Resolutions offer recipe for disaster as new year dawns
“New Year, new me” is the popular and chronically overused slogan by all of the sorry saps who look optimistically toward entering the new year, only to discover that keeping up with habits and following through with them is tedious and draining, leaving most dropping them after a week. A new year brings new beginnings, new experiences, and new memories to be made, but why must changing or starting simple habits only begin at the start of a new year in a month that’s easily one of the slowest? New Year's resolutions have been talked to death, which leaves people frustrated with no solution.
As much as some would hope and pray that New Year's resolutions were just a trend that would fade away into obscurity in the future, History.com states that the tradition of New Year's resolutions can be traced back over 4,000 years ago, with the ancient Babylonians. Making “promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed,” they hoped that fulfilling their word would bring good tidings and bestow favor upon them for the year to come. Over time, other countries have adopted the practice as well, with Rome eradicating what used to be the accepted calendar year, and introducing what is now known as January in the modern day, and “believing that Janus symbolically looked backwards into the previous year and ahead into the future, the Romans offered sacrifices to the deity and made promises of good conduct for the coming year.”
Christians adopted the belief that vowing to fix past mistakes in the future would put them in a better place with God, and potentially earn them a better spot in Heaven. However, as time has gone by, the practice of resolutions has slowly drifted from religious reasons to the purpose of self-fulfillment.
Not only does New Year’s fall right after the holiday season, a time of festivities and eating — lots of eating — but it also sits comfortably in what many consider to be the gloomiest month of the year. This is to the detriment of starting new habits as after a short period of time, people will want to go back to their old ones, and fall back into the rut of years past. In a study conducted by Dr. Phillippa Lally, a health psychology researcher at the University of Surrey, it was said that “on average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact,” beating the common myth of 21 days by more than triple.
However, starting good habits doesn’t just have to be at the start of another rotation around the sun, as any time of the year will not be any more difficult than the beginning, giving less and less meaning to having to begin new daily routines when progress doesn’t just happen overnight. It is essentially just a balancing act of choosing to continue to work at it everyday, without losing what was there before. Progress and new habits are meant to be built upon brick by brick, layer by layer, not just plopped down in a pile. That is what leaves nothing but rubble. Therefore, instead of hashing out the same motto every single time the ball drops, it’s important to come to terms with the fact that not everyone will be perfect and accomplish goals immediately after setting them.
by Evan Parfitt
Published January 29 2024
Oshkosh West Index Volume 120 Issue IV