New Year Resolutions don’t work. Stop it! You are only frustrating yourself with expectations that can’t be met realistically. Your personal frustration and self-loathing will increase exponentially with each and every passing day of the New Year. Come February 15th, you will forget all about your grand New Year resolutions and you will simply revert back to your normal patterns. We do it every year, right?
The New Year Resolution doesn’t work because it is the epitome of procrastination. In other words, if “putting off ’till tomorrow what could be done today” was given a national holiday, the New Year would be it! The detrimental picture I’m attempting to paint is very similar to the whole concept of the diet. Diets typically don’t work because a person who needs to eat healthier needs not a diet, which has a sort of beginning and an end built into it, but rather a total lifestyle change. Healthy living is only realized when we change our lifestyle. Diets are not a change of lifestyle as much as they are interim period for a particular lifestyle. Interim periods – and all the work done during them – usually don’t produce long term effects. Have you ever seen a person who diets? I bet their weight fluctuates like the Dow Jones, right? It fluctuates because diets inherently exist to be broken or ended. A complete lifestyle change is an overhaul built for the long term. A lifestyle change is an alteration to how we live right now and how we will live in the future. New Year resolutions are a lot like diets and their success rates are very similar too. You don’t need a diet; you need a lifestyle change. We don’t need a New Year Resolution; we need a Lifestyle Resolution. Lifestyle changes start right now, not at the end or beginning of our calendar year.
The moral of the story: Forget New Year Resolutions and start changing whatever you know needs changing right now. Look beyond the New Year towards the remainder of your life. You’ll catch a glimpse of a much bigger picture that will surely inspire you to make whatever changes you need to make to get the most out of all the life and living that is waiting for you. If 20, 30, 40 or 50 years of life isn’t enough inspiration for you to change your lifestyle, then the first few days of January will do you absolutely no good. So, stop the self-defeating ritual of burdening yourself with unrealistic goals and resolutions every January 1st and start considering all the life you have yet to live. Therein, you will find all the inspiration you need to alter your lifestyle in a healthy way and it will lead to success.
Happy New Year!
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couldn’t really agree more
However, rethink your resolutions, do you need to lose ten, twenty pounds, or eat more vegetables. Lifestyle
I have slowly come to realize just how true it is that we can only act in the moment. In this moment I can exercise or eat, be kind or cruel, grow or vegetate — I can resolve all I want, but have no say over the future. I can regret all I want to, but I cannot change the past. I am trying to learn from other traditions and exist in this moment deeply in love with my maker and my brothers and sisters. peace