Making New Year’s resolutions should still be practiced
By Naomi Ambrose, Staff Writer
Another new year is here. Can you guess what else is here as well? If your answer is that it’s another year to question the relevance of making New Year’s resolutions, I would like to congratulate you. However, if you agree that making New Year’s resolutions remains important, I’m with you.
While it may be worthwhile to appreciate both sides, I’d like to focus on the latter. New Year’s resolutions deserve to be celebrated and I believe that they don’t get enough credit for their importance.
New Year’s resolutions are great ways to motivate yourself and there’s no better time to start a goal than at the beginning of the new year. It can be a rewarding experience to follow through with a goal you make. If you make a promise to yourself to go to the gym at least three times a week, you’re probably excited at envisioning the health benefits you’ll get from a good gym workout. Additionally, when you follow through with your goal, you’ll feel more confident in yourself. As another example, if you made a resolution to do some more volunteering, you’ll probably feel happy to know that you’ll be helping someone or some cause that you care about.
If you didn’t decide to make one of those resolutions, or any resolutions for that matter, you won’t have that chance to experience the joy and sense of fulfillment that one could get from making a goal and sticking to it.
Making New Year’s resolutions is also an excellent way to develop your follow-through skills and stick-to-itiveness. Let’s say that this year, you told yourself that you’d make a greater effort to perform a task such as quitting smoking or eating healthier. These are tasks that many people have as their goals but rarely actually decide to do. By committing to this task in the form of a resolution, even temporarily, you’ll be happier with yourself that you followed through, whether it was for a few weeks or months.
You can also think about who else would be happy with that resolution—such as your friends, significant others, and your family.
New Year’s resolutions are also excellent tools for self-reflection. Sticking to your desire to go to the gym or eating better shows to yourself that you care about your health and well-being. You are taking some time to think about the extent to which you value your health or time—a question that may ultimately help you to perform your work, class tasks, or projects to the best of your ability and lead to a higher overall quality of life
It’s important to make goals for yourself and to stick to them, which is what New Year’s resolutions celebrate. If you’ve given up on making these resolutions, it’s my hope that you’ll reconsider—or at least be inclined to make them next year.
