A Fresh Start: Five Simple Tips to Set and Keep New Year's Resolutions
3 minute read
2022 is just over twenty-four hours away. Are you ready? Whether you are or not, the new year is coming for all of us. And as we all know, this is a great time for some self-reflection. Coming up with New Year’s resolutions is something that requires thought. What worked this year? What didn’t? What needs to change? A big part of our mission here at Restored is to help you heal and grow, so you can be whole again and thrive. As cliché as it may sound, New Year’s resolutions can help you to do this.
New Year’s resolutions get a bad rep because of how often people drop them only a few weeks after setting them. The truth is that change is hard. Even those of us who go into a new habit with the best of intentions and the utmost determination often still give up when an obstacle presents itself.
So what’s the solution? Before you throw in the towel and dismiss New Year’s resolutions entirely, try approaching them a little differently this year and see what happens. Here are some tips to help you along the way.
Examine the four major areas of your life: physical, spiritual, emotional and mental/psychological. Rate on a scale of 1-10 how you are doing in each of these areas. Are you praying every day? Are you exercising regularly? Are you keeping your mind engaged?
One helpful exercise is to imagine your ideal day/schedule—does it include room for growth in each of these areas? Where are you falling short?
Get specific. One of the first precepts of S.M.A.R.T goals is to be specific. This is because when people set resolutions, they are often unhelpfully vague. They might say something such as: “to get in shape,” or “to eat better.” These types of statements are not conducive to habit change. Motivation is fickle and often short-lived, but habit change requires time and being very intentional, otherwise it is too easy to fall back into our M.O. The more specific you can be with your goals, the better.
For example, if you want to get in shape, pick a time and place to work out every week. Decide what kind of workout it will be. What do you want the outcome to be? Do you want to be able to run five miles in a specific amount of time? Or lift a certain amount of weight? When do you want to have reached this goal? Why do you want to attain this goal or make this change? Write the answer to these questions down, so you can remind yourself when you aren’t feeling motivated anymore.
Make it fun and easy. Eliminate as many obstacles as you can. Continuing with the exercise example, you can take out your workout clothes and lay them out beforehand, or keep a gym bag in your car, place your running shoes right by your bed, have a water bottle filled and ready to go, etc. This concept applies to whatever goal you have, think about what might stop you from your new habit, and do whatever you can to overcome that beforehand. Time tends to be a big challenge in taking on a new activity or implementing change, so schedule your new habit when you’re planning your day/week.
Make the activity as accessible and enjoyable as possible. One tactic is called ‘temptation bundling.’ Essentially, you pick one thing you enjoy already and attach it to your new habit. For example, if you want to journal more, journal while you drink a glass of wine. If you want to learn a new skill, attach it to a soundtrack you enjoy or podcast you like. If you’re trying to get organized, watch a funny show while you do so. If you want to run more, do so with a friend or group of friends.
Reward and reevaluate. Make up your own milestones. Did you work out three times this week? Enjoy a sweet or splurge on dinner out as your reward. The more you associate your habit with positive things, the more likely you are to keep doing it. It’s important to not just plan the change, but how you are going to encourage it with positive reinforcement. If you find yourself failing, ask yourself why.
Did you really not want that habit change all that much to begin with? Is the schedule you made too intensive and not restful enough? Are you burned out? Do you need someone to hold you accountable? Habit change is often trial and error. As much as we’d like to get it done as quickly as possible, we have to embrace the process and allow room for failure—as long as we get back up after.
Be patient. In our age of instant gratification, patience can be hard to come by. We want things, and we want them now. Unfortunately, that’s not usually how habit change works. If you think about it, our bad habits didn’t happen overnight. Maybe it was easier to fall into them, but it took time for one bad decision to become a ritual. The same thing goes for the positive change we want to make in our lives. Often we fail at our resolutions because we get frustrated with how long it takes to form the habit, or see change. So we quit. But change is a long game, so take a deep breath and keep going. As someone once sang, “it just takes some time.”
So there you have it, five simple tips to set and keep your New Year’s resolutions. We hope the beginning of your year is full of hope and joy.
“We are what we repeatedly do, excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”
–Aristotle
