So, why are New Year’s resolutions so prevalent and observed in many parts of the world? The short answer is that they’re important and healthy.
One of the reasons has already been hinted at in the introduction and that is that resolutions can provide a fresh start. “New Year, new me”, after all.
The new year is like hitting kind of a reset button, which allows you to set new goals (or pretend they’re new, but they’re actually old, just needed a revisit). Whatever the case, it’s a nice symbolic time to reflect and refocus your priorities in life. And with that, you gain more clarity, you finally have a direction to work towards, which in turn allows you to plan and be prepared for the challenges ahead.
If anything, resolutions can make us feel good. Well, all right, completing resolutions can make us feel good. It’s the same as accomplishing anything important, except this time around you’re doing this for you.
And besides feeling like a million bucks (inflation not adjusted), you will actually get something done which in turn should improve your life. And who knows, you might end up doing more.
Would you be surprised to learn that New Year’s resolutions have been around for roughly 4,000 years? Though, it wasn’t in January, but rather in March because crops.
The celebration would last 12 days, they’d crown a new king or reaffirm their loyalty to the old one, they’d promise the gods they’d pay their debts, return anything borrowed and whatnot, not unlike how folks do resolutions today.
Now, you can joke about how even after 4,000 years humanity is still making promises of change. But it’s not uncommon for us to break promises made to ourselves.
You see, many of us lose our resolve when we’re stressed or tired. It’s just how our brain is wired. These promises to ourselves are about self-discipline, and it’s easy to shut that part of the brain down with worry and exhaustion.
There’s this thing called executive function—a set of mental skills like working memory, flexible thinking and self control. Stress and tiredness shuts those down after a hard day’s work and so it becomes very naturally tempting to just skip a beat. Or two. Or all of them—who needs to go to the gym? I’m not in that bad of a shape, right? Right!?
