Many of us are disillusioned with the idea of resolutions due to their high failure rates, almost canceling out the idea of creating new resolutions. Human behavior research states that approximately 40% of Americans formally set a New Year’s resolution. Failure rates are not very encouraging either, with approximately 80% of participants failing by the first month.
However, there’s still value in the concept of self-actualization in the new year. The fresh slate of the new year and coining a resolution is almost alluring, with this year marking the turn of the decade into the 2020s. It’s almost a timeless practice, with the first recorded resolutions going back as far as the ancient Babylonian empire. I believe we need to redefine resolutions into habits so that we can increase their accessibility and success rates.
One of the biggest points that I learned in my linguistics class last semester was that words matter. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, for example, explains to us that language shapes our perception of our world, and I believe language is a direct cause of why our resolutions fail.
Resolution, by definition, is the firm determination to start or stop something. What is lacking in the term is the journey toward said resolution. Vaguely phrasing our resolutions, for example saying, “This year I’m going to lose weight,” leaves us with no sense of direction.
Many New Year’s resolution articles will advise readers to relabel New Year’s resolutions to goals, but while I do believe goals to be an improvement from the term “resolution,” goals themselves have their own set of problems. Goals tend to be framed very specifically, such as, “Every morning before work, I’m going to go to the gym and run a mile,” but the disillusionment now comes from the required expectation.
Life, as we all know, is never fully predictable. There will be days where we cannot go to the gym due to work or class, days where we go hang out with friends at the mall and splurge on a fit, and days where we decide to eat at the nearby Taco Bell. The connotative meaning of goals disallows us to have breathing room in our often hectic lives. There’s conflicting advice on how to frame New Year’s goals floating around, from going extremely specific to having a “year word” to avoid breaking said goals. Goals, in my opinion, are therefore not the answer to this.
Habits, by definition, are the regular tendency to perform an activity. This solves the problem of implied specificity that goals have, and habits imply an activity that is sufficiently run so it doesn’t feel abstract anymore. Labeling our resolutions as, “I’m going to make a habit out of going to the gym,” leaves us with leg room to deviate from our set resolution and inherently demands a rigid enough schedule that we create a sort of plan.
Ditching the terminology of resolutions and goals for habits elevates us from focusing on the goal and rather places more value on the action. The journey is ultimately what is important when we better ourselves in the new year, so it’s about time we focus more on that process.
Most importantly, switching from resolutions to habits makes us focus more on the process of self-improvement. Breaking or making a habit is less about creating a new self but about building on and reexamining what already exists. That sparks a reflection on whether our goal comes from personal desire or from what we feel pressured to work on. Are we truly trying to better ourselves, or are we jumping on social norms regarding, for example, our weight? Once we truly find what we want to work on, the journey will not be as difficult to complete.
