“New year, new me” flooded social media and echoed through public spaces after the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve. I’m sure most people have said they’re going to be new versions of themselves internally too.
Every year, people make resolutions in the spirit of the new year and every year, they stop trying to maintain those goals within two weeks of Jan. 1. For most people, the stress of life catches up to them and it’s impossible to maintain the goals they set. Then comes the intense wave of self-hatred, which doesn’t really solve the issue, but it continues throughout the year and makes functioning as a human being much harder than it would’ve been had the perhaps unrealistic and unsustainable goal not existed in the first place.
This is absolutely not to say that having goals and resolutions is bad. This is also not to say that this happens to everyone. I applaud anyone who can be disciplined and consistent enough to not let life get in the way of their goals.
This is to say, however, that the new year almost always brings an unrealistic and dangerous standard of how people should live their lives. I hear people say they’re going on a diet for their “summer body” or striving to look like that one model they saw on their Instagram feed. I can agree that maintaining healthy habits is, after all, beneficial and important to a person’s physical and mental well-being. The key words, though, are “healthy habits.”
My goal for this year was to get back in shape. If I end it there, that sounds like a perfectly normal and reasonable goal. When I started adding things to that, like going on a 1,000-calorie diet, doing intense exercise everyday for at least 75 days, walking 10,000 steps a day, etc., I ended up pushing myself so hard that I got physically ill and ended up weaker than when I started. My question is, why and how do we turn perfectly reasonable expectations of ourselves into ones that harm us in the end?
I think a lot of the reason why people make themselves sick over losing weight and sticking to unrealistic goals is because society asks them to. I jumped into doing intense cardio after not exercising consistently for a year because I felt like if I didn’t lose a massive amount of weight by May, I’d have done it all for nothing. I think it has so much to do with the fact that that’s how people have acted about others setting healthy goals for themselves. Everything has to be “all or nothing.” In the modern day, New Year’s resolutions that were once feasible have become dangerous.
The reality is that people have lives and goals like “a summer body” are not nearly as easy and attainable in four months as people make them out to be. I also argue that the fact that we have goals that are specifically for things like “summer bodies,” with the intent to receive outside validation and acceptance makes attaining those goals harder than they would have been had we set them just for ourselves. When I set the goal to get in shape, it wasn’t because I wanted to feel happier. It was because I wanted to look skinnier. The motivation to go to the gym every day diminished because I would look in the mirror and see no progress — which doesn’t happen in a week regardless — and I would completely forget the fact that I am bettering myself even if the mirror didn’t show it.
In complete honesty, writing this is what’s making me realize what I’ve been doing is actually more unhealthy than not doing anything in the first place. And sadly, I think that’s true for most people and their New Year’s resolutions.
If you are reading this and you find yourself agreeing with what I’m saying, then I’m here to tell you that it is ok if you do not meet your resolutions. Whether your goal is to read more, practice better self-care, pay attention in class more or to get in shape, it is completely ok if life gets in the way. If you lose motivation because you’re not in the same mindset you were when you started, that’s ok. If you get to June and you’ve only read one book, that’s ok too.
The biggest piece of advice I could give anyone is that it is truly not the end of the world if you slip up. Nobody will hate you for taking a break from the gym, or taking a mental health day from class, or forgetting to turn one assignment in one time. The most important part of all of this is that you are still you at the end of the day, and you’ll lose yourself trying to maintain something you physically cannot continue.
I hope for nothing but the most successful year for everyone, resolutions or not. You are no less a person than your peer who seems to have it all figured out, because the truth is that they probably don’t.
Welcome back. Go Gators.