As the end of the year approaches, people begin to rush to complete their New Year’s resolutions that they made at the start of the new year. According to Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, only about 9% of Americans complete their New Year’s resolutions, with 23% giving up at the end of the week and 43% giving up by the end of January. With such a consistent failure rate, it is amazing how people make resolutions despite having such little discipline to complete them. In my personal experience, most New Year’s resolutions are made as a heat-of-the-moment decision when people are feeling emotional about the beginning of a new year. The truth of the matter is that most New Year’s resolutions are unnecessary platitudes, and as a result, we should eventually embrace a more permanent method of setting goals.
From my personal experience, New Year resolutions tend to be insincere promises that people make and give up on or forget by the end of January. There could be many different reasons for this, but I believe that people who make these resolutions don’t feel the need to change or are not very committed to resolving these resolutions. To change, you need to see what is wrong with your lifestyle and be honest with yourself and the things you want to change. Deciding to alter something based on a tradition of people making New Year resolutions is ultimately not an effective method. I can’t remember a time when I made a New Year’s resolution that fell through, but I can remember countless times when I said that I was going to give up a bad habit or implement a new good habit on a spur-of-the-moment decision. It ultimately failed, because I expected the bad habit to go away overnight. When it faltered, I completely abandoned my goal, which is the other disadvantage of New Year’s resolutions: once broken, people abandon them entirely.
Instead of making resolutions or impulsive goals, people need to start making conscious decisions to pursue their goals every day, even if it is hard. For example, let’s say I want to make the goal of being more on top of helping out with household chores—doing them without being asked and doing them immediately. There may be some days where I falter on that, but even when I fail, I still remind myself of that decision every day. I am no expert on this, but I can speak from experience that to make a change in your life requires more than motivation, it takes hard work. To be honest, this is a skill that I still have to learn myself. I am someone who shamefully talks the talk, but does not walk the walk. As a result, I have made my life so much harder by not fixing the things about myself that I need to fix. If you want to do something, don’t wait until next year, just do it and choose to do it consistently every day.
Change is hard, but we all have things we need to change about ourselves. Whether it is a bad habit like biting your nails, a lack of a fitness routine, or something more serious such as an addiction, change does not happen overnight — you can’t expect all the bad things to just go away. However, you can make a conscious goal to change yourself any day of the year and continue to choose that goal for all 365 days of the year not only New Year’s.
