We’re well into January, and those New Year’s resolutions you made a few weeks ago are now just dots on the horizon. Guilt-inducing dots, that is, that seem to hurt a little more every time you think about how you’re definitely not accomplishing any of them. It’s easy to make resolutions but not so easy to actually stick to them. What’s a girl to do? Well, today is your lucky day, because we have a few ideas!
1. Be more specific
Let’s say your resolution was to “Read more books in 2017.” Hey, that’s a great goal! Yay, you! Yay, books! It is a little vague, though… and I am 99.7% sure that that vagueness is what’s making you struggle to follow through with that particular resolution.
Instead of making super broad statements such as, “I want to read more books,” try narrowing your focus. Maybe you could aim to read one book per month, for a total of twelve books in 2017. Maybe you could put yourself on a book-buying ban until you’ve finished the stack of six or seven unread paperbacks (that you just had to have) stacked on your bedside table. Maybe you could finally get around to reading that series your sister’s been raving about and pestering you to read for months.
If you want to make progress on your resolutions (or any other type of goal), you have to be able to measure that progress. And that can be really hard to do if your goal is vague. Pick some numbers. Make some lists. You’ve got this.
2. Scale back
I know I need to remember this! Sometimes your goals are unrealistic, and realizing that they are isn’t admitting defeat. It’s called being reasonable. If your New Year’s resolution was to wake up at 5:00 a.m. every day to work out for an hour and a half, but you hate mornings and hate exercise even more, you’re probably not doing so well with that resolution. At best, that makes you feel cranky. At worst, it makes you feel like a failure.
If you’re in the situation I just described, you need to scale back! Please don’t be so hard on yourself, either in terms of setting unreasonably high goals or berating yourself for not meeting those goals. Don’t abandon your resolution; just do your best to make it more tolerable. For instance, I’d like to be more active this year, too. My goal is to exercise three times a week at about 7:00 a.m. for about an hour. I’d like to try the Zombies Run app, too, because it looks fun, and I need something to distract myself from how much I hate being sweaty. I know that getting up extremely early every single day would only make me resent exercise even more, so I didn’t even attempt to make that my resolution for the year.
3. Enlist your friends to support you
Your friends may have made resolutions that are similar to yours! Maybe you and your best friend have really similar reading tastes, so you could recommend books you enjoyed to one another throughout the year in order to keep both of you excited about what to read next. If you go to the gym with your friends, you have people to cheer you on, distract you from that stitch in your side and gently (yet firmly) remind you that no, doing six sit-ups isn’t “close enough” to doing ten.
4. Relate your resolution to school in some way
If you can find a way to tie it in to the time you spend in class, doing homework, etc., that’s great because school already takes up so much of your time and energy! You may as well kill two birds with one stone, right? If your resolution was to be more outgoing, find a seat in class that’s not next to all your friends. Or maybe your resolution was to decrease the amount of stress you feel as much as is possible. That could involve things such as setting up study groups (so that you don’t end up cramming the morning of the test) or actually going to your professor’s office hours (so you have a clear idea of what you’ll write about for that massive paper and won’t pull an all-nighter to complete it).
As you can see, it’s not necessary to scrap your entire plan for bettering yourself in 2017. Just make a few changes, and you should find that your new-and-improved New Year’s resolutions are much easier and more fun! Let’s make 2017 our best year yet!