Listing your new year resolutions with every passing year has become second nature by now. It’s the usual topic of conversation you have at the table when you meet up with your friends for the first time after the old year bid its goodbye.
“So, what do you want to accomplish this year?” This question gets thrown around so much during the first week of January, that you almost have to formulate a standard answer for every encounter you have. If someone actually asked you this question this year so far, I’m guessing your answer must have gone along the lines of:
- Getting your sh*t together (or at least trying to, once again)
- For the love of God, trying to eat healthy
- And… Oh! I just remembered. Working out
Yeah… resolutions are fun. Yet, after a while, they can get tiresome. I personally began to feel how tedious it was to come up with ones of my own. It always seemed like I would make my list for one year, try to accomplish those resolutions during the first few months, fail at keeping up with them, and to compensate for my failure a bit, I would basically recycle the same resolutions for the next year. An endless cycle where I would get stuck at square one over and over again.
After coming to this realization, I started to reflect about the whole process of new year’s resolutions per sé. Like, do I actually have to make a funny little list with my goals on it? Do I have to torture myself until March in hopes that this time the habits will stick?
As a natural sciences student, I do like conducting research, especially in the fascinating world that is the internet. So, one day I grabbed my laptop and I started to search up reasons why resolutions don’t work. After 2 hours of watching endless Ted-Ed talks and reading what seemed like 5 Wikihows, I came to two major conclusions:
First thing’s first, one of the problems with new year’s resolutions is that traditionally it’s only seen as some aspirations you write down on a piece of paper in a span of 5 minutes and then you just stuff that paper into one of your already overflowing cabinets. You pretty much forget about it for the rest of the year. They’re not actually goals you intend to strategize accordingly for, in order to reach. They’re just part of the annual tradition.
Second thing is that those 5 minutes spent on writing your resolutions down are not just a process of finding habits you want to implement into your life and writing them down on a piece of paper. It’s a moment in which you practically force yourself to think about things you dislike about yourself. You think up flaws in the way you look or act and you come up with activities you can do on a daily basis, to erase those flaws. It plays with our self esteem and it makes us fall into the rabbit hole that is chasing perfection.
So, how can we solve this dilemma? Well, for this year, instead of writing down resolutions. I did something a little different. I spent the first of January practically sitting on my bed writing in my journal for hours on end. I wrote about my goals, yes, but I explained exactly what I wanted to accomplish, why I wanted to accomplish it and how. My goals for this year are reading, exercising and meditating. What I specifically want to accomplish though, is reading 20 pages of a book daily (if you’re a bookworm, don’t judge me), exercising at least 3 times a week and meditating for 5 minutes every day. The reasons why I want to accomplish these things are because I want to become more cultured, I want to be able to get my body moving for my well being, and I want to lower my stress levels on a daily basis. Narrowing down your goals is essential to making them come true.
Now, how am I going to go about accomplishing these things? Setting routines and boundaries. Yep. Remember when you used to watch those cringy morning and night routines on YouTube? Well that’s about to be you now. If you want to develop habits, you inevitably have to make routines and you have to stick to those routines. And you do that by setting boundaries with yourself and with others. That is, respecting yourself and your schedule enough so that you expect others to do the same. After I had that down, I grabbed a little glass of wine, turned some music on and started making my vision board. I put images that spoke to me and inspired me. I added quotes, landscapes, activities, etc. And made my vision board my desktop background so I get to look at it every day. So far, things have run smoothly. I may not meditate or read every day, but I continuously make an effort to get back on track, and at the end of the day, that’s what matters the most.
So, If you’re also not convinced about all this new year’s resolutions stuff, I invite you to try out my method and see how it goes for you. Remember that just because you fell off the wagon one day, it does not mean that you can’t start over again. Be patient and try to stay as motivated as you can. You got this!