Ah, January 1st. A day that I usually spend on the couch watching all the great college football bowl games. It's a wonderful day to just completely veg.

What I don't like to do, though, is make a new year's resolution.

I've never really understood why the arbitrary passing of one year to the next makes people want to change things about themselves, but apparently it does. Sometimes I think the concept of new year's resolutions was fabricated by the gym and personal fitness industry in the same way that Valentine's Day was fabricated from the greeting card, flower, and chocolate industry. Both would assuredly take major financial hits without the existence of each "holiday."

Whenever January 1st rolls around, I never feel an intense desire to make life changing adjustments. Maybe I'm just lazy, or maybe I'm just so full of myself that I don't think anything needs changing, but I more or less continue to live my life in the same way.

And to some degree, everyone who makes a new year's resolution does the same thing.

Think about your life, how many resolutions have you actually kept into February?

Sure, you probably hit the gym really hard in January, but eventually you reverted back to your old couch potato ways. Otherwise, you wouldn't need to make a resolution to work out more, because you would have never stopped working out after the prior new year's resolution.

The fact of the matter is that people aren't very able to make drastic life-altering changes overnight. Change takes time, but we never want to admit that to ourselves. You can't go from being a couch potato to doing hardcore workouts everyday. Sure, you can try, but your body will resist it with every fiber, and all but the most strong willed of individuals will eventually give in to the temptation to do nothing.

So are you doomed to just be the current person you are with no positive changes for the rest of your life? Of course not, you just have to be smart about your life changes.

First off, don't wait for the new year to make changes! If you want to change something, do it NOW, whenever "now" is. If it is July and you want to start a new hobby, then start it in July. By waiting for the new year, you are just externalizing the locus of control. You are creating the mindset that you can't start a change until the new year. When you create an external locus of control, you no longer feel like the originator of your own decisions. If you always feel like a victim of your environment, then you will never accomplish your goals. The problem is that environments change, so if you rely too much on your environment, it will always let you down. An external locus of control is analogous to a leaf floating in the wind, whereas a strong internal locus of control is like a tree firmly rooted in the ground.

Secondly, don't try to go from zero to sixty with your life changes. Whenever people make resolutions, they always overdo it. If you've spent the better part of the past year sitting on the couch and eating chips, then don't try to start running a 5k everyday with a vegan diet. The shock is too much for your body to handle. Life changes that stick are all about baby steps, you have to slowly adapt to the new lifestyle. That's why I don't like diet fads that say you can't eat certain foods. Sure, there are foods that are better for you than others, but it's likely that the foods you can't eat on X diet are the ones you really like. All the sudden depriving yourself of those foods will be like a heroine addict going cold turkey, it's not gonna work. Likewise, going from zero physical activity to an intense workout routine is, at best, just going to make you quit, and at worst will end in an injury.

For many people, it will take some self control to not start a rigorous workout routine or a strict diet. When it's the holidays and you have been vegging and eating too much with more free time than you are used to, you will be tempted to do a complete 180. You've probably gained some holiday pounds and want to get rid of them now. Resist this urge, you won't be able to go from flab to fat overnight. If you want to start working out or eating better, start small, but work to continuously improve. When you try to start off too big, you will probably have to scale things back, which will feel sort of like failure. People don't like failing, so you are basically negatively reinforcing your new life change. This will make you not want to do it anymore, and you will inevitably stop.

By starting off small and and slowly but constantly improving, you are succeeding every time. Success feels nice, so it will motivate you to keep up the routine.

I'll give some examples from my own life now. A while ago, I decided that I wanted to start dressing better. I'm not exactly sure when I decided this, but it definitely wasn't a new year's resolution. Now, I didn't go to the mall and buy $1000 worth of nice clothes, nor did I just start wearing a suit all the time. What I did do was start trying to educate myself about men's fashion, how certain clothes worked with others, different style rules, etc. Then, I just took this education and made it into a mindset. Now, every time I buy clothes, I recall my knowledge and try to buy things that fit with my wardrobe, and more importantly, fit me properly (so many of my old clothes were wayyyy too big). So the moral of the story was that I started out by simply educating myself, then I worked to make small changes. Because these small changes were simple to implement, I never felt much difficulty when making this change.

Another example was when I learned to juggle. Admittedly, this did happen around the time of the new year, but it wasn't a new year's resolution. When I learned to juggle, I didn't start off trying to learn 5 balls. Or 4 balls, or even 3 or 2 balls. To learn to juggle, you have to start with one ball, then work to 2 and then finally 3, then more if you so desire. Only once you master the art of throwing one ball from one hand to the other can you hope to do it with 3 or more. Keep this in mind when you learn to do anything: always master the simple things before moving to the more complicated things.

So that is my two cents to you on new year's resolutions. I'm not saying not to do them, but if you do, just be smart about them. Take baby steps, don't get discouraged, and set reasonable goals. If you do it right, then you'll never have to make the same new year's resolution again.

Photo (c) 2013 Christopher Chan and shared under Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 License