Your next chapter starts with good mental and physical health
Well, here we are again, at the precipice of another new year and another 12 months of both opportunities and challenges to navigate.
Hopefully, you managed to find some peace and time for yourself over the Christmas period and are approaching 2023 with a sense of hope and anticipation in spite of the challenges and problems that still face us.
Christmas can often be a time of indulgence – and if you’re among those who have perhaps overdone things a bit in the last couple of weeks then you may well be thinking about your New Year resolutions and how they might help you to make the most of 2023 emotionally and physically.
But New Year resolutions can be tricky because we often set ourselves targets that are overly ambitious – which sets us up to fail once life resumes full throttle and takes over again.
Right now, you may well be excited about starting a journey to an ideal target weight when January 1 ushers itself through the door.
But unless you’ve come up with a realistic plan for how to do it, you may well find the challenge looks very different once the routine of a busy life settles in again. And when you find yourself behind on the plan, you’re far more likely to abandon it.
The same is true for many of the other common New Year goals we set ourselves for the year – trying to quit a bad habit or get fit, for example. In the afterglow of the festive period, they all feel attainable – until real life happens.
So, this year why not make your promise to yourself a little more generic, but no less meaningful? And rather than limiting your ambition to purely physical or physiological change, why not extend it to emotional and psychological health, too?
Usually, the physical changes we seek have their roots in something more psychologically primal: we know, for example, that being a healthy weight has proven health benefits – it lowers the risk of heart disease and diabetes and improves breathing and lung capacity.
But while there are those who do act on the lifestyle choices, they make purely because of the risks associated with not doing so, most people seek physical change because of the way it makes them feel about themselves.
The trigger for action is very often about self-confidence and self-esteem rather than the physical benefits alone that taking action will bring.
And when we build self-confidence and self-esteem, we see proportional or even exponential improvements in our mental health, too.
So, maybe instead of focusing on the target (‘I’m going to lose x amount of weight’, ‘I’m going to run a half marathon by the end of the year’), why not focus instead on what you really want to achieve.
If your New Year resolution becomes ‘I’m going to work to feel better about myself’ rather than ‘I’m going to lose x kilograms in weight in order to feel better about myself’, your chances of succeeding will grow enormously.
What does changing my attitude look like in practical terms
What this means in practice is that you remove or reduce the pressure you put yourself under to achieve your outcomes.
Let’s take weight loss as an example, because it’s probably the most common promise people make to themselves at this time of year, and let’s say you’ve decided to try to lose a certain amount of weight.
Weight loss is always a long game. There really are no short cuts. There are faddish diets that will see you lose weight very fast – but they’re rarely healthy ways to manage weight, and you’ll be likely to gain weight back when you stop the diet.
By eating healthily (and ideally combining healthy eating with an increase in exercise) what usually happens is you’ll lose an encouraging amount of weight in the first week or two. Then, as your metabolism adapts to your new regime, that weight loss will slow to a steady pace.
You may only lose a pound or two a week. Some weeks you may lose nothing at all.
If you want to shed a stone and a half that could take between 4 and 6 months – and for the first few weeks, you may not even see any physical change at all.
But you will feel it. Your skin will be healthier, your mobility will improve, your clothes will fit better, you’ll sleep better, you’ll have more energy, and your blood flow will improve.
And as that happens, you will feel better about yourself – more confident, and with better self-esteem.
By focusing on the emotional and physical impact of your aims, rather than just the target itself you improve your chances of success. You’re no longer a hostage to the scales, but instead measuring your success on how it makes you feel.
The same is true for any other resolution, whether it’s taking more exercise, quitting a bad habit, changing jobs, finding love or improving your health.
This less specific, but just as meaningful approach to what you want to achieve – one that isn’t determined by getting fast results – also means you’ll be able to create a realistic plan for achieving your aims.
Whether that means devising an eating plan that is tailored to the demands of a busy life, taking a 30-minute walk rather than paying £60 a month for a gym membership you can’t afford and will almost certainly cancel, or phasing out your coffee intake, your chances of success will be much greater.
Can acupuncture help me to stick to my New Year Resolutions
Acupuncture is brilliant at helping you to achieve your aims in life because it will support the psychological and emotional demands of the path you have set out for yourself.
Acupuncture helps your physical and mental health by stimulating the natural healing energy that is within all of us and allows you to dial down the stresses and anxieties that are often at the root of failure when we are trying to make a tangible difference to our health.
By having regular acupuncture sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to discover and connect with an inner resolve that will then fuel your ongoing efforts to achieve whatever transformational change you’re looking for.
And because this ancient, painless treatment works to harness your inner energy in order to support your physical and emotional effort, it can also help to accelerate those feelings of emotional wellbeing – self-confidence and self-esteem.
If you’d like to know more about how acupuncture can help you to stick to your New Year resolutions and achieve your personal ambitions for 2023, please get in touch – I’d love to hear from you.