Every New Year, people decide to resolve an undesired trait or behavior by making a specific New Year’s resolution. These resolutions mostly involve everyday life, personality traits and daily activities. These personal resolutions are important and help to ensure that you follow through with becoming, in your eyes, a better person. The problem with these resolutions are that people rarely ever follow through with the desired changes.
It’s a new year with a couple of weeks left in the second quarter, and students are stressed about upcoming unit tests and RQAs. Studying can be instinctual for some but others may need to push themselves to open a textbook. To adopt better study habits, students need to push themselves to succeed. Many make their New Year’s resolution relate to school or work habits; however, these only work when the student actively pushes himself to change their habits.
The first step to creating New Year’s resolutions is to make them realistic. An example is a person who decides to make one about how they are going to eat healthier and work out all the time. This isn’t the most realistic for someone who eats junk food every day of the week and who has never even stepped foot into a gym before. Being an overall healthier person might be your ultimate goal, but to get there, you’re going to need to take small steps. You cannot just make a giant leap into a new lifestyle because it will be too overwhelming and you will most likely fail, thus reducing their confidence and causing you to shrink away from opportunities.
Having a concrete motivation is helpful when following through with an effective resolution. For instance, if someone’s New Year’s resolution was to obtain an “A” or “B” in their classes, they would try to maintain better study habits. Their motivation for being a better student and studying instead of going out most nights would be the high letter grades.
But ultimately, is New Years the only time to change your life? New Year’s resolutions require a ton of dedication and determination that can take up to weeks, month, or even years to achieve. Without a positive mindset, your potential lifestyle may not be so near in the future. You have to have self-efficacy and believe that you have the ability to change your life. Restricting yourself until the New Year to better your life is just absurd, every day is a new day where you can make your life better.
Article by MoCo Student staff writer Erin Ramos of Richard Montgomery High School