The Truth About New Year’s Resolutions

Jack Daly | 13th January 2016

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It is a tradition in Spain, at least, to attempt to consume twelve grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve. If you are able to eat all twelve, then it is said that you will have a good year to come and that your new year’s resolutions will be fulfilled.

Rather than stuffing grapes into my mouth on new year’s eve, however, I welcomed in 2016 surrounded by my mates whom had found themselves a kiss for midnight, whilst I was left alone, gently cradling a Sainsbury’s-own bottle of prosecco while TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ played in the background.

Like many others, I optimistically headed into the New Year with high aspirations and a healthy list of life-improving resolutions. For many people like myself, setting ourselves goals in the New Year is a great way to give yourself a kick in the behind and motivate yourself to make more positive changes in your everyday life. Whether it means less jaeger bombs on a Wednesday night, the promise not to send the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ to an ex-partner at 3am on a Saturday morning (again) or whether it’s to stop spending so much time watching cat videos on YouTube, resolutions exist as a promise to ourselves that we will do something slightly nice every once-in-a-while or at least as an attempt to just not embarrass ourselves as much!

For 2016, I made the courageous resolution to eat more healthily, specifically more fruit and vegetables. So you can therefore, understand my self-loathing when on January 4th I was pretending not to cry at ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ with my flatmate, chomping on some greasy pepperoni pizza from the local takeaway.

After I had finished persuading my flatmate that I was allergic to their perfume, thus the water-filled eyes, I realised I had broken my resolution just four days in to the New Year. I began to wonder why it is that we set ourselves inspirational achievements every 31st December only to break them within the following few days?

I remember a couple of years ago, when I had an unhealthily growing addiction for chocolate milk, I courageously set myself the new year’s resolution of limiting myself to a maximum of one glass per day. This, of course, only ended with me lying on the kitchen floor by mid-January, surrounded by seven empty chocolate milk cartons and moping in despair at what I had become.

In fact, looking back on more of my new year’s resolutions from the past few years, I’m pretty sure I broke the majority of them far before February 1st.

Perhaps it’s just the tradition of setting ourselves these resolutions each year that makes going to the gym or losing weight appear to be far easier tasks than they really are. On the other hand, maybe our resolutions are set because we feel like we always need to be improving ourselves and that the saying ‘new year, new me’ really is what many people tell themselves to have a good year. Either way, we can all at least learn from my chocolate milk crisis of 2012, that old habits do die hard.

Here’s to another chance in 2017.