As we are finishing the second week of 2025, have any of you created New Years resolutions? I know I have. Part of the process for making my resolutions is looking back on 2024. As I do this, I decide what I want to leave behind. Not only what I want to let go, but what I want to welcome in the New Year. The easiest way you can do this is just write it down on a piece of paper. I have a teacher who has us write down what we want to leave behind in the past year, rip it up, and throw it away! It truly is this easy.
According to the top New Year’s Resolutions Statistics by Drive Research, 3 in 10 Americans made a resolution in 2024, 62% of those making resolutions feel pressured to do so, and only 9% of people complete their resolution throughout the year. The true question behind these statistics is, are your resolutions truly achievable? Many people want to completely change their lifestyle. Such as cutting out fast food, working out every day, or reading too many books. Our bodies and minds can’t respond to these changes this quickly the way we want them to. Instead, think about making resolutions that are easier for us to reach and maintain. Then you can grow them from there.
For me personally, I believe New Year’s resolutions are beneficial to us in the sense that they can make people excited for what’s to come. At the same time, many people will reach the end of the year and be disappointed in themselves because they feel they didn’t achieve their goals. Society is slowly getting stuck in a cycle of feeling like they failed at the end of the year, and making those same unreachable goals at the beginning of the year. We must learn to break that cycle, and I believe 2025 is the year for just that. We reached the halfway mark of the decade, take control of your life because we all know these past couple of years have flown by.
What I hope you take from reading this is that you will think about what changes you can make when making your resolutions. You don’t have to change your life right away; you have the whole year.