Do They Work? The Psychology Of New Year Resolutions

Whenever a New Year is on the anvil, a gush of resolutions will be in the air. Now again we're getting ready to welcome 2025 with a new set of resolutions, only to break them ere long. Aren't new year resolutions like dew-drops on the leaves of grass; destined to fizzle out on the very first day of the new year? They sure are. New year resolutions are like a lover's outlandish promises or a politician's ambiguous assurances. Both are never fulfilled. They are like eggs, so easily breakable.

Yet, many of us make grandiose resolutions just to leave them behind like last year. Why do we fail to adhere to them? We fail because we often make impractical and outlandish resolutions and are never serious about implementing them in our lives. If you want to get rid of a bad habit, why should you wait for the next year to divest yourself of it? Drop it the moment you think that this is not good. Tomorrow never comes. Kal kare so aaj kar, aaj kare so ab (What's to be done tomorrow, do it today and what needs to be done today must be finished right now).

“It's the procrastination in implementation that causes new year resolutions to peter out,” wrote a famous psychologist. We make new year resolutions, not because we want to turn a new leaf in the new year, we make them because we know that they are useless. The US humourist H L Mencken defined “resolution” in a deft manner. He wrote, “A resolution is nothing but repetition of a so-called solution: Re-solution.” It's certainly the same thing or 'solution' repeated every year and forgotten by the end of the first week of January.

A New Year resolution is the recycling of sameness. It's nearly a month-long ritualistic determination of not repeating the same monotony and breaking it with a whimper. It's a rehash, we all are aware of and that it's mere old wine in a new bottle. We find an alibi in a New Year to continue with an undesirable trait or practice till then. Moreover, a new year is just an increase in the number, a mere digital shift (as Carl Sagan put it). It's a change in the calendar and man's limited attempt to measure the time's endlessness. And that's it. Isn't every new day as big an event as the new year?

Well, back to New Year resolutions. In the earliest Greek Orthodox Church in 34 AD, a resolution was passed that delinquent followers would take a solemn vow in the last month of the year to be more regular in their religious duties in the ensuing year. It was seen as a sort of ' perfunctory leniency ' on the part of the earliest church, a delayed way to mend the ways in the due course of time. Very few people followed their religious duties in the new year despite their firm resolutions in the dying year.

People have forgotten the origin, but the perfunctoriness in approach and intent has survived. The Protestants of England would make firm resolutions under the auspices of the Archbishop of Canterbury that drinking would be strictly under canonical conditions and not in social circumstances (refer to Rawn Manley's out of print, 'Church and resolutions in Medieval Europe', Bantam Books, 1980). Church-goers hardly followed the rule and their resolutions to abstain from wine in the social milieu. Ironically, this canonical condition was ignored on the very eve of the New Year when revelers would drink and welcome the New Year, getting soaked in wine and drinking like a fish! We somehow manage to deceive ourselves as it's the easiest thing to do. Didn't Benjamin Disraeli aptly ask, “Who has deceived thee as often as thyself?” We, therefore, make resolutions and shelve them the way the almanac of last year is shelved and forgotten forever.

One more thing that plays a vital part in the whole caboodle of making and breaking resolutions is our too much fanfare and elaborate planning. It's like, “Irade bana ke bigaad deta hoon / Main bana ke aashiyana ujaad deta hoon.” (I plan things well in advance and destroy them/ Just like I build a home and demolish it). What begins with a bang, often ends with a whimper. Things done in haste, are never the best. Elaborate preparations kill the essence and thrill. Ergo, don't make big resolutions much before their implementations. The whole process should be funny and spontaneous; never serious and heavy. So, what's your resolution for the ensuing 2025?

Sumit Paul is a regular contributor to the world’s premier publications and portals in several languages

Published on: Wednesday, December 11, 2024, 06:00 AM IST