before I’d even got dressed.

The new-year internal monologue immediately started up: “You are absolutely useless. You have no self-control. You can’t even last two minutes . . .” All this drama and it wasn’t even 9am.

Self-loathing doesn’t strike me as an especially good, or indeed sane, way to kick off a new year. I want hope and optimism, not gloom-induced borderline catatonia. This is why I never go to New Year’s Eve parties, where demented jollity is compulsory. Too often the only way of achieving it - are we having fun yet? - is by doing that joyless, desperate, banging-into-the-furniture, alkie-style drinking, the kind that’s just about bearable in young people who don’t know any better but is cringiness personified when engaged in by wrinklies. Then you wake up with the worst hangover of your life, retching and gagging your way into the brand new year, feeling ashamed and a bit grubby.

So this year I went to the seaside, made a crustacean feast and hung out with the children. It was lovely. How doubly galling, then, to wake up to death by guilt. No wonder January is said to be the most depressing month of the year. The traditional explanation is that January is a demoralising comedown after the excitement of December, but I don’t know anyone who actually believes this. January means peace and a return to normality after a frenetic month of excess and expense: what’s not to like?

People aren’t depressed because their children have stopped asking for Xbox 360s and games at £45 a pop, or because it’s especially cold, or especially grey, or especially bleak. They’re not depressed because they’re poorer than they were: these days, that concern is a daily occurrence. They’re depressed because everyone feels like an utter failure of a human being: too fat, too lazy, too unfit, too addicted to tobacco, too fond of their glass of wine once the children are in bed.

Mind, the mental-health charity, has urged people to do themselves a favour and not kick off 2009 full of impossible aims on the self-improvement front. It said resolutions that focus on physical imperfections, such as fatness, create a negative self-image that can lead to feelings of hopelessness, low self-esteem and mild depression. When the resolutions fail to come to pass, as resolutions are wont to do, they can trigger feelings of failure and inadequacy.

Paul Farmer, Mind’s chief executive, said: “New year’s resolutions can sometimes focus on our problems or insecurities, such as being overweight, feeling unhappy in our jobs or feeling guilty about not devoting enough time to friends and family. We chastise ourselves for our perceived shortcomings and set unrealistic goals to change our behaviour. It’s not surprising that when we fail to keep resolutions, we end up feeling worse than when we started.”

To be fair, I’d say fatness itself leads to low self-esteem and to feeling wretched and that going on a sensible diet can work miracles both physically and emotionally. Equally, there’s nothing wrong with giving your liver a break for a month or with binning the evil cigs. There is nothing wrong with resolving to spend less time at the office and more time at home. The goals aren’t objectionable. What makes them impossible to achieve is the crazy, headless-chicken-style all-or-nothing mentality that we apply to them.

Take dieting. Studies show that diets started on January 1 are most likely to fail. Do people bother doing a bit of research to find out which kind of diet best suits their lifestyle or to stock their fridge with appropriate food? Nope: one day it’s a whole tub of Heroes and four mince pies for “snacks”; the next, it’s sitting there miserably, gnawing on a lettuce leaf, dizzy with hunger and crazed with self-pity. It’s not jaw-droppingly astonishing that the new regime, no matter how well intentioned, is doomed to failure.

Equally, if you’re a heavy drinker, limiting yourself to a couple of glasses of wine here and there might be an easier - and therefore longer-lasting - ambition than not letting a drop of alcohol pass your lips for a month. If you want to get fit, you might think twice about joining an expensive and intimidating gym - if you feel like a blimp, you can do without spending an hour surrounded by ultra-fit, Lycra-clad wraiths - and try walking more.

We all want miracles, but the boring truth is that the best way of realising an ambition is to take little baby steps. Some extremely fortunate beings - the social smokers, who can take it or leave it, the whip-thin women who can binge eat for a week and then subsist on yoghurt for the next fortnight - have no problem living out their resolutions. The rest of us struggle, which is why the resolutions became necessary in the first place.

I think it’s all to do with degrees of guilt. What makes you beat yourself up more: weighing half a stone more than you’d like, or failing at your sixth consecutive diet? Having slightly lardy thighs, or having wasted £400 on the membership of a gym that you’ll use twice (by going for a massage or maybe a wholesome juice in the nice cafe)?

What’s funny - well, tragicomic - about living in a society that worships perfection is that, if you look around, the imperfect people seem to be the ones having all the fun. The “perfect” ones are unbelievably stressed, so busy maintaining their figures, wardrobes, salaries, immaculate homes, hothoused children and so on that they don’t appear to have much time for what you’d call living or even the occasional laugh. We all aspire to be more like them and there is obviously nothing wrong with wanting to iron out our little flaws. But resolutions are about extremes, and extremes seldom work.

In my experience, nothing happens unless you’re good and ready. You may be ready on February 9 or June 4. You’re unlikely to be ready because it’s New Year’s Day. Have that last mince pie and relax.

+ Sitting as I am surrounded by a sea of pink plastic - my daughter is wearing a pink tiara as I type - I sympathise with Sue Palmer, who has written a book called Toxic Childhood. She claims that a “pink plague” of girls-only toys has put undue pressure on little girls to conform to antiquated traditional roles, specifically that of “princesses”.

Just as reading romantic novels and only ever going to watch slushy comedies at the cinema has led to generations of women finding themselves obscurely dissatisfied with their love lives - wot, no Darcy? - so a childhood that is pink and sparkly may lead to acute disappointment in the future. Either that or produce 25-year-olds who dress like dollies and simper their way through adulthood.

I think Palmer is right. What happened to tomboys, for instance? They seem to have become extinct. I loved my dollies when I was a child, but I also really loved my penknife. We were as likely to make puzzles of trains as we were to play with Barbies. Books were books: there were no pink, glittery, exclusively female volumes. We wore normal clothes in normal colours, played cowboys and Indians as well as mummies and daddies.

All of these things are unthinkable today: the tsunami of pink has drowned out everything. It’s quite hard to see how this is a good thing and not hard at all to predict an unhappy ending.

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