One of the traditions associated with the transition from December 31 to January 1 - perpetual, inevitable and cruel - is to pledge ‘resolutions’: a thing, or list of things, to change as you head into the New Year.

This year’s passing of ne’er-faltering time came with the added pressure of being a new decade. Reflections on the ‘Noughties’ were depressingly bleak – 9/11, a tsunami and a global financial crisis being mentioned before two England Ashes wins and a Rugby World Cup, not to mention the return of leggings to the ‘what’s hot’ list and the election of the fabulously cool Obama.

The statistics appending to New Year’s resolutions have an equally bleak outlook. Allegedly, 97 percent of New Year’s resolutions never make it out of the gate. With odds like that, why do so many of us - 48 percent to be exact - continue the ritual of reflecting on the areas of our lives that require change?

Senseless optimism would seem to be the answer. Psychologists have gone as far as to claim that the making of resolutions is detrimental to our mental health. Anyone familiar with the sense of failure when your strict regime of ‘The Celery-Only Diet’ begins to adjust its parameters to include whole bars of Dairy Milk, or the loss of self-esteem when your ‘last cigarette ever’ is, in reality, not even your last that day, may agree with the condemnation of New Year’s resolutions.

Many of us still believe that the process of making (and, yes, breaking) New Year’s resolutions is an important tradition of each year. By examining problem-areas of our lives, we can identify ways that can improve our routine and ourselves.

According to Ask Jeeves, the most commonly made resolution is ‘I will stop smoking’. The second most popular is ‘I will get fit’, and the third is ‘I will lose weight’. So, the New Year is a good time for gyms and the GI diet and a bad time for Cadbury’s and cigarettes. The inescapable air of dissatisfaction shown by this list speaks to an image- and health-obsessed society, and one which constantly requires sacrifice.

When I explored the resolutions made by students at the University of Edinburgh, the most common answer was to ‘be more organised’. One third-year History student stated that, "This year, I want to be more motivated to get myself down to George Square and bag a nice, comfy chair on the 5th floor of the library. It is all about being more organised because I get sick of that last minute panic, when all of your deadlines come at once."

My own resolution, scribbled on notepaper, or soon-discarded ‘Noughties’ diaries has been thus for as long as I can remember. Subheadings from 2009 included: read the newspaper daily, always wash whites separately, start a savings account.

During 2009 I did occasionally pick up a copy of The Times – and inevitably ended up reading only the style section. Once I went to the trouble of separating my whites from my colours, only to discover that this doesn’t magically resurrect my clothes, nor do they now shimmer with freshly-washed vibrancy. My savings account, opened in early January, remains largely empty, but I’ll call that one a success nonetheless.

Perhaps the solution is to make only positive resolutions. Instead of giving up caffeine (lasted three days, until the day of my first 9am lecture), I should take up yoga. Instead of sacrificing the guilty pleasure of occasional cinema trips, I should simply amend my viewing choices (frequent the Filmhouse instead of counting down the days until the next instalment of Twilight). To ‘take up’ something certainly seems preferable to ‘The Twitter Public Humiliation Diet’, which requires you to post your fluctuating weight on a Twitter feed, in order that the Christian-in-the-Coliseum feeling of voyeurism might prompt a sudden hatred of complex carbohydrates.

Instead of treating the New Year with cynicism, we should all look to the future as promising and exciting. This year, perhaps more than ever, when a decade has passed with some of the most horrifying displays of inhumanity in living memory, it is essential to seek improvement in our lives, and, on a grander scale, in the world.

Whether you vow to watch less TV, to pay for the music you download, to head off the hangover with a glass of water or to halt global warming, there can be no doubt that a pause to assess and reassess our lives is a healthy annual ritual. Without stopping to think, What do I want? and, How do I get it? there can be no hope for self-improvement.

Sure, we’re at an age when such things seem trivial; when the answer to, What direction is my life taking? is, The direction of the pub, but with such darkness in our past decade, we should all look for the light in the coming months and years.

Benjamin Franklin once said, "Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors and let each new year find you a better man." Leaving aside his American spelling and the exclusive language at the end, Ben Franklin had a point. The Gregorian Calendar offers us a chance to reassess our lives every 365 days of the year. Perhaps it’s as simple as dropping a dress size by the year's end, of finally kicking the nicotine, but it also might be as monumental as taking a positive stance when we are offered a clean slate on January 1.

If you were too hung over to set goals for the coming year, why not scribble some in the margin? Perhaps you will fail initially, and perhaps you will find that real change occurs. The process of writing something down doesn’t guarantee success. But, ask out the girl you fancy, or pick up a newspaper on the way to class or buy an apple instead of apple-flavoured Skittles. Change doesn’t have to be life-changing; sometimes it could just alter your day.