Envision your life in 2016 with half the stress and double the energy. Who wouldn’t want to have that?
While practically everyone aspires to better health, it’s no secret that most health-related New Year’s resolutions are unsuccessful. We are inclined to create resolutions that are too challenging or too complex—all in the name of achieving fast, extreme results.
But in place of trying for the rapid fix, the new year is a chance to establish lifestyle adjustments that are simple and easy to maintain—so that after some time they come to be habits, gradually but surely getting you nearer to optimal health.
Below are five straightforward resolutions you can put into practice right away for a healthy 2016.
1. Develop a new health mindset
It’s a recognizable story: you begin the most recent fad diet and you’re feeling really good. Then, a couple of weeks into the plan, and you have a birthday party to attend. You get there determined to be responsible, but you can’t resist the cake and ice cream. Diet over.
Quiting in this fashion is a sign of an all-or-nothing attitude to diet and health. Instead of surrendering when you cheat on your diet, imagine your current level of health as sitting somewhere along a continuum. Every decision you make pushes you closer to one end (good health) or the other end (poor health).
The cake and ice cream moved you to the wrong end of the continuum, but that doesn’t indicate that you have to move in the same direction for the remainder of the day, week, or month. It’s okay to have that piece of cake from time to time, as long as the greater part of your decisions move you in the right direction.
Establishing healthy habits requires a short memory. You will slip-up every so often. What matters is your response, and how you’ll plan on making more healthy than unhealthy decisions moving forward.
2. Establish a moderate, balanced diet
Fad diets virtually never succeed. The truth is that they are not sustainable, meaning that even if they do work in the short term, you’ll likely just regain the pounds.
Fad diets are focused on deprivation of some sort. No carbohydrates, no fats, only 1,000 calories a day. It’s as if I suggested that you’d be more productive at work if you didn’t check your email for a month. During that month, you would probably get a lot more work accomplished.
But what would happen at the end of the month? You’d expend the majority of your time reading through emails, catching up, and losing all the productivity you just achieved.
The same phenomenon pertains to deprivation diets. In fact, studies show that individuals often gain more weight back than they shed after the conclusion of a temporary fad diet.
So what’s the solution?
Moderation. Remember the health continuum? It’s okay to have a bag of chips or a cheeseburger from time to time. Individual foods are not as important as your overall diet. As long as the majority of your choices are healthy, you’re moving along the continuum in the right direction.
3. Include exercise into your daily routine
If you intend to write a novel, and you make yourself to write the entire thing all at once, you’ll never make it to the end. However, if you commit to writing one page daily, you’ll have 365 pages to work with at the end of the year.
Everyone realizes they should be exercising. The issue is the same as with fad diets: the adoption of an all-or-nothing outlook. You purchase a gym membership and promise to commit to 7 days a week, two hours a day, for the rest of your life. Two weeks in, you skip a few days, cancel your membership, and never return.
All or nothing. You’re focusing on the days you skip going to the gym when you should be focusing on the times you do go to the gym. Each gym trip pushes you closer on the continuum to good health.
You can likewise include physical exercise at work and elsewhere throughout the day. Choose the stairway instead of the elevator, park farther away from the store entrance, do some pushups on your meal break. All of these activities tip the balance to good health.
4. Reduce stress
There are in essence three ways to manage stress:
- Eliminate the source of your stress, if possible
- Reframe the stress into something favorable
- Engage in relaxing activities more often
This will be different for everybody, but here’s an example of a resolution making use of all three methods.
Eliminate – certain activities and obligations create more stress relative to the benefits obtained. If you discover, for instance, that you spend most of your time on social media, but the stress of updating your status produces little reward, you might think about ditching your accounts.
Reframe – Have you ever noticed that the same experience can be stressful for one person, yet appealing for another? For instance, some people despise public speaking while others love it. It is possible, but not easy, to reframe your feelings of anxiety into positive energy you can use to subdue your fears.
Relax – What do you enjoy doing the most? What is most relaxing to you? Listening to music? Reading? Camping? Meditating? Whichever it is, find ways to open your schedule to do more of it and the stress will melt away.
5. Schedule routine hearing tests
And finally, consider booking a hearing test this year. While this may sound insignificant, it’s not—one out of 5 people in the US suffers from some degree of hearing loss and most do nothing about it.
Hearing loss has been connected to multiple serious medical conditions, including depression, cognitive decline, and even dementia. Not to mention the consistent struggle to hear as a major source of stress.
Enhancing your hearing is a great way to reduce stress, strengthen personal relationships, and improve your overall health and well-being.