Health + Wellness

New Year, same you: Why you should quit making resolutions

Rachel Finan, health + wellness editor| February 21, 2021

New Year’s resolutions have become an endless cycle of self-help journals and new workout equipment.

New Year’s resolutions are exhausting. Enough with people using their new fitness goals to rationalize spending money on workout gear they’ll never use, people vowing to eat healthy yet ending up with a bunch of new protein powders they hate and people giving up screen time only to binge watch the next Netflix series that comes out.

As January has come to its end, so have the long lists of resolutions people meticulously scrawled into their brand new self-help journals. According to U.S News, by February 80 percent of these resolutions have failed. Frankly, after a year like 2020, the only acceptable resolution should be to have none at all. Resolutions are overrated. Below are all the reasons why people should quit making them.

1. If you have to wait until the first of the year to put your plan into action, it isn’t truly something you’re committed to.

Don’t get me wrong, having a specific date you can hold yourself accountable to is great in theory, but more often than not it becomes an excuse to delay progress. If you mess up your goal for this year then you can push it back to 2022, and the cycle becomes endless.

2. Companies just want your money

Each year as calendars flip from December to January, companies look at the hopeful resolutioners as the marketing jackpot. With each person promising to focus on themselves this year, another self-help book is sold. However, I promise you: the answer to how to take care of yourself probably doesn’t lie in a book with cuss words in the title to pack a punch. Additionally, those eye catchingly packaged post-workout powders are more likely to be filled with chemicals than be the solution to your health and wellness needs.

3. They’re generic

People have gotten so used to needing a resolution they could practically copy and paste them each year. If you’re getting your resolutions off Pinterest, they aren’t really catered to you and your specific aspirations.The yearly staples of “being more organized,” “eating whole foods,” and “losing weight” aren’t specific to you as a person and therefore will make it hard to know where to start.

4.They aren’t made of attainable steps

With people proudly sharing their resolutions, you’re more likely to shoot a little too high in making your own. Basically, you’re setting yourself up for failure. An attainable goal with consistent progress checks is usually a pretty good place to start. Think of what you want to accomplish, and then break it down into each step it will take to get there. This sounds cliche, but goals are like a ladder and each step is the rungs it will take to get you to the top. By breaking it down it makes it a whole lot easier than trying to get to the end goal right away.

5. Just do it

Stop making it a resolution. This endless marketing and lack of self-awareness is exhausting, and frankly annoys the living daylights out of the non-resolutioners of the world. It all comes down to attitude; instead of picturing yourself as a new person next year be consistently proactive in tackling who you want to be. Goal making doesn’t need to be a consumeristic and generic practice, and by focusing more on what you want instead of buying into the idea of resolution making you are more likely to be the person who tackles what’s in their way each and every day.