It’s a new year, and for us college students a new semester. With this fresh start, typically many of us pull out a pen and paper, their notes app, or whatever other writing platform and jot down their resolutions for the new year. Whether they be academic, personal, or work related, we all have goals we want to accomplish. Those aspirations too better ourselves by spending less time on our phones, eating cleaner, the list goes on and on. The idea of resolutions sounds great in theory, and might work for a lot of people. But for me, I have come to hate resolutions after years of making them. Each January I think back to the resolutions I made a year prior and they just seem rather vague and rather unimportant. I have chosen to stop making resolutions and here’s why.
While I would call myself a goal oriented person, I prefer smaller, more achievable goals. If I set five small goals for the day, I can accomplish all of them and feel satisfied with my day. If I set five huge goals that I want to accomplish by the end of the year, I feel stressed and overwhelmed. Making goals that I feel like I need to reach by the end of the year makes the new year feel daunting and automatically induces stress. Instead, having goals that I would like to reach in the near future takes off that pressure of a “due date”.
The person that I am when I write those resolutions at the start of the year is not the same person that I will be a year from then or even a month from them. We as people are constantly changing and therefore so are our goals. The things that I prioritize and want to accomplish often change quite a bit over time. I like to make different goals for different times in my life tailored to who I am at the time.
In today’s climate everyone is so wired that we rarely take time to slow down. We are in a constant state of hurry, hurry to accomplish goals specifically. We are always working towards one thing, and the second we do that thing we start on the next. It keeps us from truly being in the present. Instead of trying to hustle every single day to complete my next goal, I like to take my days slower and just appreciate what I already have and what I have now come to accomplish.
Whether or not you write down and carry out your own resolutions, I hope you might think about reframing your goals this year and have a great start to the New Year!