A new year, a new you! Well at least that’s how the saying goes. With the beginning of January, we tend to pick out one or two resolutions (any more than that and it just becomes too much for my soul to handle) and then we repeatedly tell ourselves, we can do it! A couple of days, weeks or, who knows, maybe even months later, we eventually get to the point that either school or life is getting back to it’s game of Let’s Throw This Into the Ring to See What She’ll Do and, well, we might end up sort of…forgetting our promises. Which is totally, completely normal—so don’t feel too bad! I’m pretty sure I can 100% say that most people I know (probably all of them) do this repeatedly, and I’m definitely not innocent either.
Apparently, our favorite time to give up is the lovebug month. According to U.S. News, around 80% of resolutions fail during the second week of February. This sounds about right to me, and honestly, at this point, I haven’t made a resolution in a loooooong time.
But wait! This doesn’t mean we’re all doomed to make empty promises at the beginning of the year. On a less depressing note, there is research that proves we don’t have to be as hopeless.
University psychology professor, John C. Norcross has studied resolutions for years. Reports from multiple studies with colleagues showed that out of the approximately 40% of Americans that set a goal on January 1, 40% to 44% of them will succeed in six months. Those odds don’t sound too bad, right?
So the statistics aren’t all bad and that’s at least sort of uplifting, right? If not, that’s okay. Numbers aren’t always gonna mean we’re going to wake up the next day and realize we’re definitely going to make it, rather it all depends on you. Tips can be given and more research can be made which may help in many ways but we have to ultimately remember we have to want to do our resolutions. If not, what’s the point?
Also, we have this weird quirk of making our resolutions a bit too official, but maybe they’ll be more successful if we look at them as just another goal we’re working towards. Like homework and careers, we have to make certain decisions and steps to get to our goals, but it doesn’t make them any less important. Sometimes we have a bad habit of being just a bit unrealistic with our resolutions, so how about we strive for a smaller goal—you know, one that we can actually see ourselves getting to.
I like to picture the resolution like a goal from a counselor. When they ask me about my future goals, they usually want me to be specific. They’ll accept anything even if it may seem insignificant to them because it could be not so insignificant to me. For instance, getting an A in a class could be huge if that class is particularly challenging for me. And the thing about all these goals is that they aren’t just important to think about at the beginning of the year. They’re an everyday thing.
Why do our resolutions have to be something promised on the first month of a new year? Why not the second month? Or the sixth? Can’t all the goals we make in between be our resolutions too?
If that’s so, then maybe we aren’t failing as much as we think we are. Let’s start thinking about those small things in between the year that we feel can’t reach new year resolution status. Because well, if it’s something that matters then it’s pretty huge.