“New year, new me!”

I think it’s time to start setting more realistic New Year’s resolutions. A lot of people often try to set goals for themselves in the new year that they have a tiny chance of fully completing.

“I’m going to eat healthy.”

“I’m going to save more money.”

“I’m going to be a better person.”

In my opinion, these resolutions are all great things to strive towards, but they are too vague to actually “complete”. As humans we always seem to want to be able to check something off our mental lists. I think that setting goals that can essentially be checked off a list can be a bit easier to actually complete. For example, instead of saying that you’re going to eat healthy, maybe say you won’t eat dessert anymore, or you will eat 3 fruits a day. These are things that you can go to sleep saying you completed, whereas eating healthy may be too vague to be confident in.

Instead of saying you’ll save more money, say you will limit yourself to going out to dinner once a week. Instead of saying you’ll get in shape and go to the gym every day, say you’ll workout 3 or 4 days a week. There are ways to make your goals more achievable if you do it in a way that will be more easily sustainable and realistic. Choose a goal that won’t push you too far and cause you not to be able to sustain it. 21 days starts a habit. Choose something that you can see yourself actually doing for 21 days so that a habit can truly form.

And if you have some missteps along the way, don’t beat yourself up about it. We are all imperfect and the imperfections of your resolution process will be what makes your achievements seem that much greater.

Try to team up with friends or family members in order to make your goals more feasible and fun. If your goal is to lose some pounds, bring a friend along to the gym with you so that you can motivate each other.

If you take apart the word resolution, the prefix is re, which means again, and the second half is solution, or to solve. I think the idea of a "resolution" is faulty because aren't we essentially saying we are going to "solve a problem again"? I think we should come up with a better word for these resolutions because this word is setting the precedent that we will just be re-solving this issue again next year.

So let's work towards making our resolutions, solutions.