The New Year’s Resolution

I was half listening to an article on the radio about New Year’s Resolutions, which was asking people to let them know how quickly they gave up on theirs.  It really did seem quite sad that we believe that resolutions are something not to be achieved.  However, when it comes to New Year Resolutions, the truth is, by mid-January many of us have given up and here, in February, they are just a distant passing thought.

So how did we get here?

Somewhere between another Christmas mince pie and the 1^st January hangover we have a light bulb moment as to how our lives will change at the stroke of midnight when a New Year begins.  We’ve stuffed yourself on every imaginable version of cold turkey, certain that someone else must have eaten that big tin of chocolate, nibbled a piece of Christmas cake every time we walked past it and convinced ourselves that the orange juice in your Bucks Fizz was keeping your vitamin C levels up.

Then we go for a walk – by the river, through the woods or to the nearest off-license to stock up for the coming New Year celebrations.  All that food is making us a little slower than usual.  And there it is – that voice in our heads that says “next year will be different.”  Yes, next year I will get fit…give up smoking…lose weight…get out of that job we really don’t like…

And so the annual tradition of setting our New Year’s resolution begins with a determination that this year we will stick to it.

And, if we’re really firm, we might just get past the 5^th January without a cigarette.  However, by 15^th January comes along we’re beating ourselves up for having failed yet again.  And now it is February, we struggle to remember what our resolutions was.

So, why do we set New Year’s resolutions that so many of us give up on?

After all, when we make our resolution a part of us really wants to keep them.  At heart we all know that our lives would be healthier, wealthier, happier if we had kept with it.  We all have things that we aspire to, dreams we want to come true and an undeniable belief that there’s always room for improvement in any life.  And it can happen.  We simply need to work on it all year round, not just thinking about it at the turn of the year.

So, over the next few weeks, there’s going to be a short series of articles on how we make our resolutions become reality!