Making your New Year's Resolutions more regenerative
New Year’s Resolutions can be friends or foes of our wellbeing. Repair, recover and grow with Lifetime’s top tips for making good new year’s resolutions.
Our drive to change our lives at the cusp of a new year is powerful. Having weathered the most changeable, least predictable year of our lives, somehow we want more change from 2021. Better change. Healthy change.
At Lifetime, we are a little wary of New Year’s Resolutions. Life changes precipitated by external factors to an external timetable rarely work. Yet so many of us feel an almost primal need for renewal in January, finding ourselves clearing out garages, dusting off desks and making lists, that making a self-improving pledge just feels right.
Regenerative Resolutions
Regenerative resolutions are changes that do good, repairing damage, recovering things lost and promoting healthy growth. They are kind and flexible: hands to hold rather than sticks to beat yourself with. Our resolutions to repair, recover and grow might be literal or metaphorical. We can resolve to fix the shed roof or tend to a broken heart. The first is difficult, but at least we know what we need to do: get up the ladder and get on with it. Hearts are trickier and the repair more nuanced. For some, recovery might entail a new focus: a sport or craft; for others, it might mean replacing an unhelpful crutch with a nourishing one.
So, before writing our lists or proclaiming our intentions, it’s worth considering not just what we want to change, but how. 2020 was bruising, and many of us are, quite understandably, feeling vulnerable and anxious. Let’s save ourselves a self-inflicted blow and set ourselves up for 2021 resolution success.
5 ways to make regenerative resolutions
Be imperfect. Perfectionism undermines the fact that we can make some changes, sometimes. Forgive yourself as you would forgive anyone who falls, and encourage yourself as you would encourage anyone getting up again.
Be accountable. Join a person or group with similar goals, check-in regularly, support them when they stumble and know that accepting their support will give you both a natural high.
Make it easy. If you want to change a dominating behaviour, make it hard. Leave your phone in the car and put a book and alarm clock by your bed.
Add a habit to a habit. Do some exercise before having your shower; listen to a podcast while doing your make-up; add a gratitude practice to walking the dog.
Aim low. Striving uses effort, so aim low and then, maybe, raise the bar, one notch at a time.
Change is hard, and we’re hard-wired to resist it, so resolving to change is already an achievement. Above all, be kind to yourself and consider adding self-compassion as a resolution this year: that way, you can only succeed.
Wishing you all a regenerative new year
Malachy and Team Lifetime
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If you’d like to talk to someone, Lifetime Therapy offers in-person and online counselling and a free Gratitude Practice. https://www.lifetimetherapy.co.uk/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifetimetherapygratitudepractice/