New Year’s Eve is a time for celebration – a time to reflect on the past year and get excited about upcoming adventures in the next. Friends, family and even strangers gather to ring in the new year, many watching the Times Square ball drop in New York with an abundance of party hats and merriment. However, New Year’s Eve also motivates many people to pursue resolutions. The age-old tradition of picking some aspect of your personality, life or habits to improve is certainly admirable, but every year, many of us ask ourselves why we feel pressured to make substantial changes on an arbitrary day.
When I asked my family and friends what their New Year’s resolutions were, I received many typical answers. Family members had already planned out healthier eating choices and marked “dry January,” the popular month-long practice of abstaining from alcohol, on their calendars. My friends said they wanted to make more time to go to the Wellbeing Center, avoid procrastinating on class assignments and read more books instead of scrolling through social media. More travel, more spontaneity, more excursions, more everything.
It’s exciting at first to think about all the fun we hope to have in the new year and believe that 2026 will be the year we will break our previous bad habits.
Then, as college students return to campus and the stressors of real life return after the chaotic bliss of the holiday season, the resolutions we made for ourselves fade away, becoming a goal we will “try to reach next year.” In fact, almost 80% of people who make New Year’s resolutions fail to keep them. The pressure we put on ourselves to change in our lives does not seem to work. This could be partially attributed to grade-related stress as assignments, assessments and meetings take up free time and demand attention.
For college students, social commitments and extracurricular activities can also be distracting. Combined with classes, the time we spend with our friends or at sports practices and club meetings means there isn’t always enough time to get to the gym or even to finish schoolwork. It’s already hard to find the right balance between work and social life in college, and adding a third factor, such as a New Year’s resolution, can feel excessive.
I also disagree with the custom of beginning these resolutions on the arbitrary date of Jan. 1. Why Jan. 1? What is it about the beginning of a new year that inspires us to finally make changes in our lives that we have been considering for days, weeks or even months? At the beginning of a new year, when many begin to lose sight of the resolutions we proudly declared on Dec. 31, we already look towards the distant days of the next New Year’s Eve when we will give our goals another shot.
Why give up and wait for the next year to breathe new life into our repeatedly made resolutions?
Lifestyle changes don’t have to happen overnight or become a permanent addition to our daily routines. Missing a day at the gym, eating fast food for one meal or watching one too many episodes of your favorite show instead of reading another chapter of a book doesn’t mean you have to abandon your resolution. It just means you stumbled a little bit. You certainly don’t need to wait until the next New Year’s Eve to work towards your goals.
Furthermore, I firmly believe that you don’t have to wait until New Year’s Day to make a positive change in your life. For months leading up to the end of 2025, I would hear my friends say, “I’m just going to wait until the new year to change this,” or “I probably should shake this habit, but it will just have to be my 2026 resolution.” Why should we continue bad habits or mentally and physically unhealthy ways of life until an arbitrary date? It shouldn’t matter whether it is February, July or December; you can start changing parts of your life at any time of year.
I don’t wish to say that it’s impossible to keep up with resolutions or that they’re meaningless. Many people have benefited from such goals, and for that, I applaud them. However, problems arise when a resolution is unsustainable, especially considering the packed schedule of many college students. An hour a day at the gym would be a good way to incorporate exercise into your daily routine, but when readings and assignments start piling up, it’s hard to both find that kind of time and get enough rest to be able to function properly day to day.
If change is something that you want in your life, why wait? Why throw in the towel a few weeks into the new year? New Year’s resolutions can include wonderful ideas for bettering your life, but societal pressures of perfection make them difficult to uphold. And that, that is the root of my grievances with New Year’s resolutions.
