Kelly Coons ’22 | Assistant Opinions Editor
Welcome back from winter break! Now that it’s the spring semester — er, rather, the semester that will see the end of winter — what are you going to do? There are surely some holiday sugary treats left over, burning a hole in your pocket (or a shelf in your room), but before you indulge, consider… not?
Whether this is your first semester or your last, you are sure to have developed some bad habits (certainly over your college career as well as over vacation). Going into this new semester, it’s worth your time to develop a plan to break those habits.
The key phrase of that last sentence is “develop a plan.” Creating lofty goals with no road map towards them is not only useless but demoralizing, too. In an article titled “Why New Year’s resolutions fail… and how to make them stick,” CBS News highlighted the SMART method: creating goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. Goals that are vague make it difficult to see tangible results, so they tend to be abandoned. If you don’t care about doing something, then you’re not going to do it either.
Related to that point, make sure your goals are about you. Don’t let other people dictate what you should value. (This shouldn’t need to be said, but perhaps more importantly, when you make goals, make sure that you are the subject of change. You can’t control other people, after all!) Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, in an article with Business Insider, explained: “Goals need to be made for the individual. So often, people seem to be influenced by their friends, their family, what they see in society. I think it’s important for people to set goals that are for themselves and unique to themselves.” Don’t just do something because it’s trendy. Do something that actually matters to you.
Lastly, if you have a lot of habits that you want to break, focus on one at a time. Focusing on one goal at a time can help lessen the inherent stress involved in the changing of routine. Something that can also help is surrounding yourself with a network of people that will support you. Dr. Karen Lawson, a director at the Wellness Center at the University of Minnesota, reminds us that “people on the whole tend to be harder on themselves than they are with other people. They tend to beat themselves up.”
How do you start this process of habit-breaking? To use an example from my own life, over winter break, I stayed up late and slept late. When you don’t have anything to do, this is fine. However, in school, it seems like you have literally everything to do. You can’t afford to laze in bed until 1 p.m. Punctuality is critical. Thus, the week before I returned to school, I slowly started working my way back towards the bedtime that has proven most effective for me in the past and setting my alarm for the time I would need to be awake by for next semester’s classes. I still want to sleep in, but I’m starting to get accustomed to this new habit. I haven’t been pressing the snooze button either.
By the way, if you need a bad habit to break, I recommend breaking off your relationship with the snooze button. Just don’t press it, and if you really struggle with that, place your alarm away from your bed, so you physically have to get up to press it — and really, once you’re out of bed, isn’t it easier to just get moving?
