One month and 20 days into 2026, I wouldn’t be going out on a limb to guess that any hard resolutions you made at the beginning of January are more than likely long gone. Maybe you let go of a goal within hours or days of the start of the year, or maybe it took a week or two. Maybe it was one bad day and an underconfident promise to do better tomorrow that started you on a path of slowly forgetting about it all. Maybe, like me, you just had a rough start to the semester that threw you off track. No matter what, you wouldn’t be alone. A 2019 Psychology Today article titled “Forget New Year’s Resolutions” claimed that “an overwhelming majority (80 to 90 percent) of New Year’s resolutions fail by the end of the first month.” These seem like pretty discouraging statistics. What’s interesting to me, however, is how common it is to consider a resolution to be something that either leads to success or failure. What is it about our attitudes towards growth that leads us to declare that we’ve failed at making change after just one month? Why are we sometimes so quick to write ourselves off and give up on our goals?
I think a lot of it has to do with having an “all-or-nothing” type of mentality. This is essentially the belief that if you can’t do something perfectly, you should give up on it or never even try. That mindset may sound nonsensical, but it’s pervasive in our society. It’s the voice in your head that tells you that if you broke a new routine once, you might as well forget about getting back on track. It’s the mentality that gives you a deadline for change-making, the one that tells you that you’ve failed just 30 days in. An all-or-nothing mindset affects more than just goal-setting, too. If you’ve ever skipped a class, meeting or appointment solely because you were going to be five to 10 minutes late and felt like it wouldn’t be worth it, then you know what it’s like to believe it’s all or nothing.
This kind of pressure forces us to view growth as a consistent upward trajectory instead of something much more complicated. Despite what we may tell ourselves, it’s completely natural to slip sometimes when making a change that requires commitment. In fact, it’s entirely unnatural to set out to make a change and then never flounder. Growth inevitably comes with setbacks, but they only mean failure if you let them. Permanent change is as dependent on our responses to setbacks as our moments of consistency.
The number of people whose resolutions “fail” would be far lower if we gave ourselves a lot more grace. Starting out strong for a week and then trailing off for a bit doesn’t need to mean failure at all. If you start something and truly change your mind, then that’s okay, but if you wish you’d “had the drive” to stick with it, then I’d like to remind you that you can always pick up and keep going. Growth and change are rarely linear things, and they don’t always need a hard timeline.
As we make our way through the second month of the year, I’m looking at the early-January commitments that I made and seeing that there are things that I wish I had stuck with. So, I’m picking them back up and looking forward to March with renewed promises. I know that my attempts won’t always be perfect, but I know that I can keep trying in the future, just as I am now. No matter how many times you’ve stopped, you can always start again.
