We all struggle with maintaining New Year’s resolutions, sometimes even in the first month. Whether you want to establish a fitness routine, learn a new skill, or read every day, we’re sharing our tips for sustainable and practical self-improvement.
Slow and Steady
It is easy to compare ourselves to people on social media who have developed the exact habits and lifestyles we aspire to. Let’s take a step back and ground ourselves. Nobody shares their failures on social media. The weeks and months of performing poorly and failing? It doesn’t make for good engagement. Behind every “here’s how I did it” post is hundreds of hours of unglamorous effort. There’s value in slowly curating a new habit or skill. The time allows us to reflect on why we decided to pursue it and how to make the experience better for our individual needs. Above all, it increases the chance of long-term success.
Progress is Not Linear
Take reading every day, for example. If you’re approaching this goal, having not read a book in 5+ years, any movement towards it is positive, ideal even. Reading two pages and never picking up the book for a week? Still an improvement. You’ll find that being kind to yourself and measuring any progress as moving the needle in the right direction helps meet your long-term goal.
Break Up with Social Media
Do you find yourself less able to watch a movie or read a book with a slowly-moving plot? Or take a walk and listen to the sounds of nature? Social media is meant to deteriorate our attention span. This deterioration seeps into many aspects of our lives. There are ways to train ourselves out of our maladaptive social media habits. The OneSec app can set an “intervention” after you open an app or after a custom time limit. It’s meant to snap you out of scrolling.
3 Things
Don’t bury yourself under a daily to-do list. We all lead stressful lives and need to meet ourselves where we’re at. Would you judge a friend for not getting eight to-do list items done in a day? No. So be gentle with yourself. Instead, try to make a list of 3 things that you can practically accomplish in a day. For example: move your body, read for any amount of time, and cook dinner. You can add more to the list if you feel up to it. But the point is to do what can practically be done in a day, given all our other obligations. It will feel like an accomplishment to get those three things checked off, rather than leaving four items from a longer list abandoned.
We wish you all the success in your resolutions throughout the year!
You’ll find that being kind to yourself and measuring any progress as moving the needle in the right direction helps meet your long-term goal.