The 10-second countdown until midnight is about to begin. All is well, and you’re ready to enter a new year with your list of resolutions on stand-by. From planning on working out every day, to making your bed every day, it doesn’t seem like too much, then a week passes and you skip out on going to the gym or “forget to make your bed”. With your streak broken so early in the year, instead of building it back up and maintaining good habits, you say, “I’ll do better next year”.
New Year’s resolutions often feel like do or die, as if the goals and improvements you set in January will make or break your whole year. However, according to statistics, 43% of people who create resolutions fail them by February. Now, why is this? It could be a multitude of reasons: being too busy with life, setting too many resolutions and not being able to keep up with some (or all) of them. Looking at the same statistics, 59% of the people who made resolutions were between the ages of 18 to 34. With most people who set resolutions being young adults, are we really interested in bettering ourselves, or are we just following a trend by creating these goals?
To fully answer this question, we need to look at the bigger picture. It’s the end of December, and everyone is discussing holiday plans, until someone brings up resolutions for the new year. Even though you might not have thought of any, this prompts you to think, “What do I want to change about myself?”.
This starts building up pressure on a person, as we feel pushed to change, even if we actually feel content in ourselves. It makes you start creating these unrealistic goals, and knowingly pushing yourself towards these goals yet again to the following year.
With the rise of social media use, especially for Gen Z, we are used to seeing trends online and going with the flow. Are New Year’s resolutions a good thing? Yes, if one has a goal in mind and a plan to follow through on achieving it throughout the year, but like most of us, by March, we forget we even made these goals. If one can consistently follow through and build good habits, there is nothing wrong with it, but most people create them because they know they something they want to change about themselves, but don’t know where to start, so they put it out to the world what they want to change and tend to never proceed from there.
Instead, we should ditch societal pressure in creating these lists, and instead slowly build up good habits throughout the year. Just because we enter a new year doesn’t mean everything from the previous years was left behind. We should take the mistakes from our past and learn to build a better future.
Ultimately, the answer to the question at hand, can be subjective, but it’s up to you and how you perceive your own goals! If you are determined to complete them, or want to improve yourself, rather than the pressure of doing it because others are, then this is the perfect time to reflect on how your year went, and where you want to see improvements in the following year. For the upcoming year, I challenge you to ditch the all-or-nothing mindset and look at setting goals like building blocks. Because slow and steady really does win the race.
The next time you someone asks you about your resolutions, ask yourself, are you aiming to go big with your goals and follow through, stay the same, or slowly work on yourself? Remember, your journey doesn’t have to start on midnight of New Year’s Day. It can start anytime of the year, from January 1st to even December 31st. Planning goals doesn’t have a deadline; the progress and completion do.