Sticking to New Year's Resolutions
By Joanna, age 20, South Wales, United Kingdom
It always seems to be that I find a huge list of things that I resolve to correct in the New Year, and by the second week of January they've all been forgotten. Gallons of chocolate will have been eaten after pledging that I'd eat healthily. Studying will have been left on the back burner after swearing that I'd be really committed and start revision super early this year. The gym will be left unvisited after vowing to go there frequently. You get the idea. Resolutions are hard to stick to.
There are a few different ways of keeping the changes you wanted to make back at the beginning of the year. Sometimes writing yourself a schedule or a plan will help with things like going to the gym or taking up a new hobby. If your New Year's Resolution involves joining a new club, making friends at that club will also help you to stick to it. Other resolutions like eating healthily can be harder, especially if you live with your parents who cook for you. One way of getting around that could be to talk to your parents and tell them that you want to eat more healthily, but that would have to be done very carefully so as not to upset them! Another way might be to offer to cook one night a week and integrate healthier foods into all of your family's lives in that way. Or you could target one meal a day to make healthier, and try to choose a healthier lunch when you're out, or eat some fruit for breakfast, or perhaps just change the snacks that you eat - eating fruit instead of chocolate, for example.
Even so, it can still be hard to keep up with the lifestyle changes you pledge to make every single day. I find that focusing on one or two resolutions rather than a massive list usually helps. Of course, one of the main factors is will power, and if you want to change something badly enough, that should be enough motivation for you to keep it going! Other people can be a huge influence on the decisions we all make, so perhaps telling your friends and family about the changes you are trying to make could help.
I wish you all luck in sticking to your New Year's resolutions, and hope this helps any of you who have started to lose track of them by the time this is published!
