The coming new year is an excellent opportunity to reorganize your life, better allocate your time and resources, and repair floundering relationships. By targeting and resolving the issues that left you disappointed in the past, you can set the stage for your most focused and successful year yet. Following are five ways to start the new year off right.
1. Stop Dieting and Start Making Long-Term Lifestyle Changes
Dieting rarely produces sustainable weight loss. More importantly, it can’t reliably help you meet important health goals such as lowering your blood pressure or stabilizing your blood sugar unless you maintain your diet indefinitely. Stop pressuring yourself to drop massive amounts of weight or to radically overhaul your overall well-being within just a matter of weeks. Rather than calorie-cutting, eliminating entire food groups, or engaging in other forms of deprivation, look for modest, moderate changes that you can make and then live by. These changes can include:
- Eliminating fast food
- Cooking more at home
- Making water your primary beverage
- Limiting your caffeine and alcohol intake
- Eating dessert just once each week or less
- Eating more fruits and vegetables
and more. Small, manageable changes can provide impressive returns over time. Make this the year that you stop using fad diets or “yo-yo dieting”, and start making reasonable, daily choices that feel good.
2. Implement an Age-Appropriate Fitness Plan
Stop trying to match your high school track or weightlifting record and start being mindful of your body’s changing abilities and needs. Look for workouts that don’t cause back pain or joint stress, and that you’re highly motivated to do. Exercising should be fun. It should also leave you with more energy than you had when starting, and better balance, flexibility, and mobility over time. You can work with your doctor or a personal trainer to find activities that are right for your health needs. The best exercises won’t just get your blood moving. They’ll also act as an effective form of stress relief. Consider taking up yoga, cycling, power-walking, or even ballroom dancing. There’s a dynamic range of age-appropriate exercises for people in their 20s, 30, 40s, 50s, and beyond. If you enjoy what you choose, keeping your fitness routine on track will be easier.
3. Review Your Financial Goals and Rewrite Your Budget
Don’t go into the new year with a budget that represents last year’s financial goals. Take some time to consider what you want for yourself, and determine whether you’re making the best use of your income and properly allocating your resources. Are you saving too little or too much? Have you established a good balance between planning for the future and enjoying the present moment? Decide whether you want to travel more this year, treat yourself to a big-ticket item, or stash more cash away for the unexpected. Conducting a yearly review of your budget will leave you poised for financial health and greater peace of mind.
4. Make Peace
You certainly don’t want to carry the stress and baggage of past years into the new one. One of the most challenging parts of giving yourself a fresh start is practicing forgiveness and seeking it where it’s needed. Making peace in all of your most contentious and difficult relationships can be incredibly freeing. Best of all, you can do it without transgressing your boundaries or feeling like you’ve betrayed yourself. Get in touch with a private therapist or use online counseling resources to improve your communication skills, learn more about yourself, and become more empathetic. Whether you want to learn how to get along with your ex-wife or how to resolve a long-running conflict with an adult sibling, taking a proactive approach to improving your relationship skills will make the coming new year an infinitely more peaceful one.
5. Finish What You’ve Started
Make a list of all the small projects that you’ve let fall by the wayside in recent months. Then, devise a way to complete them before the new year arrives or to continue them going forward. Break the pattern of starting things and failing to complete them. Finishing off what you’ve begun will increase your confidence, instill a sense of accomplishment, and create better time and resource management skills. If you’ve set large goals in the past and have been ambling towards them in a haphazard, disorganized way, create a timeline for completion that includes measurable objectives and feasible target dates.
Start the new year off right by leaving conflicts, financial stress, and unrealistic expectations behind. Make this the year of finishing what you’ve started, purposeful growth, and vastly improved health. With the tips above, you can enter the new year stress-free and ready to be the best possible version of yourself.
