Why I think New Year's Resolutions Are Silly

Why do people make new year’s resolutions?

I find this tradition slightly humorous, but mostly irksome. Making yearly resolutions implies that the passing of one second to the next marks a magical moment in time when our former selves transform into supernatural beings. Beings who are able to instantaneously curtail habits that have plagued us for years.

It’s as if we believe that at the stroke of midnight we are granted access to an alternate universe where the “awesome” versions of ourselves live and are prepared to switch places.

There’s truth in the tired old mantra: People don’t change overnight. 

If people don’t change overnight when sleep is recharging their mighty-morphin’ powers, they certainly don’t change while standing along a crowded street, beer sloshing onto their glitter-painted party shoes, wearing tinsel for hats, graffiti numbers for crowns and waiting for a glass ball to slide down a pole.

The appropriate approach to resolutions is to make them nightly. 

Let each minute of the day allow for the invention of a new you.  I’ll share some of my new day’s resolutions. They key is to take baby steps away from old habits. 

-          Resolve: to abstain from eating an entire box of Cookie Crisp in one afternoon.

-          Resolve: to resist the temptation to manually input 3 miles into my run tracker while watching Modern Family and eating Cookie Crisp.

And so on.