Sticking To Your New Year’s Resolutions: From Thinking To Action
Dr. Marcus Ranney
Longevity Physician to Overwhelmed High-Performers + CXOs | Best-Selling Author | Biohacker | Guinness Book of World Records’ Holder | Building Longevity Athletes | Adventurer + Explorer
Year after year, you prepare for the new year to begin your resolutions to better our health, wellbeing, career, relationships and so on. This is due to the psychological phenomena called fresh start effect, where meaningful occasions often represent new beginnings. Studies conducted on people who set out New Year’s Resolution have shown that 92% of the time they will fail to achieve what they set out to do.?
The problem isn’t in what you are trying to achieve, but in how you set out to achieve those. Wanting to make a change to your life is the first and most important step, but to know how to shift from thought to action is what I want to share with you here.
Goal Setting : The Proper Way?
The most important thing to set the right goals is to know what you want to do. Whether it is improving your fitness, picking up new habits, stopping some habits, changing your work, your house or your environment…the list is endless.?
The second thing to remember is goals should make you feel positive towards improving that aspect. Try creating SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely). Write them down and put them in a place where you can see everyday what you are setting out to achieve. Your goals should get you out of bed and make you feel happy you are trying to better yourself.
Try to make daily/weekly/monthly and quarterly goals as well. Year long goals can help us focus on the bigger picture of what we want to incorporate in our lives. But as the year progresses, we come across a variety of situations, some that we anticipate and some unexpected. Regular monitoring of our goals can help us achieve our goals in the short term and also allow us to modify our goals as the year progresses.?
The last thing you need to focus on is to change your behavior. You need to make your goals obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. By attractive I mean ‘opportunity’. Place yourself in situations where you can form those habits. When you are able to do that, it will fill you with a dopamine driven rush, which will make you want to do it again and again. You can also implement habit stacking which is adding a new habit to an already existing one.?
Optimize Sleep By Starting With A Sleep Schedule
The first step towards enhancing your wellbeing is getting enough sleep. Poor sleep affects our mood, our relationships, our energy and performance, our body functions like digestion and hormone production and makes us crave unhealthy food. Take this time to set realistic goals to help you achieve proper restful sleep by starting with a sleep checklist. This checklist can include activities you do throughout the day that can promote sleep, what time you sleep, your room’s environment and what you do after sleep. Customize it according to your schedule and your needs.?
Move Throughout The Day By Tracking Your Step Count
It is important for you to continuously allow your body to move throughout the day. If you are a novice, start small and set goals to improve your physical endurance. To help keep your body moving, you can invest in wearables to help you track and monitor steps by; taking out 15 minutes after your meals to walk or take your work calls while walking. Try to keep a goal of 7,500 steps to 9,000 steps a day.?
Understand Your Fuel Requirement?
Our body needs high quality fuel to work efficiently. When it comes to adopting a diet related lifestyle, there are hundreds of them out there. You need to understand which to adopt based on your eating habits, availability of ingredients, your weight, your metabolism, any medical condition and what is lacking in your diet. The end goal should also be that your diet is well balanced and needs to be in the caloric range meant for you.
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If you want to quit processed food, start gradually rather than all at once. Research conducted showed that after quitting junk food, people experienced sadness, tiredness, cravings, and increased irritability for two to 5 days - similar to a withdrawal.?
Change Your Environment To Develop New Habits
Your environment is key to making any changes. By placing yourself in situations that promote your goals you will be better able to achieve them. For example, want to quit unhealthy snacking? Keep only the healthy stuff. Want to go for that morning run? Keep your workout clothes and shoes near your bed, so that when you wake up that is the first thing you see.?
A new environment can also be a cue for you to start doing an activity. For example, keeping your room electronic free might give you the push you need to pick up the book and read.
Ways To Improve Your Mental Health
Our mental health is often a result of the above 4 health factors mentioned. If we get proper sleep, eat healthy food, move our body throughout the day and have a good environment around us, we become more positive, energetic and resilient. That’s not to say you can’t do anything else for your mental health. Some of the things you can do , is by writing a daily and/or gratitude journal, actively seeking help through a mental health professional (if you need it), reading self help books and by keeping your environment and yourself stress free.?
Stress is often one factor that can result in mental and physical issues. That is why it is imperative to develop strategies, like box breathing, to help alleviate it. Another way to expel the stress from your life is to adopt strategies like problem focused or emotion focused strategies.?
Boost Your Health This NEW YEAR!
If you’re wondering what else you can do to assist your wellbeing this year, to understand it better and lead a healthy life, visit humanedge.co.?
?This newsletter is part of our ongoing series.
Sources
Human Performance Scientist | Keynote Speaker | Consultant & Advisor | Unlock Extraordinary Performance Without Compromising Wellbeing
2 年Great post, Dr. Marcus Ranney I really like the idea of changing your environment to support new habits. This approach is consistent with research which indicates that, paradoxically, the people will the highest self-control seem to use it the least, day-to-day. Instead, they make decisions in advance and deploy their self-control before they need it. For example, if someone was trying to improve their eating habits, rather than trying to use self-control to resist the temptation to eat a box of cookies while watching a movie, they would use self-control to avoid buying them in the first place!