Happy New Year

Wasting Another Year With Well-Intentioned Resolutions

Photo by Clement Souchet on Unsplash

This is not your average, joyful, full-of-hope New Year’s post. But perhaps the harsh demonization of resolutions is what’s needed to, dare I say, liberate us from the grip of “next year, I will be better.”

At the start of every year, millions of people wake up and decide to pick some form of self-improvement to commit to for the new year. Common resolutions are losing weight or being more organized — things like that.

In January, the air is heavy with the stench of change, but by February — only a few short weeks into the year — many of these commitments have been forgotten or discarded outright.

I’m not innocent here either.

I’ve given up on my fair share of New Year’s resolutions, but what gives? Why are we like this? Humanity has always been about progress and change, so why can’t we do it on an individual level when its clearly things that are good for us?

Resolutions seem like a case of saying, “I’ll start at 8,” and then when it’s 8:02, giving up and saying, “I’ll start at 8:30.” There is no optimal time to start other than right now. I think if you want something, you do the thing. You don’t wait. You don’t make excuses. You simply do.

Therefore, I believe that New Year’s resolutions are a psychological trick — an illusion of control and self-improvement that ultimately leads nowhere. The failure to enact these changes year after year highlights deeper — and perhaps unaddressed — factors which prevent meaningful change. It demonstrates how resolutions function more as a coping mechanism for self-doubt than as a real strategy for personal growth.

A Promise of Change

There is a rather immense social pressure to partake in the cultural ritual that is a New Year’s resolution. I feel like each year I am asked by numerous acquaintances what my resolution is, to which I have to give some dull reply, “Oh, to be healthier.” I haven’t made a resolution in earnest since I was 21.

Promises were not made to be broken, so I tend not to bother with resolutions. In essence, I’ve made a resolution to not make anymore. When I want to change something, I start the work. I don’t wait for a calendar to flip over or a month to end. And I would implore you to do the same. You know what they say, “The best time to start is yesterday. The second best time is today.”

But regarding the cultural aspect, they have become a rite of passage to enter the new year. And whether they come from genuine desire for self-improvement or to conform to social pressures, they are not going anywhere any time soon.

The bombardment of “new year, new me” posts and marketing campaigns all focus around the idea that resolutions are impactful, helpful things that we should all have. It’s like the last thing on the end-of-year and holiday celebration to-do list.

But it’s not like making New Year’s resolutions are some hip, modern thing that we started doing. Resolutions date back to ancient civilizations — like the Babylonians some 4,000 years ago — who believed the new year was a time to make promises to their gods to secure good fortune. The modern form has evolved into personal pledges for self-improvement, but they are nothing new in a cultural sense.

There’s an appeal to the idea of a fresh start though, isn’t there? It does provide a “clean break” from the old year and a chance for us to start anew. For many, January 1st represents a perfect moment to make a significant change, which explains some of this optimism around resolutions.

The idea that we can start with a clean slate can itself be a uniquely powerful thing. It encourages us to believe that with enough willpower, we can become our best selves through the use of self-improvement focused resolutions.

But it really begs the question: with so much history and cultural pressure behind resolutions, why do we fall victim to failure more often than not?

Failure to Launch

As research has pointed out, there is a gap between intention and results. What the study tells us, in short, is that we are more likely to not meet our goals when we publicly announce them. Resolutions are no different here. By talking about doing the things we want to do, we end up inadvertently sabotaging ourselves from doing them at all.

Most resolutions are also made in the spirit of excitement rather than meaningful motivation. They come from places of FOMO and pressure rather than a willful desire to improve. Many people are content with remaining as they are, so saying, “I want to eat healthier,” becomes a bit of a cop-out to partake in the resolution-making during January.

It’s a well-known fact that many resolutions are given up on in the first few weeks of the year. Gyms are crowded in January only to become empty again by March. The first few days feel rewarding and good, but if there is no real motivation behind the resolution, the feel-good begins to fade and the resolution falters.

The resolution will fail because of a lack of meaningful motive and also because forming habits is sometimes a really hard thing for us to do when we are living in times that demand so much of our daily attention. For instance, for me, the hardest part of going to the gym is finding the time to actually go to the gym amongst everything else I need and want to do.

Further, resolutions may fail because of vague goals and a lack of specificity. For instance, what does “getting fit” or “eating healthier” really mean? These are not STAR-approved goals. Without a clear pathway forward, the goal has no practical steps outlined to follow, and this sets the resolution up for failure as soon as it’s “made.”

At the same time, goals are often overly ambitious. People make a broad resolution which is a sweeping change to their lifestyle and aim to complete it in a quicker timeline with less effort than they perhaps thought at first.

A person trying to go from couch to marathon, for example, is in for a rude awakening at the time and effort required to do such a thing, and saying you want it simply to fill a resolution quota will not result in anything meaningful.

When a resolution is too vague or too overwhelming, any effort exerted to exact an end result will be in vain because the resolution was set up to fail from the start.

If you are going to make a New Year’s resolution, then you must make resolutions that are specific, timely, action-oriented, and realistic (and preferably something that can be measured).

Mechanisms Behind the Failure

Behind every failed resolution likely lies the illusion of change. When people make resolutions, it is as if in that moment they feel they have taken the steps required for self-improvement. This gives them a psychological off-ramp where they can feel they have changed without necessarily changing at all. It is sheer cognitive dissonance; the actions are not lining up with the intentions at all.

Eating healthier may lead to “cheat meals” wherein the person can tell themselves they’ve already promised to be better and that they’re actually on the right track. It’s a form of self-deception that I am just as guilt of doing. It maintains a false sense of improvement and keeps us from facing the reality of our inaction on our actual resolution.

But, of course, there is more than cognitive dissonance working against us. As I feel is a topic I keep revisiting, humans have a short attention span and a seemingly hellbent desire for instant gratification.

Resolutions often require long-term effort for a delayed reward. Take losing weight. To lose weight — let’s say something like fifty pounds — it would take six months of dedicated weight loss on the high end of the recommended. It would take a year at moderate weight loss. This is a huge ask — especially when results are not noticeable right away.

This is hard. Of course it’s hard. It’s supposed to be.

I was working out with a friend the other day, and he said, “Exercising is pretty hard sometimes.” And I said, “Yes, because if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.”

There is merit to hard things, but you won’t do them if you don’t deeply want to, and a resolution for the sake of having a resolution will not yield the motivation needed because you will not get instant gratification for the work put in, and then you will give up.

The allure of quick rewards provides and immediate pleasure — a dopamine response — and makes it hard for the long-term rewards to succeed unless you rewire the way you look at what motivates you.

And this all leads to the fact that many people overestimate their own willpower. You cannot simply change because you ask yourself. You have to really want it.

Willpower is finite and can be depleted through stress and fatigue. In my most well-intentioned days of eating healthy, I still lose the battle and will order junk food when I’m tired and stressed because it is a quick reward even though I know a home-cooked meal would be better.

Willpower cannot be relied on alone because, let’s face it, nobody’s willpower is strong enough to overcome everything all the time. Plus, if you rely on willpower alone, you may risk simply crashing out and dealing with burnout.

All that willpower, instead, should be used to create sustainable habits which can build up over time. The hardest part of a good habit is starting one, but once you begin, it gets easier through reinforcement.

True personal growth comes from small, manageable steps, not drastic changes. Instead of setting a goal like “I’ll work out every day,” start with “I’ll walk for 15 minutes a day.” This lends into habit-building and is a manageable task that sounds less vague and overwhelming then “working out every day” or “getting fit.”

For example, we can compare the following resolution lists:

1. Get fit

That’s an incredibly vague “resolution” list, but maybe we can make it better by breaking it into chunks. Maybe even monthly goals.

1. January: Walk 15 minutes a day.
2. February: Add one day of strength training.
3. March: Reduce junk food and takeout to special occasions.
4. April: Reduce sugar intake and increase walks to 30 minutes daily.
5. May: Add a second day of strength training.
6. June: Start a weekly yoga or stretching routine.
7. July: Track your food intake and watch for areas of improvement.
8. August: Increase from walks to higher intensity cardio.
9. September: Try a new fitness activity or sport (e.g. rock climbing, hikes, swimming, soccer).
10. October: Add a third day of strength training.
11. November: Focus on mental fitness and start daily mindfulness.
12. December: Reflect on the year’s progress and set new fitness goals for the next year.

Breaking the resolution out into chunks gives you a roadmap and makes for smaller, manageable tasks which all lead back into the same resolution of “getting fit.” Obviously, this is a rough list, but you get the idea (I hope).

It’s also important to remember that it’s not about winning every fight. You will slip and stumble, and as cheesy as it is, it’s not about how many times you get knocked down but about how many times you get back up and keep going.

The Pressure of Change

With all the talk about change, there’s a lot of talk about change. Pressures mount on us all the time. We live in a society which places a lot of pressure on us to constantly improve — or at least try to — and this creates an environment where people feel that they should always be striving for the perfect version of themselves (which I do not think is inherently bad).

Social media and the “self-improvement” industries — think diets, atomic habits, and motivational speakers — often, in my opinion, exaggerate the success stories of people who have used whatever methods to improve themselves.

Of course, it makes sense that we would shy away from broadcasting the failures, but I think failing is just as important as succeeding in these pursuits of self-improvement so long as the failures lead to learning and growth too.

The average person, if shown a dramatic turnaround of someone else, may take two paths: be emboldened by the success and attain it for themselves or feel demotivated to even try because it won’t happen for them. Then, what if they try and fail? That won’t garner any meaningful benefit to their psyche, I’m sure. Coping with failure is a skill of its own.

The cultural expectation to make and keep these resolutions can lead to shame and feelings of inadequacy when we inevitably fail — or even just falter. This perpetuates the cycle of self-criticism which is often really just negative self-talk rather than anything constructive.

But these things are, in part, designed to make you fail. You see, the self-improvement industries don’t really want you to be better. They want you to fail and come back to them, year after year.

The commercialization of self-improvement occurs in things like gym memberships, diet plans, fitness trackers, productivity apps, and more. It all bleeds back into corporate greed and profit. They would rather profit from our desires of self-improvement than offer meaningful resolve to our resolutions. How else would these companies make profits?

Then again, they are offering tools meant to make it easier for us to make the change, so it could be all on us to be better or worse.

Conclusion

The pervasive culture of resolutions in the New Year and self-improvement is a complex thing. While the desire for growth and betterment is generally good, it’s often times misguided and set to fail before it is even put into motion. This cycle of renewal and failure is ingrained in our society.

The pressures we have to improve can lead to issues in actioning these resolutions in the first place. And when we vocalize our intentions, we subconsciously recognize that as “putting the resolution forward,” and it means we are less likely to see it through. It’s a paradox that requires active effort to combat.

In order to see these resolutions through to a meaningful conclusion, we need our resolutions to be planned and well thought out. They must also come from places of genuine desire to improve ourselves rather than simply fitting into the cultural inertia around us.

So, instead of buying into the myth of a “fresh start,” we should focus on consistent, mindful tasks and small, achievable improvements year-round. True self-improvement does not occur in one bold resolution but in a thousand quiet — and often flawed— steps.

All those tiny steps we take add up to one long journey after all.

Yours truly,
D.

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