New Year’s Resolutions

Achievable Resolutions for the New Year

As the New Year dawns, resolutions become a familiar topic of conversation. While setting goals is common, the challenge lies in their realization. Often, we find ourselves succumbing to boredom, doubting our abilities, and overwhelmed by competing priorities. The question arises: why bother taking these resolutions seriously? However, the key is not to burden ourselves with unrealistic expectations. Instead, consider setting achievable resolutions that align with your genuine desires.

Here are some practical and realistic resolutions to kickstart your year:

Cultivate Meaningful Connections: Dedicate more time to friends and loved ones, engaging in activities you genuinely enjoy. This is a powerful way to foster connection, even for introverts. Establishing a routine, such as joining a monthly club meeting every first Monday, can make this resolution more manageable.
Express Gratitude Daily: Boost your happiness by expressing gratitude each day. Begin by acknowledging the abundance in your life—your home, your job, and even your gym. Gradually, extend your gratitude to smaller joys, appreciating a blooming flower, the morning sun, or a smiling baby. Over time, you’ll become adept at finding joy in the little things.
Prioritize Sleep and Exercise: Improve your overall well-being by getting adequate sleep and incorporating regular exercise. If you currently sleep less than 7-8 hours per night, start by gradually increasing your sleep time. Add 10 minutes each night for a week, progressively reaching your optimal sleep duration. Additionally, kickstart your post-holiday fitness routine to shed those extra pounds and boost your mood with the release of endorphins—the hormones associated with pain inhibition and euphoria.

I wish you the best of luck on your journey to achieving your realistic resolutions.

May the coming year bring success and fulfillment to your goals!

A Guide to Budget-Friendly Self-Care Purchases for 2019

Self-care has become one of the most popular New Year’s resolutions, promising a year full of health, well-being, and self-love. However, the problem with self-care as a concept is that it is extremely vague. What does promising to take care of yourself actually entail? Is it possible to invest in self-care without spending a fortune on exclusive treatments and high-tech gadgets?

Eating Better

According to INC (1), the most popular New Year’s resolution for 2019 is to eat better or diet. Now, with increasing evidence showing that dieting is both ineffective and bad for your overall health, your focus should definitely be on simply improving your diet rather than drastically restricting it.

There are a few items that can help you do that. A slow cooker is a great way to eat healthier and save money, and some models cost under $50. A juice blender is great for people who want a way to have a healthy breakfast on the go, with cheaper models costing as little as $20.

Mental Health

Self-care for mental health can mean different things for different people. If you need to reduce stress, meditation is an excellent tool with loads of free options — try an app such as Insight Timer to help get you started. Journaling is another great budget-friendly, stress-busting habit, which can give you a sense of order and control.

It is also crucial that you take care of any unresolved or undiagnosed mental health disorders you may be suffering from, so go see a medical professional if you suspect you may have depression, anxiety, seasonal affective disorder, or any other issue.

Physical Health

Don’t forget that your mental health is strongly connected to your physical well-being, so regular check-ups are in order. One area people tend to neglect is dental care. Poor dental hygiene can be both a result of and a contributing factor to depression, not to mention affecting your physical wellbeing. This guide to affordable health insurance can help you keep these costs under check.

Exercising

Exercise doesn’t have to cost you anything. For example, jogging, walking, and hiking are all great forms of exercise that can be done for free, and there are some excellent free YouTube channels for workouts from yoga to Pilates.

If you do want to invest in your fitness, go for some new exercise gear that gets you excited for your workouts. Health.com has a great guide to buying budget-friendly workout clothes without sacrificing quality. Alternatively, you could spring for that gym membership — just make sure you make it worth your money by going regularly.

Sleep

Sleep is often neglected as a health habit, especially compared to diet and exercise, but it is just as important as everything else. One of your main resolutions for the year should be to sleep better, and there are a few simple ways to achieve this.

Firstly, create a consistent sleep routine and stick to it. This means going to sleep at the same time every night to wake up energized and refreshed in the morning. This is free, and it’s possibly the most important part. However, you can enhance your sleep with small, affordable luxuries such as high-quality bedding or a soothing pillow mist spray.

Self-care is often used as an advertising tool to sell luxury and expensive wellness items. However, the truth is that true self-care is available to everyone and can actually cost very little (even nothing at all). The items you purchase for self-care should be tools to support lifestyle improvements, not the improvements themselves. The most important thing is your attitude and commitment to taking better care of your mind and body — the stuff is just there to help.

(1) editor’s note: Inc. is an American weekly magazine which publishes about small businesses and startups (Wikipedia)

New year’s resolutions are very common at the beginning of each year.

The most difficult thing is to achieve them. We get bored, we start thinking we could never accomplish them, we have too many things to do and why bothering to take those for serious? But you don’t need to set unrealistic resolutions, you can set something like the following, that are not that difficult too achieve, if you really want to.

Here they are:

Spend more time with friends, or your beloved ones doing anything you really like. It’s the best way to feel connected, even if you are an introvert type. You can create a routine out of it, like joining a club that gathers each first Monday of the month, for instance
Everyday, find a way to thank someone. This is great happiness booster. You can start with being thankful for all what you have, the place you live, the job you have, the gym club you go, all that is part of the abundance that surrounds you. Day after day you’ll become an expert and you will be thankful for a blossoming flower, the rising sun, a baby smiling at you
Get more sleep and exercise. If you sleep less than 7-8 hours each night, you can start by increasing your sleeping time 10 minutes a night for a week, then another 10 the next week, and so on until you reach your optimal sleeping time.
After the winter holidays, we all feel a bit overweight. Starting with a physical activity will help you not only in loosing some weight but also in feeling in a better mood. Physical activity in the long run gives you more endorphins, the hormones that inhibit the transmission of pain signals and may also produce a feeling of euphoria.

Good luck and may you achieve your goals in 2019!