Why New Year’s
Resolutions are so important
I love this time
of year, probably more than any other if I am honest. I love that build up to Christmas where I
spend a lot of my time reflecting on my year and appreciating all the great
things that happened in my life. I then
turn my attention to the next year, to the future. I am a big believer in personal growth. I believe completely in always striving to
improve myself and learn from the experiences I have in life. 2017 has been a good year, in fact it has
been a great year. We moved into our new home in March, a home which we love
and we still can’t quite believe that it is ours, I celebrated 40 years of
existence and my family and I flew to New York to celebrate, nowhere better
really to celebrate than the Big Apple.
My youngest had her First Holy Communion, a lovely family celebration
and an opportunity for us all to get together again and my eldest started high
school. We had a lot to be thankful
for. My new year’s resolutions tend not
to be about setting goals like going on a diet, going to the gym more or
drinking less. I like to set New Year
resolutions more about how I choose to live my life. Like improving how I cope with adversity and situations in
my life that are out of my control by changing the way I react to
them.
I think this is
where a lot of people go wrong. I know
lots of people who hate making resolutions and avoid it at all costs but I
think it gives us a wonderful opportunity to reflect, refocus and improve. Ask yourself what do you want from your life
this year? How could your life be better
and what could you do to make it better?
This might just be something as simple as stopping complaining about
your job. If you hate your job that much
that all you do is complain about it, maybe it is time to go and get a new
job. Constant complaining can be
dangerous to our mental health and that of others and your complaining impacts
other people more than you realise.
According to a research study from Stanford University exposure to
negativity peels back neurons in your hippocampus which is the part of the
brain responsible for problem solving and cognitive functioning. What tends to happen is that complaining
becomes a habit. People vent their
frustrations onto others to make themselves feel better but instead they should
be looking for solutions if there is something you are not happy with. We have to stop and consider the effect
complaining has on our health. Venting
floods our bloodstream with the stress hormone cortisol and each time we tell
someone about our frustrations we end up 10-12 times more aggravated.
So, if you
reflect on last year and find that complaining became a habit for you then just
make that one change in your life and notice the positive impact it has on so
many aspects of your life. Pay attention
to the difference and how it makes you feel.
Write it down even to remind yourself in case you slip back into your
old habits.
One of the best
changes I made to my life was in 2011 when I started keeping a gratitude
journal. I remember the day I bought
it. I was in Bristol attending the
Positive Psychology Masterclass with Bridget Greenville Cleave and Miriam
Akhtar, two positive psychology experts.
They introduced me to the idea of keeping a gratitude journal and I went
and bought myself one that day. I sat at
my hotel window and wrote in it for the very first time about the three things
I was grateful for that day. I loved it and I am now on gratitude journal
number 2 and would not be without it. If
you are struggling to find a New Year’s resolution for you then maybe this is
the one. I cannot begin to explain to
you the benefits it has made to my life, to my thinking, my happiness and my
health. Living a life of gratitude
enables you to really focus on and see the good things in life rather than the
bad. It helps me to stop and savour
things and really appreciate moments that too often would just pass me by. I worry less and enjoy everything more. So, if you don’t have a resolution I
recommended a gratitude journal.
Another
resolution that will make your life better is mindfulness. Not necessarily meditation but just learning
how to be mindful will enable you to savour the simple things in life and it
somehow enables time to move slower because you pay attention to things. Things like having a shower, driving to work,
eating your dinner, reading your book.
If you pay attention in the moment you enjoy things so much more. I learned this in 2014 when I was studying my
MSc in Applied Positive Psychology at the University of East London. As part of the course I needed to try out 3
different positive psychology interventions and document my experience of
them. One I tried was the Headspace
App. You can download it on your phone
and it offers ten free take ten sessions of mindfulness meditation which you
are guided through. If I am honest this
scared me. I have never been a big fan
of meditation and this intervention pushed me right out my comfort zone. If you
don’t know anything about mindfulness meditation, put simply, it is when you
sit up straight on a chair and pay attention to your body, how it feels, smells
around you, noises you may be able to hear, you might count your breath or do a
body scan. By day 6 I was starting to
feel the benefit. I started to pay more
attention to little things in my day that I would normally just do. On my drive to work I used to spend too much
of it thinking about the day ahead (and how much work I had to do usually) and
before I knew it that ball of stress had built up in my stomach by the time I
arrived at work. Instead I started mindful
driving and paid attention to the drive, my hands on the steering wheel, the
noise of the indicator, what I could see out the window etc. and I found this
made for a much nicer drive to work and me feeling much better by the time I
got there. As a result I found myself to
be more productive.
I only did the
take ten once (ten minutes of mindfulness meditation over ten consecutive days)
but this was enough to have an impact on my life since then. It has helped me particularly in my job as an
Assistant Head teacher when I deliver whole year group assemblies. So often I used to get distracted when I gave
assemblies, I was too busy focusing on the kid at the back who had fallen
asleep or the one who looked like they were whispering to their mate. I spent too much of my time during assemblies
focusing on what they (the audience) were thinking about me rather than
focusing on the content and the message I was actually trying to get across to
them. Mindfulness changed that and now I
love giving assemblies and having the opportunity to give key messages to my
students that I know will help them flourish in life. Assemblies are now a much more enjoyable
experience and the delivery is much better when I focus on the topic.
New Year
resolutions are linked to Hope Theory which can be divided into 4
subcategories:
1.
Goals
provide people with direction and hopeful thinking and a belief that you can
actually reach your desired endpoint.
2.
Pathway
thoughts refers to the thinking we choose that leads to us achieving
the desired goals and our belief in our ability to do so (Snyder, 2000).
3.
Agency
thoughts refers to our motivation to actually get up and act.
4.
Barriers
refers to the inevitable things that may block our way in the pursuit
of a goal – we have a choice. Either we
give up (which too many of us do) or we utilise our pathway thoughts to create
new routes to our desired goal.
Accept there
will be barriers but aim to see these barriers as challenges and find another
way to reach your goal. It doesn’t have
to be a big thing, it could be something small but maybe a new year’s
resolution that will help you be a better you is the right place to start. Perhaps a New Year resolution that will make
you feel happier and more present in the moment is perfect for you. I was sceptical when I tried some of them but
I can honestly say I am so glad I did. So
that is three suggestions for your New Year’s Resolutions: stop complaining (change a bad habit), start
a gratitude journal and be more mindful.
Hope this helps some of you set some great goals for 2018 and make life
better for you and those around you.
Katie Small
