5 Ways to Start your New Year’s Wellness Resolutions off Right: Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the first 4 ways to start your New Year’s wellness resolutions off right. These include

1. Beginning early

2. Prioritizing

3. Shifting your self talk

4. Going step-by-step

In this part, we will be discussing all about the 5th way: Sacrifice.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. As you begin heading towards your goals, your habits will become more complex. As they take up more time, you will also need to sacrifice things in your life. We’re all busy, and it may seem impossible. You may tell yourself “everything I do from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed is essential and I still can barely keep up with my do-to list!” But is this really the case?

One way is to record all the activities you do in a typical day, broken down by the corresponding time you are doing each thing, from work to pleasure. Everything. Your showering and getting dressed time. Your looking for a matching sock time. Repeatable tasks are key here, because if you can cut off even 10–30 seconds searching for a sock each day, that time can add up fast. You may have to spend some additional upfront time cleaning and organizing your space, but in the long run it will pay off. Next are leisure activities, like screen time.

Once you’ve tidied or sacrificed some indulgences, think of habits you’ve developed that served you well in the past but no longer work. Believing that individually doing hard work was enough to succeed in this world was a habit for me. It worked well during my school years, when grades were based on do-it-yourself study techniques. Now, however, I am learning that my circumstances involve building a tribe and collaborating in addition to creating quality work. It’s a hard transition, but slowly letting go and surrendering some of the time I used to set aside for doing intensive and intricate writing, so I have more time to build community, has freed up a lot of time and reduced my stress levels immensely.

DEEP DIVE

Once you’ve analyzed all your habits — and shifted/updated them to serve your current resolutions — it’s time to look closer. Maybe it’s the way of thinking about things itself that needs to be surrendered.

The sacrifices so far are in the name of optimization. If you’re a millennial like me, we grew up learning how best to manage time, optimize outcomes, get the best grade, go stronger, faster, longer. So, if we’re trying to accomplish a New Year Resolution, we tend to look at how we can streamline the process and sacrifice habits that don’t serve that goal. We have this idea that we should be working all the time toward the goal, lest we get guilty lounging around watching Netflix or scrolling for too long. We feel better once we’re doing the practices we think we need to do in order to accomplish the goal, without questioning those practices.

If you’re trying to get healthy, don’t just do a diet and go to the gym without knowing why. Strategically, wellness is about what makes you feel happy, alive, and healthy. Your life choices should align with your character, passions, and goals. Being well should not be a chore. Wellness practices should not be temporary relief to balance out the hecticness of modern work tasks. When you don’t feel progress or inspiration at the gym or let the treadmill time pass like your workdays, trudging along and constantly thinking of when you’re going to be off, then you should ask some serious questions. It’s easy to think, “Well, health must not be a priority for me.” But it’s harder to question “What is wellness to me? Is the way I’m thinking about it in-line with my definition or the way the industry has told me it should be?” Perhaps what needs to be sacrificed isn’t more leisure, but viewing your Resolution, especially if you’re breaking it down into mini-goals, as just another to-do list.

For example, consider a meditation session. You decide to meditate to reduce stress and fatigue. You could set a timer, get into position, and wait it out. Your limbs start to hurt and go numb. You imagine how good it will feel when you get through with it. You can’t wait for the timer to go off. You start daydreaming about stretching out on the sofa after, having a nice cheat meal to recover. Or worse, you start getting anxious that the rest of your to-do list isn’t getting done. In this case, your very reason for starting is negated.

Another way to approach the session is to focus on your breathing. When your thoughts begin to wander to your pain and numbness, pull yourself back to your breath. Don’t get upset with yourself that your thoughts keep wondering. The discomfort of sitting for long periods is real. But by refocusing, over and over, a habit is built. You’ll eventually find you can go longer periods of time just breathing. In this case, you slowly learn to deal with discomfort, and thus build up to dealing with your stress and fatigue.

No, just having meditation apps will not necessarily solve burnout, but meditating, unhinged from the wellness industry and incorporated for how it works best in your day-to-day, does.

As another example, look at your sources of income. Try to see beyond what’s been drilled into you of needing a career to pay bills and put food on the table. Get past your ego of fitting in, disappointing loved ones or yourself, your fear of losing financial security. If you persist in practices, even if they are part of your career, and you are tired, burned out, and know deep inside that they are not productive for you, quit them. Other opportunities will come along when you start doing the thing you’re truly passionate about.

From this perspective, maybe Netflix is wellness. If you trudge through a job you hate but end up watching not to zone out and escape your issues, but to find a thrill in how a show is made, or the storytelling involved, and get immersed for hours, forgetting that you didn’t eat dinner, then that’s flow state. Applying that experience, you can create any number of possible products and services from it. Books, show reviews, cinematography, design, choreography, etc. Whichever aspect or aspects most excite you. There are career opportunities out there to pursue, and today’s internet age helps as never before to make such things a reality and leave your dead-end gig behind.

Thus, when making wellness a priority goal, sometimes meditation is not needed, and sometimes Netflix is.

Look around you. See the bare autumn trees letting go of the last of their dying leaves, in anticipation of Spring’s new growth. What leaves should you let go of? And what goals do you have for your future Spring?

RESOLUTION

For all 5 ways to begin your new year resolutions off right, you will have moments of vulnerability and indulgence. You will fail along the way. The important thing in these moments is to not beat yourself up about them. Do not say, “I’m the worst. I’m lazy. I have no discipline.” When you try to do what you’re not ready for, not fully committed to, then it’s not sustainable anyway. You may as well not even begin. Which is why it’s so important to prioritize before even beginning on executing your resolution. If you are fully committed, realize humans grow, adapt, and mature in their own times. Instead of beating yourself up for failing, think of the next attempt. Tell yourself “I will make up for it tonight. I will start fresh tomorrow.” And then keep your word to yourself. That’s beginning each day anew. You identify the small steps that are holding you back and practice overcoming them, again and again. Finally, and most importantly, constantly reassess what’s leading you towards your resolution. Are you doing a thing just because you think it will serve your wellness goals? Or do you know that the practice is right for you because you feel joy just by doing the small steps? By the time New Years rolls around, then, new habits will be forming, failings will be less, and you’ll be more likely to keep your Resolutions through January and beyond.

Now go. Begin!