05/01/2026
Why New Year’s Resolutions Fail
The significance of the New Year is that we all feel the gradual and consistent passage of time, and that sends a message that we are getting older, the deadline on which to accomplish our life’s goals is getting closer, and we are becoming ever more aware of our flimsy mortality. The New Year can rightly be considered a global birthday which, like an individual’s birthday, heralds to us the drawing end of our time on earth. We thus feel like we must make haste and do the things that we ought to do before it is too late.
This feeling of the fast-approaching end makes us too excited and motivated for our own good. We set resolutions for the New Year: things that we must do differently henceforth. During the first week of executing our New Year’s resolutions, we seem to be making tremendous progress, sometimes even effortlessly, and this plunges us even further ahead of ourselves, either to increase the rate at which we are acting on our New Year’s resolutions or to add even more items to them.
Then the first week elapses, the first month follows, and by the second month, the intense motivation instilled in us by the New Year, and the feeling of dread sparked by the approaching end, start to wane. We begin to feel the sting of boredom that comes with the new routine, and the fatigue accompanying the sudden pushing of our willpower to its limits; so that by the third month, we are already either inconsistent in our ex*****on or have given up completely. We no longer read 50 pages a day as we inscribed in our New Year’s notebook, or go to the gym five times a week, or start being the social butterflies we had envisioned ourselves to be, or continue to ask for what we want and be okay with rejection as we postulated earlier in the year.
Instead, we don’t read any pages at all because we don’t want to reduce our 50-page mark and break our New Year’s resolution. We would rather not do the whole thing entirely (which, ironically, is breaking it as well). We quit going to the gym, retreat into ourselves, and stop asking for job opportunities or new relationships. What we become in the middle of the year, in fact, is a version of ourselves that is worse off and more mediocre than our last year’s self.
Why does this happen?
Needless to say, I’m not a productivity expert, but from my own experience, having been a victim of overly ambitious New Year’s resolutions myself, I have a ballpark idea of why this happens.
The first reason is that we don’t seem to understand the simple fact that who we were last year—and last year is from January to December of the year that we just concluded—is not drastically different from who we are in the New Year. We still have the same mental and physical shortcomings as we had the past year. But of course, we also have much of our potential lying dormant within us, which could be woken up with a little bit of pushing. It is this potential that we overestimate and therefore overwork with our ambitious New Year’s resolutions, and the deceptive idea that we are suddenly different on January 1.
This potential, however real and capable, is inevitably strained by boredom, fatigue, anxiety, and fear; and if we don’t give it one dose at a time, we poison it and render it incapacitated. That is why an excited “New Year’s resolutioner,” after being a morning person for the first couple of weeks of the year, reverts even further backward to waking up at 10 a.m. as opposed to his normal waking time of 9 a.m., all because he wanted to become more productive and instead waged war with himself by waking up at 4 a.m.
For New Year’s resolutions to work, therefore, we must not assume that we have no weaknesses, or that the excitement and false motivation that come with the beginning of the year are going to last throughout the twelve months. With that preconception completely abandoned, we can now work with our real selves, and that starts with understanding that we are uniquely different from one another and that our New Year’s resolutions should be equally unique to us. For instance, if this year will be your first time in the gym, your New Year’s resolution should not be to lift 80 kg like the New Year’s resolution of someone you know who has been in the gym for two or more years. Yours should be to simply show up at the gym. Inevitably, you will work your way up the scale. If you make lifting 80 kg your goal, it shouldn’t be surprising if you quit the gym altogether by February, if not earlier. This applies to any other resolution that is overblown, which many of them are.
Only when we understand that we are the same person we were last year, and that we will only be different next year if we practice a little bit each day, can we remain loyal to our New Year’s resolutions. Furthermore, New Year’s resolutions don’t have to be big or extraordinary. In fact, the extraordinary ones are the ones that fail. Let them be just small alterations of your normal self. Over time, they will accumulate into noticeable differences. On this point, I recommend reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, one of the few self-help books I have read and loved. I would go out of my way to add that it should be the only self-help book you read this year, because reading too many of them can be a little confusing and counterproductive.
Therefore, do not overwork yourself this New Year, because it won’t work, and do not be complacent by making no effort to improve yourself, even if just a little bit.
That said, Happy New Year. May 2026 be the year you get closer to actualizing yourself.
—G*i Manoah James
