Plenty of people are making their In and Out lists for the New Year. This begs the question: Are classic New Year’s Resolutions unbearably passé? Or are they an indispensable part of how we celebrate a new beginning? Reporter Mika Ellison has the story.
Mika Ellison: Turning over a new leaf for the new year is a tradition that goes back to Ancient Rome and Babylon. However, in the modern age, people can be a bit more cynical. Some have even dubbed January 17th “Ditch Your New Year’s Resolution Day.” So are New Year’s Resolutions still relevant? And what role do they play in our increasingly connected society?
BH: New Year’s resolution is a commitment for a year. It’s a moment of reflection, and it lets people figure out what they care about and what they want to express, what they value, and how they want to change their lives or themselves to align with those values.
That was researcher Blake Hallinan. They’re a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studying the cross-cultural values of social media. They are also one of three experts I spoke to who have studied resolutions.
Let’s start off with Dr. John Norcross, a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton, who has conducted research on how successful our resolutions actually are. In an email, he wrote that, contrary to popular belief, 40 to 44 percent of people who make resolutions are successful six months after making them.
40 percent is higher than you might expect, but it still means the majority of people aren’t sticking to their pledges. So, is there something special about the people, or resolutions, that manage to make it? It might have something to do with the way you phrase it.
Martin Oscarsson is a licensed psychologist and doctoral student at Stockholm University. He conducted a yearlong study on New Year’s Resolutions. The study concluded that approach-oriented goals, rather than avoidance-oriented goals, are more successful. In other words, you should phrase your resolution in terms of what you want to do more of, rather than what you don’t want to do.
While Oscarsson didn’t aim to find WHY approach oriented goals are more successful, he has a couple theories.
Martin Oscarsson: Resolutions such as, “I’m going to stress less in 2025,” gives very little information about what to actually do in order to succeed. So when we flip it and phrase that in terms of approach, instead, you could consider what you would do more of if you stress less. Maybe you would spend more time with your family or with friends. Maybe you would read more books, maybe you would exercise more, and that then that gives you maybe a whole list of activities to try to do more of in 2025, or the year after that, to actually bring you closer to something that’s probably underlying that you want to achieve.
Oscarsson’s study also found that the majority of participants actually were successful in their resolutions. It’s possibly because of how they measured success.
MO: One thing we did that I think people should consider is that we didn’t have a dichotomous outcome measure of success. …So maybe you did fail with quitting smoking in March, maybe failed again in July, but by December, you had, all things considered, made a great change in your intended direction. Then, then, then that would qualify you as successful in our study.
Norcross’ advice for sticking to your resolution supports that: treating a slip-up as a total failure falls into what he calls the “Abstinence Violation Effect.” That’s the idea that one slip proves that keeping the resolution is impossible. He advises sticking to the idea that “a slip is not a fall.”
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New Year’s Resolutions tend to be intensely personal. But sharing our resolutions with friends, family and the Internet has also become a sort of yearly ritual.
In 2020, Hallinan and their team scraped tweets in five different languages about New Year’s resolutions and studied them. They found a surprising new trend: resolutions formatted around self-acceptance, rather than self-improvement.
BH: The self acceptance is a pushback against the conventional resolutions: “You have to go out more, you have to do all of these things.” And instead takes the form and plays with it, to think about changing your relationship with yourself rather than changing what your behavior is.
Weinberg junior Sophie Pichardo’s resolution wasn’t necessarily about self-acceptance, but it matched the energy of Hallinan’s findings.
Sophie Pichardo: Hi, I’m Sophie. My New Year’s resolution is to find a fun new year’s resolution to do every month.
She echoes the idea that resolutions shouldn’t necessarily be only to make yourself better.
Mika Ellison [on tape]: Do you believe in New Year’s resolutions?
SP: yes, I think, though not if they’re punishments and done for the wrong reasons.
Overall, it seems that instead of fading into the past, New Year’s resolutions are changing. Rather than a strict rule to follow or a source of shame, they might provide a surprising break, even from the cynicism of Twitter.
BH: a lot of the conversations are quite supportive. People are excited to hear that it’s a way of sharing what your resolution is as a way of disclosing yourself. And people like that join into that… And so, you know, there might be practical benefits from talking about it, but even if it doesn’t help you make the resolution, it still provides an opportunity to share a sense of who you are, have conversations, to get to know the people around you.
Oscarsson said that his study changed his idea of the potential of a resolution as well.
MO: I feel like my perception on New Year’s solutions was that it is as much of a tradition to fail at them as it is to have any to begin with. But looking at our data, we see that that need not be the case. So my perception now is that new solutions can be a great way of achieving your personal goals and making changes in behavior, if you do them right.
Weinberg junior Sophie Zhang’s resolution fits that perception.
Sophie Zhang: I would like to go to the gym. My roommate says that the gym overflows every January to February with people who have New Year’s resolutions to go to the gym. And I aspire to be one of those people.
So it turns out that New Year’s Resolutions, much like those new gym people, are sticking around. And rather than make fun of those hopeful wannabes, the science says that it might be better for all of us if we join them.
For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
