Every year on January 1st, millions of people resolve to make a positive change in their life for the new year. Be it eating healthy, exercising more or trying out a new hobby, almost everyone has an aspect of their life they want to focus on improving and what better time to start than the beginning of the year?
New Year’s provides an essential period of time for people to reflect on the past year and the year ahead and resolutions are a great way of focusing one’s efforts on specific improvements. What are the most popular resolutions across the country? And how long do people typically keep them? A recent study explored these questions to find out how people in the U.S. take advantage of the new year for self-improvement.
Most Popular New Year’s Resolutions
Across the country, people in different states took different approaches to how they wanted to improve in 2019. The resolutions that were the most popular in the most states had to do with physical health with the most people resolving to exercise to get in shape in 18 states, choosing to diet in an effort to lose weight in 16 states and wanting to eat healthier in general in 5 states. Another popular self-improvement was to save more money, which was the most popular resolution in 9 states. While practicing self-care, learning a new skill and getting a new job were each only the most popular in one state a piece, they are so important to self-growth.
Americans Ability to Keep Up With Resolutions
With people across the country making great resolutions for self-development, how skilled are they at keeping their resolutions going? Of all the resolutions, the easiest ones to keep are those focused on personal development and the hardest to keep are those concerning healthy eating and diet change. This is interesting considering that more people try to change their diet and eat healthier than make resolutions based on personal growth, such as learning a new skill or practicing self-care.
While only 11.4% of people claim that they have been able to keep a resolution permanently, a fair amount (upwards of 80%) claim that they can keep a resolution for around 6 months to a year and only 36.6% claim that they only last through January (if that).
No matter your New Year’s resolution, the important thing is that you are making an improvement to yourself and if you work at it, you can achieve whatever you aim to this new year. You’ve got this, 2019 is your year.