Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a great Christmas and enjoyed the New Year’s celebrations last night. It’s a special time for feeling the love with family and friends, and I hope you had time to do that over the past couple of weeks.
Of course, a new year usually brings a time to reflect on your life and make resolutions for the year ahead. Indeed, I expect you made some resolutions last night – you will often hear people say they want to lose weight, get fitter, achieve more. All good things, I agree, but for once, I am saying you should NOT set New Year’s Resolutions now.
That may sound a bit strange, but please bear with me.
Christmas can be a difficult time – you may be rushing here and there, visiting friends and family, panicking over the last few presents that need buying and wrapping, fighting the crowds whilst doing the food shopping. We get tired – over tired in fact. Endless late nights, and yes, most of us try and get an afternoon doze in front of the TV, but it’s not the same.
And who eats healthily over Christmas? We eat lots more chocolate and biscuits than at other times, we drink more alcohol. It would be rude not to, wouldn’t it? And what happens to drinking lots of water? It goes out of the window.
If you have been lucky enough to be off work you may have started to recover from the madness we put our bodies through, but if you have been working again in between the two lots of festivities, then that is just added stress.
And then, on the back of all that you have been putting yourself through, you make a quick decision to improve your life – eat better, drink less, get more exercise. Binge to angelic, just as the clock ticks midnight! Mmm, what are the likely chances of keeping this up?
I want you to think about this, and I urge you to make changes to your life for the better. Just don’t make them now. Take a minimum of 2 weeks, use longer if required, to get back into your normal routine. Allow yourself the time for your body, and your mind, to get back to normality.
When you feel less exhausted, your mind has had time to settle down, and stop worrying over the Christmas rush, THEN I suggest you take the time to sit down and spend an hour or two to truly reflect on your life and how to improve it.
You can set goals at any time of the year. In fact I suggest you do set them at regular intervals – maybe every 3 months. And they can be adaptable, as you manage to tick off things from your goal list, you can then add more, or adapt the ones you’ve already achieved. For example, if you wanted to start running regularly, after three months you may adapt that to running a certain distance or join a running club.
I hope that makes sense. Leave the rash resolutions made whilst out celebrating behind, and take the time to truly reflect, think wisely, and make changes that you will stick to. And if you decide to join a gym, you’ll find that they will be emptying around the last week of January as all those other people drop their resolutions!
I’ll talk more about goal setting soon, in the meantime, have a great first week of 2017, and make this the year that you truly become the person you want to be.