A new year means new resolutions, but how can you actually execute them?

GET OFF THE PHONE

Coming into the new year, people are always setting resolutions, but new resolution doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do life-changing things. You could start by changing small things in your daily routine. For example, you could make your bed every morning, or stay off your phone for the first 30 minutes of the day.

According to patient.info, people who start their days off by making their bed, will set their mind into following their morning to-do list. It will also make you feel like you accomplished something.

MAKE YOUR BED

Writer Charles Duhigg states in his book, The Power of Habit, “Making your bed very morning is correlated with better productivity, a better sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.”

If you are a person who wants to start to do something, like making your bed every morning, it will take you 66 days for it to become a routine. You would have to do it, consistently, for more than two months for you to add it to your ‘to-do list’ and do it subconsciously.

PRAY

According to Deacon Doug Macmanaman, “The most important thing is to acquire the habit of prayer. It has to become a habit. Without that, we don’t have an interior life; we just have an exterior life. And when all we have is an exterior life, we become anxious, restless, and that leads to greed, the inordinate love of possessing. For we end up trying to secure our own happiness and to reduce our own anxiety, and when things do not go our way in life, we become angry, impatient, irritated, we lose the peace that we long for,” as he writes for the Catholic Education Resource Center.

LOSE WEIGHT AND GET IN SHAPE
A typical New Year’s resolution involves weight loss and fitness.

But how many people actually set out and work on that goal?

According to KOAA News, 52% of Americans want to exercise more and 40% want to lose weight as their New Year’s resolution, but only 9% actually achieve their wish. Why is that? It’s because people set themselves with unrealistic expectations of how to lose weight. They think that if they starve themselves they will lose weight and if they over exercise they will gain muscle. People also think that they have to start off with a huge change in their lives when they really don’t. If they start off with a drastic change, people find it too hard to stick with it.

Instead they should use the following methods KOAA News recommends to be able to succeed:

• Have a realistic routine: Choose a place to workout that will work for you
• Start off slow: Condition first and start small at first
• Nutrition: Your gym results and your mood is greatly impacted by how you fuel your body
• Patience: Nothing comes quickly if you don’t have discipline. If you slip up one day, just remember that you always have tomorrow.

New Year’s resolutions amount to what you add or change to your daily routine. So, don’t be hard on yourself because a resolution is something that takes time to master.

How are you going to make your New Years resolution stick this year?