According to the University of Scranton Journal of Clinical Psychology, 45 percent of Americans frequently make New Year’s resolutions, with an underwhelming 8 percent who are ultimately successful in maintaining these resolutions.
Making resolutions only tends to work for those few days, or maybe even few weeks, in the beginning of January. We feel like we are responsible for living this life to the fullest and that any moment spent doing anything other than being a productive member of society is useless.
But then we’re back on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, mindlessly scrolling through news feeds and timelines and pictures, relentlessly comparing and judging and effectively negating those few days or weeks of raw motivation.
I’d like to submit to you that the problem isn’t the resolutions we’re making, but when we’re deciding to make them.
Change is hard. There’s no question about that. Using the allure of a new year as motivation to turn over a new leaf and change some of those less-than-ideal habits that you’ve picked up over the past year is a safe way to start a change.
The thing is that lasting change starts from within and if lasting change is the desired goal, why do we wait for an external holiday to jump-start our efforts? We find ourselves struggling in the latter months of the year and, rather than stopping and re-evaluating in the moment, we toss it up to something we’ll “fix in the new year.”
After all, waiting for the new year is the “perfect moment” to make a change. We’ll be ready then, we say.
Hold that thought and entertain this one: “If you wait to do everything until you’re sure that it’s right, you’ll probably never do much of anything.” That’s a small piece of wisdom courtesy of Lemony Snicket, who basically just called us out for being scared.
Maybe it’s just me (and Lemony), but I think that we are scared. We want to be motivated, we want to be productive, and, more than anything, we want to be happy. Not long after getting that motivation-rush I think that a lot of people feel an immense responsibility to live “correctly,” only to realize that they don’t know exactly how to do so. It is in these moments of uncertainty that we learn the most about ourselves, but with so much information available at the click of a mouse or the tap of an app there’s an equal amount of fear that we might miss something.
There's the fear that we aren’t quite living up to our friends with their mansions in the Hamptons or that we won’t quite do anything perfectly so, honestly, what’s the point of trying at all?
I say avoid the trap of trying to create a perfect “new you” at the turn of the new year. Why not spend the hours leading up to the annual change reflecting on the past year without feeling the added pressure of having to make a resolution to change?
It’s a lot like going to a concert and recording the whole thing through your phone because you just have to be able to watch it later. Why can’t you just experience the concert in the moment? We’re so focused on how we’re going to change ourselves in the upcoming year that we forget to be present and give the previous year a proper send-off.
Hold off on those resolutions for now. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Try something new with the ones who you love as you close out a year most certainly filled with cavernous ups and downs.
Be present right here, right now. Then, in a moment when you find yourself unwilling or not ready to make a change, push through and do something--anything--differently. It's the bravest thing that any of us can do.
