Once January 1 comes rolling around, people of all age groups begin coming up with all these over-the-top New Year’s resolutions that are bound to fail. When thinking of resolutions, people often go to the very extreme, instead of taking things in on a smaller scale. Chances are if you’ve never gone to the gym a day in your life, you’re not just going to get up every morning and be motivated to go. Or, if you’re usually don’t earn great grades, you are going have to work hard to improve them.

A few weeks into January we often get upset with ourselves, realizing that our new-way-of-life resolution has utterly failed, because these goals that we have for ourselves are too unrealistic.

Not to sound so negative in this situation but, research shows that only about 8 percent  of people actually achieve their New Year’s resolutions. With that being said, there’s no need to be so hard on yourself for one bad test grade, or eating that piece of birthday cake, because 92 percent of people’s New Year resolutions have also failed. Just say focused and keep trying.

Although, the new year is often a fresh new start for many and a time where we like to think “new year, new me.” Every day can be a fresh new start so if you’re regretting something that happened today just start over fresh tomorrow. Just because January 1 is the start of a new year does not mean it’s the only day you should try to enact change in your life.

A helpful tip to achieving a New Year’s resolution is coming up with little, specific goals in order to help you achieve one big goal. If your plan for 2017 is to become more organized, you may want to start by using a planner and then work on keeping your personal space clean, like your room and locker. Having these little goals set will help you accomplish the overall goal of being more organized by the end of the year.