Year after year people make what they call New Year’s resolutions. They promise that they will live their lives differently and do things to better their bodies, minds or attitudes. Unfortunately, those resolutions only last for a short while before people fall back into their same routines and go back to their old habits.

Common New Year’s resolutions often include eating better and losing weight, exercising more or spending less money.

Senior Pearl Stowers said. “I made a New Year’s resolution a couple years ago to eat better than the previous year. For the first week it went well, but it became harder to build a habit of cooking healthy foods and buying the right foods instead of the easy frozen foods.”

Senior Cambria Tech also wished to make a change. “I wanted to exercise more often so I could be stronger. For the first couple of days I went to the gym and did a full hour workout. Then school started and I couldn’t find the time to keep going to the gym and started to go on the weekends. Then, eventually I stopped going altogether. Only recently did I start to go back again.”

According to Ian Newby-Clark from Psychology Today, “It depends on the habit you are trying to establish. Some will be easier to establish than others. There will be setbacks. But, if you’re ‘tweaking’ some behavior of yours, the time to habit change will likely be much shorter. That’s one of the reasons why I recommend that people take baby-steps when they are changing a behavior. We have bad habits because they give us short-term payoffs. It’s that feeling of a juicy burger melting in our mouths or gleefully sinking into the couch instead of schlepping to the gym. The more immediate and tasty the payoff, the harder it will be to break the bad habit and replace it with a good one.”

One of the few who stayed with a resolution is sophomore Alexandra Somera. “I wanted to get back into point work for ballet so I decided that my New Year’s resolution a couple years ago was to do extra ballet exercises at home. I set myself a deadline to how many hours I would build up to. I started with small increments of exercises and worked my way up and eventually got back up on point.”

Key factors in staying with resolutions are planning ahead so that time is not wasted and being organized better. Planning ahead makes things less overwhelming and forces people to organize thoughts and ideas. In creating a plan, people are more ready to deal with the changes they are about to make. While it may be hard starting a new habit or sticking to New Year’s resolutions, it is possible.