New Year’s resolutions are a commonly practiced tradition of each year deciding to make positive changes to one’s life during the coming year or continuing with positive aspects of their life they are already doing. This tradition is mostly found in the western world however there are instances of people celebrating this tradition all over the world.
How did they start out?
According to ‘History.com’, the earliest known practice of this tradition dates back to ancient Babylon. It started with making promises to their worshipped Gods at the start of the new crop cycle each year. If they kept to these promises then the Gods would reward them however if they failed to live up to these promises then they would anger them and pay a resulting penalty!
It's believed that this might be the earliest known example of what we might refer to as New Year’s resolutions. A closer example to the modern tradition of New Year's resolutions might go back to Ancient Rome with Julius Caeser changing the calendar to make January the 1st the start of a new year, Romans would then make promises to God ‘Janus’! Janus was the God of transitions and new beginnings so they would state their targets in hope that if they conducted themselves well the favor would be returned.
How is it in practice today?
An article published on ‘Piedmont.org’ (a non-profit organization for healthcare based out of Atl, Georgia) talks about the reasoning surrounding why people make New Year’s resolutions today.
In the article, they talk about the new year being a chance to try and make positive changes in their lives. By making these promises and keeping them, they are taking agency in their own life so it's that sense of control over one's own life in a positive manner that sways people into committing to New Year's resolutions.
They also talk about a new year as a clean slate or beginning meaning that you can leave the negative aspects of your life in the previous year and move forward with only positive attributes heading into the coming year.
New Year’s resolutions are notorious for being incredibly hard to keep as the motivation for these positive promises starts to dwindle over time. The ‘US National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health’ published an in-depth study in 2011 on a common New Year’s resolution to lose weight. The crux of the study was that many women make New Year's resolutions to lose weight however the percentage of those that keep them is very low.
We all know this in practice as well as many of us have more than likely made New Year's resolutions that we haven’t stuck to, so why do we keep making them knowing that they are more than likely going to fail? We probably keep making them anyway because even if we don’t succeed in completing our New Year’s resolutions there is still the effort to at least try to make positive changes in our lives.
