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Happy New Year! Let’s rewind the clock to 12:00 AM on January 1st 2019. What was your New Year’s resolution? Most of us make New Year’s resolutions in terms of health, whether it is physical health, mental health, or even nurturing healthy relationships. How did you do at achieving and maintaining your resolution for 2019?
Although some of us are able to use sheer willpower to make a lasting life change at the turn of the clock from one year to the next, most of us struggle to keep up the resolve needed to maintain these changes. The next question we can ask ourselves is why it became impossible to keep the resolution? For some of us, the temptation of old habits is overwhelming. Others find that life’s pressures demand more time from us than we can give to the resolution. Still others simply forget about the resolution and fall back into a lifestyle from the year before. With the New Year upon us again, let’s take the opportunity to overcome the barriers we faced in the past.
Setting Reasonable Goals
One of the reasons for failing to live up to a New Year’s resolution is simply that the goal is too difficult to carry on. If you decided in 2019 to go to the gym and exercise every day, it is likely that the commitment only lasted a few weeks. Changing your lifestyle overnight requires incredible willpower and fortitude, and most find that they fall back into old habits before long. Instead of vowing to exercise daily, why not set a reasonable goal at first, pledging to exercise once a week for the entire month of January. Not bad, right? Then, when February comes, maybe you can reaffirm your vow for that month. If you find yourself going to the gym more than once a week, all the better!
Forming New Habits
Rather than making your resolution like a checklist to complete each day, forming new habits can be a better way to approach the process of life change. If you want to cut out the junk food, your mouth will still start watering every time you walk down the snack aisle at the grocery store. With time it is inevitable that a bag of cheese puffs will find its way into the cart! Instead of relying on willpower, forming healthy habits is a better way to go. What is the time and place where you are most attracted to those cheese puffs? If you say it is the afternoon at the end of the working day, try keeping baby carrots on hand. You can get in the habit of having a few carrots each afternoon, you may find that you don’t even think of cheese puffs at some point. Carrots will be your new afternoon habit food.
Removing Obstacles
Another way to think about resolutions is in terms of removing the obstacles to your success. If your resolution was to keep in better touch with your family, perhaps you found that time was an issue or that you simply forgot. A phone call seems like it will take too long, so you might neglect your closest loved ones. To remove the obstacle of time, work a phone call into a time that you already have carved out. You might be able to call during your walk to work or in an evening when you would otherwise be watching television.
New Leaf Hearing Clinic
One of the best resolutions you can make for yourself this New Year is to get a hearing exam, and you will find that many of these barriers to keeping the resolution are easy to overcome. You don’t need to establish a difficult habit or to overcome powerful obstacles. One simple call or email is enough to set up an appointment for your hearing test at New Leaf Hearing Clinic.
What more reasonable goal could you set for yourself? If you have been putting off your hearing exam through 2019, the time is now to take the first step toward healthy hearing. The benefits to your life, communication, and relationships will be long-lasting, and you won’t regret this resolution when it comes to 2021!