Arianna Peper
Editor in Chief
In a survey done by Forbes Health, it was found only 13% of New Year’s resolutions lasted four months.
Every year, it is a common trend in the United States for individuals to set goals for what they would like to accomplish within the following year. Often, these resolutions are centered around personal health and well-being, finances, and new hobbies.
In the beginning and middle of the school year at Webster, each advisory class creates SMART goals for what they would like to accomplish within the following semester and how they will do this.
Family and Consumer Sciences department chair Amie Shea has a senior advisory class and said (via email), “The SMART goals are individual and should be: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-sensitive.”
As for the success rate of these goals, Shea said she believes there is a direct correlation between the type of student making the goal and its end result.
Shea said, “Students who make a goal that is meaningful to them and there is an overall effort to achieve that goal, then yes, I think students can be successful.”
However, the high rates of failure for New Year’s resolutions can often be correlated to a lack of motivation, expectations and plans.
In an article from Metropolitan State University of Denver, psychology professor Randi Smith said, “The one thing that dooms resolutions to failure is an all-or-nothing attitude.”
By setting low expectations of the achievability of a goal, one is inevitably setting it up to fail by creating a lack of motivation to accomplish it.
In order to achieve a resolution, several things must be done, including a self-evaluation of one’s current lifestyle and how it might be preventing the goal from being accomplished.
An article from Forbes, published in December of 2025, said, “Without recognizing and addressing underlying challenges and doing the work to strengthen boundaries, people may unconsciously and repeatedly gravitate toward the same damaging situations.”
Therefore, without evaluating how to achieve a goal, it becomes extremely difficult to maintain one’s New Year’s resolutions.
Along with this, vague resolutions like “eating healthier” lack a plan of action. With an emphasis on the larger goal, an abrupt change in lifestyle is created, which is harder to maintain compared to smaller goals.
A licensed clinical psychologist said in a Very Well Mind article, “People tend to set New Year’s resolutions that are really big, and they might be achievable, but there are probably 30 steps they need to take before they get to that place. And so they make it unattainable by not setting smaller, more immediate goals.”
Shea said, “The hard part about goal-setting is that the skills that lead to success are a maturation of skills, discipline and commitment to a goal. Making a change is hard and requires a lot of discipline and effort. Whether it’s a lifestyle change, like healthier eating, it’s really the small daily decisions that make the big ones easier, but it’s the daily grind of working at it.”
With the struggles of consistency in New Year’s resolutions, it is important to find ways to keep oneself accountable for building these habits. Some examples of doing this include creating a daily schedule for daily habits, journaling or logging specific activities into online apps that track one’s progress.
Despite the struggles in shifting lifestyles and creating a focus on a goal when life gets in the way, successful New Year’s resolutions are still possible. By understanding why a goal is valuable to oneself, creating smaller plans on how to actually achieve it, and putting in the work to make it happen, one can achieve almost anything they put their mind to.
Arianna Peper–Editor in Chief
This will be Arianna Peper’s third year on ECHO staff. She made several contributions while taking journalism class her freshman year.
|
Support our Sponsors
|
