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Hello and welcome to the Own Your Health podcast, I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to help you step into your health power. So Happy New Year's if you're listening to this real time, and if you're not, perhaps you've already fallen into the New Year's trap.
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So what is the New Year's trap? See if any of this sounds familiar to you. You run around like crazy in December. You have a million things to do. You are looking forward to maybe having a lot of those things over with and getting back to some sort of normalcy and New Year's Eve, maybe in, maybe out, maybe a blur, maybe just an early night to bed.
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New Year's Day hits and it's like, oh my gosh, the calendar changes, now what? And people around you are making resolutions and there's a million people in the gyms and all of this stuff is going on because of this random date.
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So my first comment on this is if you've been following me for any length of time, I always wish Happy New Year's in September. And September is more my time to make big changes in my schedule. It matches up with the season, whereas you know, New Year's falls right smack dab in the middle of either winter or summer, depending on what hemisphere you're in. And it's not necessarily a time where you're going to be changing over wardrobes or changing schedules or changing those kinds of things.
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So there is a little bit of randomness to it when it comes to our natural life cycle kinds of things. But here we are - New Year's. What are you going to make of it? Let me give you three ways to avoid falling into the New Year's trap. First, pause - enjoy the moment.
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Enjoy the time. I find it's a wonderful time to sit with the tree, to soak up a little bit of that kind of festive feeling without all the action and all the activity. And it may be time for the family to settle in these long, darker nights.
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We've passed the solstice, so the days are getting longer lightwise, but they're still long nights that we can be drawn close to home and hearth and family. And I encourage you to take advantage of that and not be in such a hurry to rush to the next thing, especially if you haven't figured out exactly what the next thing is.
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Second, in terms of figuring out what that next thing is, I encourage you to take away before you add anything to your routine, your schedule, your calendar, when you start to Think about New Year's resolutions or whatever you call them, whatever category they fall into for you. What do you want to take away?
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What don't you want in your life anymore? This could be something as simple as a schedule that's not working, or it could be a longer term plan. If you really are unhappy and unhealthy in your workplace, maybe it's your plan for the year to make some changes to that.
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And obviously that's not something that's taken lightly. And you don't just automatically get up, or at least most people don't automatically get up and change jobs. But if that's something you want to do, if you want to take away that stress, if you want to take away the unhealthy activities that happen in your particular career or workplace job right now, that's something that's going to be on this takeaway list so that you can then make room for other things.
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Now, this is true for clothes. I know people are looking for new wardrobes, people are looking to lose weight, people are looking to exercise, all of these things that fall in the New Year's resolution categories.
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Let's ask what you can take away first to make room for the new behavior, to make room for the new clothes, to make room for more travel. We have a fixed number of hours in the day, and although we can encroach on things like sleep, it's not a good idea and it doesn't pay off in the long run.
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So really, when you look at the time that you have available to you, what are you currently doing or engaging in that you want to stop in order to create more space for something new. And that's the beauty of this step number two, this tip number two, is that if we take some time at the beginning of the year to figure out what's going to go, we then create some open space, either on our calendar or open space in our energy that we have for each day. So then we can figure out what we want to add, what we want to try.
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And that leads me to point number three. Tip number three. Feel free to try new things without the obligation to commit to them forever. So we've all heard change takes a certain amount of time. It may take 90 days, 120 days, whatever, to create a new habit, to see if something's really working.
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And a lot of us, when we want to try something new, we kind of hesitate to try because we don't want to try it for three months. We want to try something for a couple of weeks and it may be that change in schedule, a switch in work hours, a change to see if traffic patterns are differently if you switch up your work hours and your commute. You don't have to commit to long term for everything.
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Now, some habits, some lifestyle and health changes will take longer to see results and require that commitment. But if you just want to try some things on, we try things on in our journals and check back with me if you haven't.
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I can, I can look and see if we've done an episode on that recently. I don't think we have on journaling. But you can try things without a long term commitment. Give yourself permission to do that. Give yourself permission to change and adapt. So if you commit to doing something, if you have a New Year's resolution to do a certain type of exercise a certain number of times a week for a certain length of time. If that doesn't seem to be working for you after a week or two, ask yourself, is it just hard and I don't feel like it.
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In that case, push through and try on some more, or is it because it impacts your schedule in ways you never expected and it's causing you more stress and you still want to accomplish those goals, you still want to do that exercise.
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But maybe when you do, it has to change, or maybe the days, or maybe the frequency has to change or maybe you need shorter amounts of exercise more frequently. So feel free to change and adapt. You know, the statistics show that most New Year's resolutions have already, quote, unquote, failed by the end of the month.
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And I think that is because people are in a rush to make them. They get that, oh my gosh, it's the New Year and that day changes and I have to know what I want. And most resolutions add to our current life.
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I'm going to start doing this, I'm going to start doing that. I'm going to work on this, I'm going to work on that. And it's on top of everything. So people don't weed out and clean out and create space first. And then people are very rigid. They don't give themselves an opportunity to adapt and change so that they can actually get the outcomes they really want.
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Now, most of the New Year's resolutions I hear about, of course in my profession, but I think it's probably common across the board are health related resolutions. And I've gotten questions and I've gotten requests, so I'm certainly going to extend my three session jumpstart deal.
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If you have something you want to start on. If you have a resolution that you've always wanted to make and make work, let's pick one thing together. We'll figure out what needs to be weeded out, how you want to try this on, and then how you want to change and adapt so that you can create lifelong practices that help you to own your health.
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The links and information are below. And until I see you next week, let's go out and own it.
