RECESS  |  CULTURE

The usefulness of New Year's resolutions

Along with fireworks, making resolutions for the coming year is a universal feature of New Year's celebrations.
Along with fireworks, making resolutions for the coming year is a universal feature of New Year's celebrations.

Like over 1 billion people worldwide, I rang in 2018 by watching the ball drop in Times Square. Confetti streamed down into the crowd, which was substantial despite the frigid temperatures.

Now that the celebrations are over and the confetti has been swept off the streets, many Americans — about 40 percent according to the Washington Post —are making their New Year’s resolutions. I am one of those people. Although I haven’t yet written down a list of formal resolutions for the year, I have a few goals in mind, goals that do line up with what The Nielsen Company has found to be among the top 5 New Year’s resolutions in the United States in previous years. These top resolutions include staying fit, losing weight, spending less and saving more, enjoying life to the fullest and spending more time with family.

The top goal for 2016, staying fit, is also one of the most difficult to keep. According to Statistic Brain, 67 percent of people with gym memberships never use them, even though they cost an average of $58 per month. Often the difficulty in keeping this resolution is the vagueness when making the goal. Although “staying fit” is an admirable sentiment, it doesn’t set specifics for how a person plans to do so.

One of my goals does relate to exercise, but those gym statistics were quite discouraging. So, while my end goal is to be more fit at the end of 2018 than I was at the start, the resolution I came up with has more to do with the process of getting there.

I used to exercise quite a bit, but I dropped organized sports when I got to high school. At the start of college, though, I decided to get back into athletics, so I joined the women’s ultimate frisbee club team, which practices three times a week. My resolution for the year is to do some sort of exercise on our off days — what that is and when I’ll do it, I’m not sure yet.

Another goal of mine fits into the category of health and fitness as well, and it was actually spurred by one of Duke Green Devils’ projects. In 2018, I want to eat at least 3 vegetarian meals a week, both for health and to hit the incentive markers of the “Bleed Blue, Eat Green” project.

I don’t remember where I first heard about “Bleed Blue, Eat Green,” but it caught my eye. The project provides incentives for students to eat meatless meals in order to cut down on their carbon footprints by reducing the greenhouse gases emitted by livestock in the production of a meal with meat.

I had already learned about the negatives of industrial livestock farming — both to the environment and the surrounding communities — in one of my classes, and I had started trying some of Marketplace’s vegetarian options as a result. There were also some days when I just didn’t feel like eating meat, and the project provided more incentive to continue on this course, with the promise of a spork, tote bag, t-shirt, hoodie and the potential to win a blender in the final raffle.

I hope that the incentive structure provided by this project will help me to keep to my goal, at least when I’m at school or otherwise on my own and have the ability to choose my own meals. In fact, The Washington Post reported that even short-term incentives can lead to lasting behavioral change.

My final goal ventures into another category, what The Nielsen Company dubbed “spend less, save more.” Like joining a sports club, I wanted to get a job after starting college, and I did. I work for the Duke Innovative Design Agency, and doing so has made me more aware of what I spend. I still wouldn’t consider myself financially-savvy, though, and that’s something I hope to work towards in 2018, starting with creating a monthly or perhaps weekly budget.

The new year can seem like an arbitrary time to make resolutions, but I find it a useful framework in which to organize and reevaluate my goals. It’s a time when people tend to look back on what has happened in the world, what they’ve accomplished and what they hope to do in the upcoming year, and that’s a powerful sentiment that encourages change.

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