'I'm only letting myself down. I'm used to that'
Tim Dowling

This is, I think, the fourth year I've forsworn alcohol for the month of January, though not in a row: I did it last year, but not the year before; the year before that I gave up but my wife didn't; before that I can't remember.

Over the years I've learned not to expect too much from the exercise – a month isn't really a long enough abstinence to notice a marked improvement in one's health, appearance, mood or outlook. By the time your sleep patterns recover from the jolt of sobriety, the month is practically over. It's just an annual pressing of a mental reset button, and a reminder that self-discipline remains among the available options.

The first time I gave up drinking I found it quite a challenge, but now I just find it a little boring. There is only so much fizzy water one can drink, and things that are reliably entertaining after a few glasses of wine – crap television, for example – tend to make me twitchy and restless when sober. I find I'd rather just go to bed and read 180 pages of a book.

Like a lot of people, I also find sobriety socially debilitating. January is a good time to give up alcohol, because I can sometimes go the whole month without being invited to anything. Somewhere around year three I decided I could just make exceptions for certain events anyway. It's not breaking the rules; it's hastily rewriting them. In the end I'm only letting myself down. I'm used to that.

In spite of my flexible enforcement policy, I still manage to spend most of the month feeling hard done by, and for that reason I tend to give myself over to one of my other competing addictions. One year I gambled my way through January. This year I've been eating a lot of sweets, something I'm normally never interested in. Ice cream, biscuits and chocolate form a big part of my diet right now, putting paid to the idea that I'm doing my body any kind of favour. It's not as if I need the sweets in order to stay sober, although I speak as a man safe in the knowledge that he has a cinema-size sack of M&Ms sitting in his desk drawer. Actually, I just checked and they are all gone. I must have eaten them last night. Roll on, February.

'No drinking became no drinking during the week'
Tim Jonze

Isn't January bleak enough without us trying to invent new ways to make our lives even less enjoyable? Why choose January to go without a drink or a bit of cake? Why not December, when we at least get some presents to make up for it?

Anyway, because I'm nothing but a conformist drone at heart, I decided to have a shot at not drinking this January. Sadly, "have a shot" became the operative phrase.

Not that I didn't go through hell trying – it was like Trainspotting when Renton decides to go cold turkey. Only instead of boarding myself up in my bedroom with a month's supply of Campbell's soup, I sat in the lounge moaning for two minutes. Then opened a bottle of wine. They probably shouldn't make a film out of that.

I basically couldn't do it, right from the start, right from the first day. I instantly changed my "no drinking" schedule to "no drinking during the week". Then, when the weekend ended, the mission was changed to not drinking "most days". This has now been downscaled to "not every night". By the end of the month, I hope to be sticking to my strict rule not to crack open the Laphroaig before 10am.

Friends seemed slightly concerned that I would even find this a struggle. Giving up drinking was, according to one colleague, "easy . . . just don't go out". Is that easy? I mean, not going out I can handle . . . in fact, there's nothing I like more than an excuse to skip a date in some dingy indie venue so I can sit slack-jawed in front of Don't Tell the Bride. But sitting in with nothing to take the edge off watching my wife effortlessly go two weeks without a drop of alcohol? Pass me the corkscrew.

So, yeah, this might be officially the world's lamest attempt to give something up for January. But you know what? Life really is too short to forgo one of your main pleasures just for the sake of it. If it's not LITERALLY-KILLING-YOU-RIGHT-NOW then why put yourself through it? My advice to all those ditching the chocolate/booze/Frazzles this January is to end the misery and return to the habit pronto. And then eat/drink a load more to make up for all the days you've missed. That's my advice. And yes, there is a reason I never chose drug counselling as a career.

'Evenings have become terrifying voids'
Sam Wollaston

It has been more than two weeks now, and it's not getting any easier. I thought the idea was that you were supposed to feel better – healthier, happier. Nonsense, it's pretty much the opposite.

It's not just alcohol I've given up. I'm also on some ridiculous diet that means I can't eat any dairy, or grain, or sugar, or carbohydrates, or anything nice at all really. It's not just booze-free January, it's joy-free January. But the drink is the difficult one. A(nother) bowl of ratabloodytouille for tea wouldn't be so depressing if there were a glass of rioja involved.

During the day it's not so bad – except that there's nothing to look forward to, of course. But the evenings I'm finding hard. They go on and on and on. Who knew that evenings were quite such enormous, terrifying voids that need to be filled somehow?

I'm not doing this alone, it's a joint adventure. You might imagine that would make it easier; it doesn't. We've never been sober for such a long time together, it's like we're strangers. OK, so we don't have the silly rows, the ones that feel ridiculous the following day, but that's because we're too embarrassed to. We've become polite, shy, awkward together. Conversation is not spontaneous, it's questions and answers. This feels more like an extended business meeting than a relationship. Certainly, doing it with someone else doesn't make the evenings go any more quickly.

After what feels like an eternity and it finally gets to a reasonable time to call it a day, I'm not even tired. Normally – ie boozily – my head would hit the pillow, and that would be the end of everything; but now I lie there, wide awake, alert, angry. And when sleep finally comes it doesn't last, it's dabbled sleep, with the most frighteningly vivid dreams I've ever experienced.

Then, in the morning, I feel terrible – sweaty, exhausted, depressed, with a cracking headache. It's not unlike having a hangover, in fact. That's so unfair – the punishment without the crime.

Of course, I realise what all of the above means. My name is Sam Wollaston and I'm a you-know-what. At least in February I'll be able to be a proper one. Only 12 more (sort of) sleeps to go.

I'd resolved to stop being passive aggressive
Zoe Williams

It takes a lot of time bitching and spreading bad feeling. And you never get what you want, because moaning is so indirect and, well, passive, and nobody would ever think, "I must action this whining! It is so urgent and meaningful!" And the actual aggress element of regular aggression doesn't have to be that aggressive. I don't have to nut anybody in the face, under my new resolution. I just have to complain about things in a straightforward way, to the person responsible, instead of complaining about them in a raving, faintly pantomime fashion, to anybody else who will listen.

This is what I've done so far: I had a fight with my accountant, who never calls me back. It turns out he doesn't call me because he doesn't like me, and we have parted ways. So now I have 13 days to file my own tax return. I might as well try to learn Irish dancing.

I sent a high-handed email pointing out that "commensurately" and "commensurably" were not the same word. Then I looked them up. They are not the same word, but they do mean the same thing.

I went to review a restaurant with a friend, and I made him eat lambs' brains, even though he was on his way to see a physiotherapist following a catastrophic brain injury. That is just partially true; he would only smell the brains, and refused to eat them. But I tried it on.

Then I looked up "passive aggressive". Apparently, it doesn't mean avoiding conflict. It is a fully fledged personality disorder, consisting mainly of obstructionist behaviour, or to be specific, expressly not doing things that one has expressly offered to do, either interpersonally or in the workplace. I'm not like that at all. I have a mindless can-do attitude, like a child, or a dog. No, the personality trait I'm trying to stamp out is conflict avoidance. Wikipedia is not even 100% sure that avoiding conflict is a bad thing: it refers to a school of thought that says minor, non-recurring conflicts – for instance, about the interchangeability of words, or whether your friend has to taste brains – are a waste of time to tackle. My resolution should instead have been to carry on avoiding conflict, to concentrate on not complaining and stewing about it.

Next year I'm going to put all my resolutions through a rudimentary fact-checking process before I start.

Can I live without my internet binges?
Emma Brockes

Of the eight windows open on my desktop right now, one relates to the task at hand – the document I am typing these words into. Two have to do with the complaints procedure at United Airlines. One is a half-read book review. One is half-written book review. One is a YouTube clip of the Australian TV show Summer Heights High (it's so funny!) There is a page on what espresso machine to buy and an article from the New Yorker website about the Oprah Winfrey Network. It has taken all day, but I've almost finished reading it.

For a long time I told myself this behaviour was OK. It is, I thought, like the three-field system: to stop your brain going stale, you have to rotate the crops every two and a half minutes by breaking off to look at a photo on the Daily Mail website of Kim Kardashian getting out of a car.

Also, I have to know things for my job. Things happening in the culture. Since everything that happens happens in the culture, it's OK to check it. Right? That reminds me, I need Netflix.

I now have Netflix.

For the past fortnight I have gone for nearly two hours at a time without looking up anything. The window in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen has called to me but I have resisted. I have kept doing whatever I'm supposed to be doing – writing a book – and achieved a small measure of success. I'm so pleased with myself, I have taken a little mental break every two and a half minutes or so.

But today is a bank holiday in the US, so I'm being lenient. That is why, between typing "so" and "but" I checked to see if the man who cut my hair yesterday has a Facebook page. (He does!)

I could disconnect the cable. Or get one of those disabling things. That's what I'm going to do, in fact. I'm definitely going to do that. Right after I've sent a picture of Alec Guinness standing on one leg to my friend Oliver; composed a mocking email about the title of the novel, The Art of Racing in the Rain; and looked up to see how much the blazer at my old school costs these days. Guess how much? £60. I know! £60 for an item of school uniform! How times change.