People who make New Year’s Resolutions need a reality check

The first weekend of the New Year is traditionally a Puritanical one. Everyone who drunkenly committed to loosing a few kilos or decided they were going to be especially nice to their friends is resting on their laurels. Having gone a full week and a half since #newyearnewme, they’ll see their life-changing goals as suddenly achievable.

However, this weekend will separate the sheep from the goats. Those who wanted to eat healthier will be tucking into a kebab in Peckham, those doing Dry January will be drinking bacardi through a straw and by Sunday lunchtime we’ll all be so hungover that the motivational morning run wold turn into a spewfest.

Most of our New Years Resolutions will be tattered and broken promises by this time next week and we’ll all feel super bad about it on Monday. Maybe we’ll make a half-arsed attempt to stick to the promise but by Tuesday the 17th of January we’ll all be back to our shit, underachieving selves.

But why do we consistently fail to self-improve? Why do we kid ourselves every year that this time we’ll actually make a difference?

New Year’s Resolutions are as traditional as crackers and stockings. Celebrating the New Year just wouldn’t be complete without it. Maybe it’s how our minds work? The chance to wipe the slate clean and motivate us to loose the xmas bulge seems somehow more achievable when we can delay it until a change in the year.

However, we always promise ourselves too much. You can tell yourself to ‘lose weight’,  ‘eat better’ and ‘keep on top of uni and life’  but they aren’t specific. They’re loose dreams that every normal human being stresses about on a daily basis. Somehow the transition from one calendar year to the next seems to be the only moment when these idealistic hopes could ever pretend to be a possible reality.

Everybody this weekend

Because they’re unspecific, these dreams tend to be unrealistic. You can promise yourself to ‘eat better’ and have a mental image of you looking like a super-model with really great skin but let’s face the facts (and this is where it gets deep), life is too unpredictable and variable for resolutions to be made and properly stuck to and this only does us harm. If you’ve set a resolution ‘to start running’ for example, then anytime you miss a run, you’ll  feel guilty and a bit shit. You know what you’ve said to yourself, yet you just don’t feel like getting up and doing it.

Wouldn’t it be far healthier and more fulfilling if instead of ‘New Year New Me’, we just live in the moment, enjoy that moment, carpe diem and so on? Who knows what 2017 will bring? I get that we all want to remain slim and be fantastic in work and life, but why don’t you set an achievable goal to yourself when and if the need arises at any time in the year?

It’s time to accept the fact that News Years Resolutions will never work and many of us will not enter 2018 as kale-smoothie-drinking-Victoria’s Secret-angels.  Instead of getting hung up on it, go and have new experiences, met new people, do some form of exercise, drunk texted your ex less and complete another hopefully successful year of the crazy thing we call life. You don’t need a drunken commitment at the stroke of twelve to get in your way!