Avoid the “Quitters Day” Curse This Year!
New Years resolutions have proven hard to keep for most of us.
| 06 Jan 2025 | 11:27
For most Americans, New Year’s resolutions this year were the same old same old. (
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The festive holiday season is often followed by New Year’s resolutions that are quickly forgotten by mid-January. (
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Too partied out to pop another cork as the holiday season finally winds down? Well, here comes yet another red-letter day: Jan. 10 is Quitter’s Day.
Quitter’s Day sounds like a joyous occasion, when a person gives up a bad habit like smoking or overeating. It’s exactly the opposite. Quitter’s Day, which falls on the second Friday of January each year, marks the point at which the average person throws in the towel and abandons his or her New Year’s resolutions.
The concept of Quitter’s Day emerged from research in 2019 conducted by Strava, a social network for athletes. The research showed that approximately 80 percent of people who set resolutions tend to give up by this date, often due to plummeting motivation and unrealistic expectations. Strava’s findings were based on its study of 800 million user-logged activities. Since then, Quitter’s Day has gained acceptance as a day that highlights the challenges of maintaining New Year’s resolutions.
Ever since the concept of New Year’s resolutions emerged in Babylonia 4,000 years ago, they have sounded deceptively easy. But anyone who has tried and failed to follow through on them knows the truth. The Miami Daily News in 1938 wisely encouraged its readers to keep resolutions small and manageable, warning against “glittering resolutions which you know in your heart are as brittle as Christmas tree ornaments, wedding vows, or campaign promises.”
Why do so many people stop short of these familiar goals? Psychologists point to factors such as unrealistic expectations, external pressures, and failure to adapt when life’s unpredictability disrupts plans.
For determined resolution makers, there are many helpful guides for staying the course. Good Housekeeping, that traditional fount of common sense, offers 65 achievable goals. If you find that number too daunting, the University of California at Davis, whittles their advice down to seven tips.
For those of us who have already broken our pledges, take heart. The Pew Research Center found that 13 percent of those surveyed openly admitted that within a month of New Year’s Eve, they hadn’t reached any of their goals. And those were only the ones talking...
Happy 2025!