Name: The history of New Year's resolutions
Uploaded: 2026-01-02T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 5 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Every day, I am gonna do one thing I have never done before.

That, my friends, is my New Year's resolution.

Now all you have to do is find a plane load of people whose resolution is to plummet to their deaths.

Every New Year offers the promise of a new you,

the person you'd become if only you could just stick to those. All too easy to make New Year's resolutions.

The clock is ticking down once again to a new year.

And millions of Americans are right now making promises they probably won't keep.

Once again, getting into shape was the number one New Year's resolution.

Well, if you haven't already given up on your New Year's resolution to try to eat healthier.

And if your New Year's resolution was to become rich, well, it's not too late.

Studies show most New Year's resolutions are bound to fail.

But did you know that we've been failing at them for thousands of years?

we can find people trying to kind of orchestrate a fresh start at the New Year's through resolutions.

Candida Moss is a historian and professor of theology at the University of Birmingham.

She says annual attempts at self-improvement are about as old as the celebrating of New Year's itself.

The ancient Babylonians had a big celebration almost two weeks long

where they celebrated the New Year around springtime in March or April and would make resolutions.

And they were small, so pay off, like, small debts.

They would make sort of small vows about better behavior.

In 46 B.C, Julius Caesar created a new Roman calendar that started the new year on the first day of January.

January was named for the Roman God Janus, whose two faces look forward and back.

That's really important for how we think about New Year's as a kind of taking stock and starting again.

Were these kind of traditions about making the people happy or making the gods happy?

These are primarily about making the gods happy.

And that's really what New Year's is about.

It's a kind of supernatural spring cleaning.

For many in the West, New Year's lost much of its religious significance.

The advent of electricity helped to turned the celebration into a nighttime affair,

complete with champagne toasts and midnight kisses.

But through it all, the ritual of the New Year's resolution remains.

In only a few days now, this year will be over and a new one will begin.

Mo Rocca and Nancy Giles share some New Year's resolutions.

And back in 2008, my friend and colleague Nancy Giles and I publicly acknowledged our own resolutions.

How much do I love New Year's resolutions?

I've had the same three for the last nine years.

We got together 15 years later to see how they held up.

Number one, learn to speak Spanish fluently.

Number two, read the Bible cover to cover.

And three, complete a back handspring unassisted.

It is weird to look back at this stuff, and

I did have the same resolutions over and over and over again.

Those are such noble resolutions and that you stick to it.

And I have not been to unkimnacio for a long time, so the back handspring.

I don't know that it's ever gonna happen now.

Wouldn't it be better to approach our New Year's hopes very, very quietly

so that we're all less humiliated when we don't get there?

I try to make my resolutions more specific, realistic, doable.

I was sure I was gonna say a lot of things that down the line I hadn't done.

But kind of being cool and being content with one's life and living quietly

What grade would you give yourself on those resolutions?

What kinds of resolutions are more likely to succeed?

And a psychologist will tell you small baby steps.

Don't revolutionize your life just overnight.

New Year's is arguably the most optimistic holiday, and

New Year's resolutions, succeed or fail, have a lot to do with that.

After all, there's no chance you'll achieve a goal if you never set one in the first place.

I think everyone struggles with, you know, just the problem of not living up to the person they want to be.

And funnily enough, the whole system is based on the idea that you'll inevitably fail.

But it doesn't matter because there's always next year.