Realizing New Year’s resolutions

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Esther Son, Staff Writer

The start of a new year allows people to reflect on their past selves and move forward to make positive changes in their lives.

According to the American Psychological Association, failure to meet your New Year’s resolutions can cause anxiety and frustration. This is why it’s important to make realistic resolutions instead of ones that are nearly impossible to achieve.

Beginning with more reasonable goals will make it easier for an individual to reach his or her desired results. For instance, if your goal is to lead a healthier lifestyle, then going to the gym a few days a week instead of watching TV or switching out a bag of potato chips with a granola bar would be a better way to start than going to the gym every day or skipping an entire meal.

According to the APA, changing one thing at a time and moving past mistakes are both crucial aspects of accomplishing New Year’s resolutions. Unhealthy habits tend to grow over time and they usually don’t go away easily, so changing one thing at a time instead of attempting to do everything at once is imperative. Timothy A. Pychyl, a psychology professor from Carleton University, wrote about this topic in his piece “The Power of Habit.”

“Breaking habits requires establishing a new behavioral pattern, a new prepotent response; a new habit,” Pychyl wrote in Psychology Today.

Another element that the APA considers crucial to achieving your goals for the New Year is moving past your mistakes. If you ate at a fast food restaurant instead of making a turkey wrap or did three sets of squats instead of four, don’t obsess over those trivial slipups. Mistakes are likely to happen, so learning to move past them and keep going are necessary in attaining your ultimate goal.

Whether the goal is weight loss or becoming a better person, everyone experiences setbacks during his or her journey toward checking off his or her New Year’s resolutions. The resolve to continue on is what determines the final outcome of a person’s New Year’s resolutions.