New Year’s Resolutions

Each year as the calendar marks “January 1,” the entire world creates their New Year’s Resolutions and tries their hardest to stick with them for an entire year. The idea of New Year’s Resolutions has been a tradition for decades. But do these resolutions and promises help us become better versions of ourselves, or do they only create even more stress and standards that we can’t hold ourselves to?

Rather than creating resolutions that are out of reach, people should base their resolutions off of what is reasonable for themselves.

The basis of a New Year’s Resolution is to do, or not do, something that will help you grow as a person—whether that be setting out to accomplish a goal, try something new, or ditch a habit that affected you last year. It’s basically an excuse to improve ourselves and make an effort to do something different.

In the past couple of years, according to The Washington Post, New Year’s Resolutions have centered around attempting to pick up a new and better habit, rather than refraining from a bad one.  Instead of giving something up, people have tried to gain a new and beneficial habit in order to add something more positive to their life. These people are trying to better their new year by adding something to their lives and trying something new. According to Huffington Post, it is beneficial to try new things in life, as it “engages fresh experiences that reinvigorate your life with energy and excitement.”

A negative effect of creating a New Year’s Resolution each year is being pressured to keep that resolution, and most likely ending up feeling unaccomplished at the end of the year. Although it is beneficial to challenge yourself, it seems to be equally as important to set realistic goals that may actually be accomplished within the year. According to John C. Norcross, a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, “most people will have lapsed or slipped on their resolutions by mid-January”. This shows how people may make these resolutions without considering whether or not it’s actually an attainable goal. Thus, maybe it is more beneficial to add something new in our lives if we cannot stick to cutting something out.

According to US News and Reports, “it's important to recognize that outside-in solutions such as dieting, joining gyms and so on are doomed to fail if, other than your well-intentioned resolve to change, you've done nothing to enhance your capacity to either sustain motivation or handle the inevitable stress and discomfort involved in change.” If people are not stable or strong enough to stick with a certain resolution that they created for themselves, it will not be solid enough for that person to stick with for the entire year—or in certain cases, just for a couple of weeks or months.

The process of creating New Year’s resolutions comes full circle as we try to better ourselves in the beginning of each year, but end up unsuccessful—remaining just how we began.