New Year’s Resolutions

All around the world, those who observe the Gregorian calendar hail January 1st as the dawn of a new year. One of the oldest New Year’s traditions still widely celebrated today (albeit hailing from a different calendar altogether, and therefore occuring during a different time of year) is the creation of New Year’s Resolutions. These personal goals can be traced back to the time of the Babylonian Empire, in which the planting of crops in mid-March marked a new year which would be honored with a 12-day festival called Akitu, as well as with promises to their gods to repay debts and return borrowed items. If the promises were kept, it was believed that the gods would look favorably upon the harvest and any other endeavors in the coming year. If not, the gods would send down heavy consequences until the next year, which offered a chance of redemption.

While our present-day custom of New Years Resolutions does not carry as much religious significance as in the Babylonian Empire, setting resolutions can still impact people in negative ways. As anyone who has set New Year’s Resolutions knows, it can be very difficult to maintain those personal goals for a few weeks, much less an entire year. For one, the fear of failure can often be a greater obstacle than motivator to achieving New Year’s Resolutions, keeping many from persisting in their efforts. More prominently, however, is the influence of ironic mental control over our behaviors and decisions. Ironic mental control is the theory that a person is more likely to think or do a certain thing when attempting to deliberately suppress the thought. Perhaps writer Fyodor Dostoevsky expressed this concept best when, in his “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”, he said “Try not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Students can certainly attest to the experience of attempting to avoid obsessing over an upcoming test, only to have their worries multiply. This same theory applies to New Year’s Resolutions as well. When deliberately exercising control over previously established habits, such as may occur with a New Year’s Resolution to stop eating junk food, the desire to give in to the habit increases in strength. Considering that a mere 8% of people who make New Year’s Resolutions keep them, this science is certainly reliable and should serve as a caution to anybody hoping to use New Year’s Resolutions as a launch pad into a new self.

Since making New Year’s Resolutions is proven, year after year, to be unsuccessful at achieving goals, what can we do instead? Senior Loryn Camp offers her advice: “I think a lot of people create New Year’s Resolutions just to say you have them… but when you make those resolutions an actual, personal goal, it isn’t a waste of time anymore because they’re commitments that you work towards continually”. Her words are also backed by scientific fact: since ironic mental control is based upon the avoidance of a thought or behavior, creating resolutions that are constructive and gradual rather than resolutions that expect to immediately end a behavior see higher rates of success. A positive resolution in which a person chooses to do something is more likely to succeed than a negative resolution in which a person tries not to something and then must contend with ironic mental control, as these resolutions require more effort to avoid the behavior than the positive resolutions require to add a new behavior.