New Year is always a time for people to turn a fresh page into a new chapter, which means this is where they make promises to themselves for the year ahead. Some people vow to stop smoking and other people vow to stop drinking. Mostly, health resolutions tend to change around February, when the momentum that the year started with dissolves into the winter Blues.
The problem is that whether it’s trying to lose a few pounds or you’re looking to finally understand the health benefits of regular hearing tests, you need a way to stick to those resolutions that you started the year with. You don’t want to just say the healthy habits you’d like to have out loud, but you need to actually do the work to get you there. Here are five ways to do it below.
Don’t go too far out of reach.
The resolutions that you set for yourself really do need to be attainable. If you want to achieve your goals, you have to be able to measure them, and you have to be able to adjust your goal as required. The last thing you want to do is to pick something that you’re never going to achieve and then tell yourself you’re a failure as a result.
Take small steps to get there.
If you’re starting out with a resolution that you’ve never done before, such as giving up smoking or giving up drinking, then you need to start small. So instead of just cutting things out cold turkey, you need to start with gently reducing the amount that you have so that the goal is by the end of the year you are no longer drinking, not that you haven’t drunk all year long. If weight loss is your goal, for example, aim to start with the small milestones like swapping full sugar drinks for diet drinks and see the changes that come as a result.
Healthy timeline.
Make sure that you book some appointments. Go and see the audiologist for a hearing test, go and see the optician for an eye test. Book in with your GP for a full MOT on your health. These small steps that you take to do this gives you that healthy timeline so that you can see where you are at with your current health and build from there. Seeing an audiologist may not have been on your initial resolution list, but if we’re talking about your health care, you need to go from top to toe and not skip your ears along the way.
Get some support.
It’s so much easier to stick to a resolution if you have friends and family backing you as a result. So tell everybody what your goals are and ask them for their support in those goals.
Prep meals.
If you’re changing your diet for the new year, then start prepping your meals and use Tiktok, YouTube and recipe books as inspiration. Social media cooking classes are actually fantastic, so get yourself immersed in those and learn how to cook good food.
