Students evaluate progress — or lack thereof — toward New Year’s resolutions

It’s time to think about those New Year’s Resolutions again.

With every intention of doing better in 2015, people everywhere participated in the New Year’s tradition of writing down resolutions.

Now that it’s the end of February, some students evaluate how their goals for this year are going.

Lindsey Parrish, a sophomore majoring in biochemistry, said she had two New Year’s resolutions: go to bed by midnight and finish homework before Sunday.

Reaching her goals wasn’t easy. She had to change how she went about her day and swap some of her social life for extra sleep.

“I’ve been trying to stay on campus longer like during the day, so I can get all my homework done,” said Parrish, “It has been kind of hard, but I have to like stop hanging out with people earlier, so I can get to bed earlier.”

Parrish said the key to successfully meeting her goals was the fact that they were choices she had to make daily.

“I just wrote them down, but they are daily, so I think about them everyday,” she said.

Though Parrish is keeping up with her New Year’s resolutions, this kind of success story is not always the case.

Nathan Merrill, a senior majoring in computer science, set resolutions with his wife.

By the time February came, those goals had already fallen through.

“We wrote them down on the computer, but we wanted a board to track them, so they never got tracked,” Merrill said. “That is where it fell through.”

This is the boat many people share. They make goals with good intentions and even take some steps to meet that goal. For whatever reason, by February the goals often haven’t stuck.

Parrish advised that completing a goal daily is a good way to remember it.

Dallin Leavitt, a sophomore majoring in sociology and a member of the USU football team, achieved his New Year’s Resolutions by sharing them with his family.

“My mom and my dad would talk to me about it, and every once in a while, they’d send me little reminders,” Leavitt said.

According to self-improvement website life.gaiam.com, sharing a goal with friends and family is a good step in the right direction because they can provide a support system.

Leavitt’s piece of advice was to “make little goals that will allow you to obtain your large goals.”

This was also mentioned in life.gaiam.com. Words like ‘never’ and ‘always’ are hard to achieve while ‘more often’ and ‘less often’ are a lot more attainable and will help set-up the road to success.

In general, keeping a goal is hard work. Parrish had to stop hanging out with her friends as much and go to the library more often.

Staying motivated can be the hardest part. Forbes.com’s tip for staying motivated is to “make a list of the reasons you want to accomplish the goal.” It also advises people to think about how they will handle the “pity-party” moments before they happen.

If a person can shut down the pity-parties, he or she can continue on the road toward the goal.

In a study at University College London, it took 66 days for the majority of the participants to form a habit, according to brainpickings.org.

Sixty-six days may seem long, but it is less than one semester. A habit that will help obtain a goal can be formed shortly after the first midterm. Therefore, it’s not too late to pull out the New Year’s Resolutions, write them down, think about them every day, share them with friends and family and fulfill them until they are habit.

— whitlewis7@gmail.com