The New Year starts, and suddenly, one thing is on everyone’s minds. It’s everywhere you look, gripping onto your conscience like the seemingly endless amounts of your dog’s hair on a new wool sweater: “What’s your New Year’s Resolution”? Every brand and social media platform begins to flood with the classic yearly goals and plans, each post and advertisement screaming at you: “This year, it will be different– I’ll reach my goals”. But will we actually?
A longitudinal study was conducted by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health to assess when New Year’s resolutions began to fail and why. 187 participants received 7-point-scale surveys monthly, assessing their well-being and commitment to their goal. The results showed that 23% of people quit their resolution after the first week. 43% by the end of January.
As February begins, if you so happen to be keeping up your New Year’s resolution, great job! You’re doing better than 43% of people. But hear this: research suggests that out of all the resolutions made, only 9% of people complete them by the end of the year.
Why does this happen? Well, the answer is quite simple: the New Year isn’t that special. Now don’t get me wrong, it is a wonderful time of celebration with family and friends, of reflecting on hopes of and self-betterment. But it wasn’t originally that way.
The New Year holiday had manifested in Mesopotamia in 2000BC, its significance rooted in religious pledges to gods, the repaying of debts, and hopes to secure a fruitful harvest. Then, over the years, a cultural phenomenon occurred: ideas of self-improvement and the New Year’s merged together in the form of the incessant question you hear from everyone you talk to: “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”
My question is this: Why New Year’s? Why that specific day? Why is this the day we identify with self-improvement? Why is this the day you sit down with a piece of paper, write down reflections of the year, and then make notes of how you want to improve? Why only now do we admit our flaws and seek to improve them? Because evidently, the New Year in itself was never special in this way– we made it so.
Here is the issue with this: instead of comfortably looking forward to the new year, where expectations are reasonable, many put unnecessary pressure on themselves with some gigantic resolution. After the motivated rush of this dedicated time, the false sense of productivity you get from setting this date, you actually have to act. Just setting the resolution doesn’t mean you’re pushing yourself, nor that you are ready. Most of the time, you aren’t. This is because the most common ‘resolutions’ —exercising more, eating healthier, being happier, and saving money – aren’t resolutions at all. They are vague hopes that you make on a whim with no plan, no steps to break them down into. Then, when you suddenly have to get to work, it seems impossible, a task too large to tackle. This is the reason why so many people fail.
But I propose a solution in which every day can feel like New Year’s Day, in which February is just as important as January. And no, it’s not just ‘doing it’. That mindset is the very one that sends you down a spiral of procrastination until you give up. First, you reflect. I mean, truly reflect, not just halfheartedly acknowledging what you didn’t do well. What worked and what didn’t with your past attempts? What problems did you run into, and why? What can you control?
You don’t have to hit the ground running, nor wait until the ‘perfect day’, such as New Year’s, to act. Any day can be your New Year’s: all you need to do is start, no matter how small it is, no matter when. It could be signing up for a gym membership, filling your bottle of water before you plan to exercise, or buying vegetables for the week. It doesn’t have to be revolutionary. When you break your goals down into steps—mini goals—, they become routine. Fleeting motivation is replaced with planned consistency.
When I say the New Year isn’t special, I mean that it does not have to be the one, god-send, societally-pressuring day you decide to overwhelm yourself and become an olympian. I mean that you should remember who you are truly making this resolution for: yourself. Not so you can tell your friends the day after New Year’s that you began running marathons only to never run again. When the post-New Year’s motivation has worn off, whether it be January 1st, February 1st, or even May 1st, that is when what you do matters most. For your resolution to work, you have to acknowledge that it’s imperfect, and it isn’t immediate. It doesn’t need to be special. It doesn’t even need to be a New Year’s resolution: It needs to no longer be a resolution, but an action.