As we enter the new year, people worldwide establish New Year’s resolutions to better themselves. New Year’s resolutions are nearly 4,000 years old, and people have tried to keep up with them since Mesopotamia and Babylon.
Some of you may have already given up on your New Year’s resolutions. We are almost 20 days into 2025, and with everything that life and the new semester have thrown at us, it can be challenging to maintain our goals.
A problem that many of us face is that we are overly ambitious. It is easy to look at social media, see these supposedly “perfect lives,” and want to reform our entire lives to become this idealized version of ourselves. We write down countless resolutions that we cannot possibly keep, and then we give up on them shortly into the new year. In addition, as college students, we have limited time outside of classes and academics, which makes it increasingly more difficult to keep these goals.
The trick to making New Year’s resolutions that you can keep is being specific, not taking on more than you can handle, and giving yourself time.
Being too broad is a significant problem when creating these resolutions. For example, instead of simply stating that you will “exercise more,” take time to examine what that entails to make it more attainable as a college student. Instead, set a goal like exercising for 30 minutes a day or running around campus once a week.
In addition, the main thing that makes New Year’s resolutions unattainable is making too many. Instead of choosing ten things you want to do more, better or less this year, find the three most important ones to you and focus on that. Not only does creating an abundance of resolutions not work, but you must also consider what you could feasibly do. For instance, if you have never run a 5K, don’t make it your resolution to run a marathon.
Finally, giving yourself time to develop these resolutions into habits is incredibly important. Forming habits does not take much time out of your day-to-day life — you just have to be consistent in ensuring you do them daily.
Even though we have already entered the new year, it is never too late to revise your resolutions into ones you can keep and consciously try to achieve.
Lauren Douda is a freshman secondary education and English major from Lexington, South Carolina. Lauren can be reached at [email protected].
