Living on a college campus can make it difficult for students to balance their New Year’s resolutions with their already-full schedules.
Most college students tend to have the same ideas when it comes to their New Year’s resolutions. They all want to work out more, lose weight, eat healthier, actually show up to class, or start getting a healthy amount of sleep. But these goals can be hard to accomplish, especially with an 18-credit hour class load.
If you are still trying to figure out a resolution for this new year, here are some that will not only make you a better person in 2019, but are also easy to manage if you have three classes, four meetings, and practice every single day.
The first one is to just find small moments within your busy day to take a deep breath and relax. It’s hard to find time for yourself, especially in the rush of the first few weeks back at school.
Even if your only free time is less than five minutes, put some mellow music on, close your eyes, and just take a nice deep breath. Doing this a few times throughout the week will make it seem less stressful.
Another simple resolution is to find confidence in the decisions that you make. College is the time of tricky decisions and choices. Between parents, professors, and friends, being confident in the choices you make can sometimes be difficult.
Ultimately, you have the best idea of what is going to be the best for you. When you decide something, stick with it. There is always going to be somebody somewhere that will criticize you for the choices and decisions that you make–the key is choosing to block their opinions out because they don’t matter.
If the two previous resolutions are way too much work for you, just try to eat new foods. You don’t have to completely change your dietary plans, but if you see a fruit in the MDR that you have never tried before, just put it on your plate. You don’t know if you hate it if you haven’t tried it.
Sophomore Hannah Barnard has chosen a more laid-back approach to her resolution for the year.
“My New Year’s resolution is to embrace Ariana Grande’s song, ‘thank u, next.’ So, when things come my way that might not be what I want, I’m going to let them run their course. And when they are done I’m going to say ‘thank you, next,’ because they are teaching me valuable lessons along the way,” Barnard said.
Another Sophomore student, Alexis Pojman, has a similar type of view on her resolutions.
“I just really want to live out 2019 in a way that will make 2020 me happy when she looks back on all that happened,” Pojman said. She has created a bucket list of fun things she wants to do this year in order to further guide her efforts to have a happy year. 
The list doesn’t stop here either. If none of these resolutions are quite your style, there are plenty of websites with ideas that can be specifically suited to what you need most in this upcoming year.
In the end, the resolutions that you create in the beginning of the year are not the things that will define your overall year, but they can certainly have a positive influence.
