ditching new year resolutions | a kinder way to treat yourself during new beginnings
Anytime is a good time for a new beginning.
I think it’s an almost universal experience where every year nearing the end of December, we hype up ways to reset our entire lives in expectation of a more promising fresh start when the countdown for midnight comes around. I’m too familiar with this feeling, and in the past few weeks, have been itching with grand plans to declutter, make resolutions and to write down a list of new year goals the length of my arm. I think it’s a very endearing thing that we do this, it’s like our way of hoping and looking forward to a better time ahead. To dream and aspire towards a life that we want to live is at the core of every new year resolution that we make.
But this year I’ve decided to make the conscious decision not to do any of that.
While a reset feels like a good way to refresh and head into 2023 on the “right foot”, I’ve found over the many years of doing this that I don’t typically achieve the grand “reset” I want to achieve (fellow perfectionists - we can form a support circle…), making myself feel more unaccomplished when the first of January comes around - very counterproductive. More importantly, the idea of needing to reset parts of, or my entire lifestyle just for the new year sends a subconscious signal to my mind that my lifestyle leading up to now needs to be scraped and re-worked on. Like wiping off all of the ways I’ve learned, grown and failed, to give myself a squeaky clean slate to start again. Rather, I thought that it might be more useful for me to replace this idea of a “reset” with re-navigating my way back into balance.
While it’s true that I wish I had incorporated better goals and habits into my life this year: exercising, eating well, prioritising mindfulness… to name a few, I think that its a much gentler approach to ease into the new year with the mindset of looking at achieving our goals through finding our way back into equilibrium.
A book I read titled Everything You Need, You Have by Gerad Kite gave this analogy of life as a pendulum, and the inevitable ups and downs of life is mirrored by the consistent swinging motions from side to side. There are many things in our lives we can’t entirely control: upsetting times like losing our jobs, going through a break up, or joyful times like achieving a goal or getting an amazing career opportunity. This means that we can’t possibly be always living the life that we want to live, but what we can do is to always find the gentlest possible way to guide ourselves back into the centre of the pendulum path - the part where things seem to fall into place just the way it should. Gerad Kite goes on to explain that navigating kindness towards one’s self in this crazy world of ours is like finding your way up the pendulum where the swings get less and less intense. Your ups and downs still exist, but you don’t get swept up into the emotional volatility as much as you would have, and this is done through lifestyle changes like mindfulness, radical self-care and better habits that impacts your health, mind and body. I brought up this example because I found it an amazing way for me to envision how best I wanted to navigate the yearly resolutions craze.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to making resolutions or setting goals and intentions for the year ahead! In fact, I think it’s a really exciting yearly ritual that helps us to align ourselves introspectively. Instead of looking at it as a resolution for an entire year, I prefer to look at it as understanding which part of my life I need balanced at the present moment, and moving forward with small steps forward towards achieving this balance. I love this mindset because:
It acknowledges the parts of your life that are good, but identifies the parts of your life you’d like to be mindful about in a more gentler way that doesn’t make you feel like you’re doing anything wrong at present
Focusing on balance doesn’t put a deadline or end-result stressor onto your goals, instead, the small steps that you take towards finding this balance helps you to think about your goals as a journey, rather than a destination. This radically shifts your mentality towards the things you want to achieve and helps you to focus on finding present joy and peace in the process
I’ve created a very simple printable sheet with prompts that I’m using to help me brain storm areas that I want to balance and how I can achieve working towards it. You can download it from the button at the end of the post. Please remember that even though we may be embarking on this reflective journey together for the new year, anytime is a good time for a new beginning. You don’t need a whole new year to set out onto making changes big or small.
Remember, set your goals gently, and don’t tie your worth to the number of bucket list, agenda or goal boxes you tick. We tend to become productivity driven during fresh starts, and lose sight of making the right decisions to prioritise our holistic wellness. I’m wishing everyone an amazing year ahead, and hope for nothing but good things to come your way!
All my love,
Luna
Feel free to use this printable wherever and whenever you feel like it. You can either print it out on a normal A4 sized paper, or import it into your tablet to be used digitally as well. I hope it’s of great use to you should you choose to use it!
If this exercise or blog post resonated with you in any way and you’d like to chat with me about it, I’d love to talk to you. Feel free to drop me an email at hello@luneggu.com ♡
