Unpopular Opinion: New Year’s resolutions are pointless

Mississauga | Ontario | Lifestyle | Opinion |

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Published January 1, 2020 at 11:15 pm

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It’s that time of year again, people are making plans for how they intend to improve their lives now that a new year is here. The only problem… they’re probably extremely similar, if not identical to last year’s.

If you are just now realizing you fall into the category of people attempting the same New Year’s resolutions over and over, you might be wondering why.

The simple answer is: they’re pointless and they don’t work.

According to recent studies, 75 per cent of people don’t even stick to their resolutions beyond the first month, and less than 10 per cent of people actually stick to them for the full year.

There are several reasons why this is the case.

For starters, many people bite off more than they can chew so to speak, and attempt to make changes that are way too radical in too short a time span. For example, people who have smoked for years who intend to suddenly quit cold turkey—this sort of resolution is destined to fail because it’s simply not possible to achieve such a feat immediately.

Another reason so many resolutions fail is because they’re too vague. One of the most common resolutions people make is to get in shape. However, a resolution this vague is hard to achieve because it’s hard to set up a plan for how to go about actually making it happen.

‘Getting in shape’ can mean a myriad of different things and be achieved in a large number of ways.

But, the biggest reason New Year’s resolutions are terrible and never work is because of how many days it takes to stick to them—a year is a long time, and many people feel once they miss out on doing what they resolved to do for a couple of days in a row, they give up on it entirely.

Think about it—there are 365 days in a year; can you think of a single thing you do on each and every one of them?
Probably not.

So, rather than trying (and probably failing) to stick to a resolution for the full year, why not try to come up with a seven-day plan—something you can restart if it doesn’t work, or build on if it does.

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