Forget Your Highlight Reel: The Year-End Review Nobody's Posting

You've seen your Spotify Top 10. Google made a video of your top photos. You've scrolled through lists of the year's best books, most-watched shows, and biggest news stories.

Your algorithms know what you consumed this year.

But do you know what consumed your energy and attention?

Beyond the Highlight Reel

We're conditioned to review our year in superlatives: best moments, biggest achievements, most memorable trips. But that Instagram-ready approach misses the texture of your actual life. It doesn’t show the difference between what looked good and what felt good, or between what you accomplished and what actually kept you going.

This year, instead of a resolution list for 2026, try something different: an honest energy audit of your year.

The Rose, Petal, and Thorn

There's an exercise that's been used in student affairs, design thinking, and team meetings for years. It's deceptively simple, and it goes like this:

Rose: What bloomed this year? Consider what energized you, made time disappear in the best way, or left you feeling more like yourself.

Petal: What's still unfolding? These are your works-in-progress, the things that aren't finished and don't need to be yet, or the parts of your life that deserve more patience than judgment.

Thorn: What drained you? We often remember what went sideways, but what exhausted you (even if it looked impressive from the outside)?

The beauty of this framework is that it allows room for the complexity and messiness of real life. Your year doesn't have to be good or bad. It can be both. It can be a mix of growth and uncertainty, achievement and exhaustion, connection and loss.

Why Your Brain Wants This

Here's what's happening beneath the surface: your brain is already tracking what energizes and depletes you, mostly outside your conscious awareness. That dread before certain meetings? That’s your nervous system remembering the last five times you left feeling drained. The lightness when a specific friend texts? Your body has been keeping score.

Reflecting on your year brings this implicit knowledge to the forefront. You're not discovering anything new, but you are surfacing patterns your body already knows so your conscious mind can use them. Year-end moments are particularly powerful for this. Psychologists call them "temporal landmarks." These are natural transition points where your brain is primed to make meaning and notice patterns.

So when you feel pulled to review your year, you're not being self-indulgent. You're working with how your brain makes sense of your experiences.

The Energy Audit: Going Deeper

Most year-end reflections stop once you’ve created your top 10 or rose-petal-thorn list. But if you're willing to sit with that analogy a little longer, you'll find something more valuable: a pattern.

I recently led a workshop where a participant recognized that her social calendar was full, but raised the question, “were the events fulfilling?” That’s exactly where we want to go.

Look at your roses again. The moments that energized you. Now ask yourself: Was I energized by the activity itself, or by who I was with?

Maybe you loved that weekend camping trip, but was it the camping, or was it the three hours of uninterrupted conversation with your best friend by the fire? Maybe you felt excited during that work project, but was it the project or the collaboration with the colleague who actually gets you and understands your ideas?

This matters because it tells you what to prioritize. If your energy came from the people, you don't need to plan more camping trips. You need to plan more time with that friend, regardless of what you do.

Now your thorns. The things that drained you. Ask yourself: What made this exhausting? Was it the task itself, the timing, or the expectation I placed on it?

Did hosting Thanksgiving drain you because you don't really enjoy cooking for crowds, or because you tried to make everything from scratch while working 60-hour weeks? Did that volunteer commitment drain you because the cause doesn't matter to you, or because you said yes when you meant no?

Some thorns are unavoidable, such as grief, illness, or surgery. But some are self-inflicted. And those are the ones you can choose differently next time.

Finally, your petals. The works-in-progress. These deserve the gentlest attention, because our culture doesn't know what to do with things that aren't finished. We want transformation stories with clean before-and-afters. But real growth is messier than that.

What are you still figuring out? What relationships are evolving? What parts of yourself are you still getting to know? These do NOT need to be resolved by January 1st. They just need to be acknowledged.

What This Isn't

This is NOT about optimization. It's not about extracting lessons, maximizing productivity, or becoming the best version of yourself.

It IS about knowing yourself better. About recognizing what lights you up and what dims your flame. It’s about giving yourself permission to want what you truly want, not what you think you should.

Because here's the thing about New Year's resolutions: they assume the problem is that you're not doing enough or trying hard enough. But what if the real question is simpler?

What if the key to a fulfilling year lies in simply embracing what energizes you and gently letting go of what doesn't?

Moving Forward (Without Pressure)

You don't need to take everything you learned from this reflection and turn it into an action plan. You don't need to overhaul your life by February.

You might notice yourself making slightly different choices.

• Saying yes to the friend who energizes you, and "maybe next time" to the obligation that drains you.

• Building in more space for the things that are still unfolding.

• Letting go of the stories about who you should be and getting curious about who you actually are.

Your year wasn't a highlight reel. It was a life, lived day by day, with all its beauty and mess and ordinary-ness. And the most radical thing you can do as this year ends is to resolve to NOT make wild changes. Embrace this wisdom as you step into the new year.