“New year, new me” is the quote that is mentioned every year. As New Year comes, people are figuring out what their New Year resolutions are or what goals they are wanting to achieve. New year resolutions can be very achievable but can also be very frustrating and bring a lot of tension. 

  “Anyone that’s trying to better themselves my hats off to them, it’s just sometimes I think that if you’re trying to better yourself why wait till New Years? Why not just set up a plan no matter what time of the year is and let’s just do that,” said counselor Tom Ford.

  Ford mentions that goals don’t need to be set at the start of a New Year and Sophomore Rylee Herban says her New Year resolution and being able to accomplish it over quarantine is what helped her improve. 

  “I never thought that I was a big runner and then over quarantine I started running a lot and farther distances and so that was kind of strange,” said Herban.

  Although Herban found something in quarantine she enjoys, junior Makenna Ebling struggled with online school due to being quarantined. 

  “I definitely think that school is a lot harder and keeping my grades up because it’s a lot harder to do online school,” said Herban.

  Being stuck at home was good for some people and helped them find what they enjoy doing but some have struggled with being stuck at home. Students have some goals they hope to reach for the New Year. 

  “I just want to read more, because I feel like I stopped reading for awhile.” Says Herban. 

  Herban finds that she enjoys running through quarantine but was able to become stronger throughout the year and now her new goal is to do a 75 hard challenge. 

  “My mom and I are gonna do the 75 hard challenge, starting Jan. 25. It’s like you have to follow a food diet type thing and have to do two 45 minute workouts a day and one of them has to be outside and then you have to read ten pages of a self health book and take a progress picture and drink a gallon of water and there’s no alcohol but I mean I can’t obviously,” said Herban.

  Herban is excited to start a New Year goal. Ford talks about how sometimes having a New Years resolution can be a struggle due to pushing themselves way too much. 

  “So sometimes it’s good to start small because if you set a huge goal and you don’t reach it, your kinda setting yourself up for failure, then you get more discouraged and then that cycle of  ‘anxiety or depression or fear of failure’ just perpetuates itself. So that can be a downside of setting up on realistic expectations  of resolutions,” said Ford.

  Ford has ways of being able to keep your goals on top and end up being able to accomplish them in the end.

  “What they say is that essentially when you talk about resolution, your talking about behavior and your talking about behavior changes. With a behavior change, researchers say that you can initiate  a behavior change in 14 days, and be pretty successful if you stick with it and they say on the average it takes about two weeks so 14 days to implement a behavior change,” said Ford.