Written for Her Campus Leeds
New Year’s resolutions; a lot of us make them, and a
majority of us seem to end up breaking them.
I don’t even remember if I made a resolution at the beginning of 2012…if
I did, I doubt I kept it. But this year, I decided to make an effort, and wrote
quite a long list of resolutions, which can all broadly be summarised as “utilise
the time you have”. A big part of that was waking up and going to bed at a
reasonable hour (with nights out as an exception, of course). I find if I get
up at seven or eight I can do so much more with my day, than if I wake up at twelve
and then stay awake till three in the morning.
And I’ve already failed. Of the sixteen days we’ve day of
2013 (as of when I’m writing this), I’ve ended up sleeping in on maybe a third
of them. And I’ve failed at other parts of my resolution too; I’ve
procrastinated, wasted time; done all of that.
But I don’t see this as outright failure. Because for me,
this isn’t some sudden change I expected to happen as soon as they let off the
fireworks at 00:00 on 1st January 2013. I’m instead trying to see my
New Year’s resolutions for 2013 as a process.
Because it’s the perception of New Year’s resolutions as
something that you must change about yourself the second the New Year rolls in
that makes them so impossible to stick to. For a lot of people, their
resolutions are going to involve changing months, even years’ worth of bad
habits. If you’ve pledged to eat healthily of course you’re going to cave and
eat pizza at some point because up until the beginning of that year you were
used to just eating pizza whenever you wanted to.
If we see New Year’s resolutions as these static,
immovable things that we must stick to religiously from the first day of the
year then when we do inevitably break them…we just give up. But then that means,
because you had one pizza, you’re not going to make the effort to eat healthy
for the rest of the year; because you stayed in bed instead of going to the gym
that one time, you’re not going to exercise for the rest of the year.
Breaking our resolutions should be seen as stumbling
blocks, rather than outright failures. I’ve learnt from the times I didn’t
manage to get out of bed in the morning; I now put my alarm across the room so
I have to get out of bed to turn it off (although now I seem to have developed
the habit of getting out of bed, turning it off, and getting straight back into
bed…may need to work on that!). And more importantly, having this goal has
motivated me to get out of bed on the days that I have managed to get up early. It’s helped me stop scrolling through
tumblr and actually do some work on many occasions. Despite the many times I’ve
failed so far, I am making progress.
Of course, there’s something quite alluring about the
static fail-once-and-you-quit resolution. It means you can try and be a
“better” person, but you don’t have to sustain that energy and effort
throughout the year. But I don’t want to treat New Year’s resolutions as an
exercise in collective failure. I actually want to be a more productive person;
and if I really want to, by the end of 2013, be properly in the habit of waking
up early, of not procrastinating, of really utilising the time I have…then I
have to accept I won’t always succeed at the beginning of the year.
So here’s to seeing New Year’s resolutions as a learning
curve and to not giving up because of initial failures, to working to break bad
habits and to actually being happier/healthier/more productive/a snappier
dresser/whatever you want to be in 2013.
