Why new year’s resolutions suck!

So it’s that time of the year: “new year, new me”.

This isn’t a motivational blog about how to organise your time, your resolutions or which one of the many apps that help you track your progress, you should download. A simple internet search will take you there.

This is my attempt at explaining that a new year will not transform you into a new you. Life isn’t a fairy tale where at the stroke of midnight a magical transformation takes place.

The resolutions:

Every year, since I can remember I would join my mother and then my friends in making new year’s resolutions.

Same stuff every year:

· Lose weight

· Exercise 5 times a week/do yoga every week

· Drink more water & eat healthier (unaware that healthy doesn’t mean salad as a side dish to junk food)

· Spend less time playing games

· Spend less time scrolling aimlessly on Instagram, starring at a screen

· Do something ‘productive’ — not yet having defined what this productive activity was.

These vague resolutions that we probably read on some celebrity magazines as a kid or heard our mothers, aunts, older cousins say growing up. When is the deadline for these vague resolutions? Who decides what the deadline is anyway?

These vague resolutions are exactly that: vague and essentially not mine. They have been influenced or adopted by me after I heard or saw them.

The failure:

A week or two later I have moved on with my life and the new year’s resolution automatically gets stored to be re-used for the next new year. I feel guilty for giving up so quickly and then forgetting about that guilt just as quickly as I enjoy a chocolate biscuit or ten! And I know I’m not alone in this. Me, along with my friends, my mum and many other people jumped on the “new year, new me” bandwagon and made these vague resolutions.

Why did I fail to meet these resolutions, where did the motivation I felt on January 1st go? Was it simply that they were vague? They weren’t specific or well planned out? Would giving them a deadline make it any less vague? Or was it that I thought at the stroke of midnight a magical transformation will take place?

It was perhaps a combination of these things, I admit being a millennial the end product of the resolution is more attractive than the slow work I know I would have to put into it. The results need to be delivered quick and I have that Insta perfect images loaded with ease and little to no effort.

Now what?

Well I never got that Insta perfect picture last year, or the year before that or even before “Insta perfect picture” was a concept. I never got that satisfaction of completing a new year’s resolution so I can’t talk about how amazing it felt and so we just need to find the motivation (blah blah blah!).

Upon reflection what I did realise over the years was that when I really wanted or needed a change I made that resolution really specific to myself and the change required, with no “Insta perfect picture” unfortunately. And the resolution was not set at the start of the year either, I simply set it when I knew I needed to make a change or a situation arose that required it to happen.

Simply put: new year does not equate to new you, there is nothing wrong with the old you! So instead, just enjoy your chocolate biscuit (or 10 if you really want), don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself at the start of the year and if you really want to make any changes then you don’t have to wait around for the new year.

Ideally just savour the fact that you’ve successfully survived and navigated the holiday period with family members you only reserve to see on “special occasions”.