Written by Gina – Naturopath, Nutritionist & Yogi at Elysia Wellness Retreat
Allowing our New Year’s Resolutions to become more realistic and achievable might be to reword them as ‘new you goals’ so they flow into permanent new habits and behaviours.
All change is hard at first and messy in the middle, but so fulfilling at the end. Often changing one thing about your lifestyle can have a domino effect and trigger other healthy changes. Such as: “Those many walks allowed me regular time to think about what I really wanted, and the time to analyse how I was thinking about things and how to achieve my goals.”
New Years’ Resolutions fail for two reasons:
1. They’re too big (I want to lose weight, get fitter, change my job, find a partner, be happier)
2. They’re too vague (see above!)
The more honed-in and defined your goal is, the more likely you are to effect change. “It’s hard to have a fulfilled life if you don’t have a plan”, writes Sophie Scott, ABC’s medical reporter, in her book Roadtesting Happiness. Her advice is to:
- Write them down – we need to give ourselves a very specific set of instructions about what we want to achieve and how we’re going to achieve it. Then plan to read these instructions every single day.
- Have a support team to encourage you and help you to keep on track. This might be a trusted friend or family member that you share your goals with, or it might be a health or fitness coach.
- The great thing about ‘new you goals’ is that you don’t have to wait until the beginning of another year before you can start them.
Some ‘new you’ goals may be:
- Take an hour for yourself in the morning to exercise, meditate, breathe deeply and declutter the mind-take time to move and reflect in the morning
- Exercising decreases the stress hormone cortisol and so we tend make better choices to eat better so the serotonin happy hormone balances and elevates our metabolism
- When you feel like surrendering, continue just a little bit longer
- Having better awareness of yourself, and your mindset, cultivates better choices and better results
- Journaling habits improve clarity and awareness and release low energy emotions
- Isolation from overstimulation. Consider all devices turned off after 8pm
- Sleep by 10pm. Human growth hormone production has a wellness balancing influence
- Have your last meal of the day before 8pm
- Instead of stating your goal as ‘to stop sleeping in’ rephrase it by saying: ‘my goal is to get up by 6:00am every morning.’
- Short-term goals may need to be completed to achieve long term goals. Set specific dates for completion of each goal.
- Be kind to yourself, tomorrow is a new opportunity to get back to balance and good habits
- Recognise your achievements. Each step you take is an achievement, and it indicates you’re on your way to achieving your ‘new you goals.’
Written by Gina – Naturopath, Nutritionist & Yogi at Elysia Wellness Retreat
