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Each year, many people around the world make New Year’s resolutions in order to change old habits and form new ones. Grand View senior Claudia Sloat has 18 New Year’s resolutions that she plans on completing in 2018. These include learning more music on her ukulele, not watching Netflix unless she is working out and learning how to control her anger.

“I am not afraid to ask people about myself and maybe what I could improve on,” Sloat said. “I am all about self-improvement. Especially as a nurse, I think it is important to understand people better and know what about me is not as easy to work with.”

Sloat said that she keeps a hard copy of her resolutions with her at all times so that she doesn’t forget to keep up with her goals. She admitted that it can be a challenge to keep up with her resolutions because it becomes difficult to find the time.

“There are some days or some weeks where I am more busy with homework and I don’t have time maybe to go to the gym or take out my ukulele, but even if I don’t do well that week I know that next week I can improve and continue to keep trying,” Sloat said.

Quite often people have trouble sticking to their planned resolutions. According to Aspen Athletic Clubs Vice President of Sales and Fitness Luke Aduddell, the club has a spike of people signing up at the very beginning of the year.

“January is our busiest time,” Aduddell said. “We will sign up three to four times the amount of people in January than we will any other time throughout the year.”

If you dive into the psychology behind enforcing resolutions, what Aduddell said makes a lot more sense. Grand View Professor of Psychology Guy Cunningham says that sticking with a resolution won’t happen unless you push yourself. It is better to think short term when it comes to achieving New Year resolutions, so people need to start small and keep doing that action consecutively for it to stick.

Cunningham said that people must take those first steps of their resolutions and then keep doing them in order to create a habit. He explains that it won’t be possible to get far if we are not focusing on the short-term goals.

“You may have a long-term goal, but very few of us are really good at keeping with a long-term goal that doesn’t have any payoff until the end,” Cunningham said.

Aspen offers many programs to help people stick with their routines and exercise more. Aduddell said that the ones who continue to stay motivated continue their program for a longer period of time.

“The ones who get involved with the programs, whether they’re with personal training, small group or large group training, will stay on average 18 months,” Aduddell said. “The people that do not get any help, who come in on their own and try to do it, less than 10 percent of those people succeed in their New Year’s resolutions because they are not getting any help.”

Cunningham also mentioned that people who find a way to make the programs they are enrolled in unavoidable and build them into their routines are able to stay with them. Not everyone will go through the same difficulties when trying to achieve particular resolutions, because sometimes we don’t want to give up our indulgences for the results we strive for.

“Now we vary in our ability to do this,” Cunningham said. “Some of us can do this more easily than others. Some of us can do it in other areas. If you’re a person who likes to exercise for instance, exercising is a small sacrifice. If you’re not a person who loves to eat all the time, it may not even be a big deal. But if you’re a person who doesn’t want to exercise that wants to eat, that’s going to be rough.”

It seems that in order to reach those aspired goals set in January, one must be willing to wait to see results by slowly embedding them throughout your daily routine. The reason that New Year’s Resolutions seem hard to keep is because we make them that way by seeing the end goal without the process of getting to that goal. If we pace ourselves and allow for gradual success, we may see the results we wait so eagerly for.