CREDIT: FANSHAWE ATHLETICS
With new year's resolutions being tough to complete, turning it into a hobby should be the goal to achieve it.

The new year is in full swing with 2023 well under way. As it happens at the start of every year, people everywhere have set plenty of resolutions to try and improve themselves or change a part of their lives.

Many end up trying to cut alcohol, exercise more, learn a new language, or other various goals with varying degrees of difficulty.

With that difficulty though comes a lot of failed resolutions.


According to a recent study conducted by Time2Play, nearly 70 per cent of Canadians fail to achieve the new year’s resolutions they set.

Many different reasons come into play for those who can’t complete what they set out to do. The same study showed that the primary reasons people weren’t able to complete what they set out to do were a lack of motivation, losing track of progress, or even forgetting about their resolutions altogether.

“Every year I try to give myself a couple goals to work on throughout the year, but like a lot of us, I often don’t follow through with them, especially towards the end of the year,” Western University psychology program graduate Emily Passfield said in her blog post titled My New Year’s Resolutions and How I Plan to Keep Them.

With there being many different types of resolutions, changing difficulties for each, and other different variables that come into play, it’s difficult to ever have a one-sizefits- all solution. That being said, one thing that makes it easier to achieve your goals is to turn your resolutions into real hobbies.

That almost sounds like a given, to turn resolutions into hobbies, but it’s incredibly easy to overlook. It’s important to understand that to realistically complete your resolutions, you need to picture it all as a marathon more than a sprint.

Setting realistic and long-term goals is a great way to make sure you have a good plan in place.

“Last year I started doing monthly check-ins for my goals to help to ensure I stayed on track, and for once I successfully completed most of my resolutions,” Passfield said.

A good little hack for this as well is to set those goals a bit under what you want them to be in order to make sure those goals are realistic and achievable. Plus, it can often give you a little emotive boost when you accomplish them.

Another way that I personally have found is a good way to complete resolutions is to start the year with a few different ones, knowing most of them will fail.

As you try to complete each, you’ll start to notice how you begin to devote more attention to a particular one. In wanting to give yourself free time, save money, or just relax, you’ll start cutting off certain resolutions and just focusing on the one that is most important to you.

The year is moving along quickly and those who set resolutions are already starting to see whether their resolutions will succeed or fail. With 70 per cent of Canadians falling out of their resolutions, it’s important to know that if your resolutions are part of that number, it’s completely normal.

That same number should also hopefully be good motivation. If you’re able to put in the work and really grind through the lows of starting a new hobby, you can be part of the small number of people around you who can say they’ve actually completed one of their new year’s resolutions.