The secret of keeping your New Year Resolutions

A new year is coming, and with it comes an opportunity to make some new resolutions and make your life better. Now, the thing with new year resolutions is that, we often fail to keep half the resolutions we make, which could be disappointing. However, you can achieve your resolutions if you set them free. How? Let's see.

Guide to keep you new year resolutions; Image Source: Britishcouncil

Most people make new year resolutions in the spur of the moment, overridden with the guilt of not having met their last year's resolution and feeling left out when they see everybody around them making ambitious resolutions. However, your resolutions shouldn't be guided by what others are doing.

To make sure you achieve your resolutions, you must make SMART resolutions. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound. This means that you shouldn't make vague resolutions or set unreasonably high goals for yourself.

The resolutions you set need to be well thought out and properly planned to align with your capabilities. For example, if you are not big on reading, you shouldn't set the goal to read 100 books in a year. Or that if you don't particularly enjoy going to the gym, you shouldn't set a goal of having six-pack abs in 6 months. These unrealistic goals can be daunting, and they will stop you in your tracks.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the wonders that small improvement can do to your life, over a long period. He states that

If you get one per cent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you're done.

Keeping that in mind, here are some resolutions you can make this year:

Self-care

In the current day and age, after the covid-19 pandemic taking care of your health has become more critical than ever. Health doesn't just include physical health but your mental well being. In the new year, you can make resolutions to take better care of your health. You can resolve to watch your carbs or have green vegetables at least thrice a week. Or even make a resolution to at least get in 30 minutes of simple physical activity every day. Then gradually, you can either increase the time duration or start doing more rigorous exercise.

For your mental health, you can start by meditating for just 5 minutes a day. You can cut the amount of time you spend on social media slowly and eventually start taking a week-long or even month-long break from those sites.

Prolong use of social media sites has proven to increase people's feelings of inferiority and anxiety, and a periodical break from it can do wonders for your life.

You can form a simple skincare routine and stick to it. You can even make a resolution to kick your smoking habit to the curb. The idea is to select which areas of your physical and mental well being you want to improve and start making better gradually. Remember, slow and steady wins the race.

Better Budgeting

More often than not, it happens that we find our budget stretched thin by the end of the month. This new year you can resolve to get better at budgeting.

Don't try to save what is left after spending, instead set aside a certain fixed amount that you want to save every month and don't touch it.

I would advise transferring it to your savings account, and then making do with what you have left. You can also use apps to keep track of your spendings. You'll find that you don't need any significant lifestyle changes to save a good amount of money. All you need to do is keep a certain amount aside each month and be disciplined enough not to touch it.

Decluttering

I can not possibly emphasise enough the importance of decluttering. Clear your closet, donate the things you don't need and organise your room the way you want it to. You can invest in some great decor and accessories for your space, whether they are some fantastic lampshades or organisers for your closets. Once you have set an organisational scheme in your mind, stick to it. It won't just make your room, and your house looks pretty but also make your life more convenient.

An organised space would mean that you would never have to worry about losing something in your room, only to find it a year after during the annual house cleaning.

A decluttered space would also make you feel good about yourself. Start by organising a little, and devise an easy to follow and convenient organisational scheme that suits you best and stick to it. You'll thank yourself for it.

Be a better person.

Now, this sounds vague, organising, or it might seem like you need to do something extraordinary to achieve this goal. However, it's not as hard as you might think. You can start by donating the clothes and articles you discarded during your decluttering to a charity of your liking. You can look up bookshops and libraries that need a volunteer on weekends. You can make environmentally conscious choices and use recyclable plastics. You can resolve to catch up with one of your friends once a month. You can determine to be a better listener, and it just requires patience.

You don't need grand gestures to be a better person; you just need to do small good deeds.

Try something new

Humans are exploratory by nature. Humankind grew because we were curious enough to experience new things.

This might be the most fun yet challenging resolution to keep. Fun because when you try new things, you might find something unique that'll make your life more enjoyable, hardest because this requires you to be patient and not give up if you don't enjoy something you try.

This new year, you can make a resolution to learn a new skill, try new food cuisines, and watch movies and television shows in genres and languages you have never explored before. You can even make plans to travel to places you've never been to before. The idea is to have new experiences and make new memories, and these experiences might not always be pretty. Still, at the end of the following year, when you look back, you'll have a whole bunch of novelty experiences and memories that you gathered throughout the year.