4 Ways to Celebrate World Health Esteem Month
As January of 2023 comes to a close, it’s a great time to prioritize your mental health by celebrating the end of World Health Esteem Month. Around the globe, this month was dedicated to emphasizing the importance of having high self esteem in your everyday life. Which is not to say that self esteem is always easy to maintain or improve – quite the opposite is true for millions of people.
The great news is that everyone can boost their self esteem and mental wellbeing by practicing a few techniques that can help boost one’s sense of self respect and positivity about who you are. To honor the end of World Health Esteem month, let’s take a closer look at a few reliable ways to bolster your self esteem that you can use throughout the year.
Commit to Physical Activity
According to board-certified neurologist and psychiatrist Julia Samton, exercise has been shown to have a positive impact on self-esteem and life satisfaction. More specifically, NIH research strongly suggests that adults between the ages of 18 to 65 should strive to get either 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of challenging physical activity per week. For people who don’t have easy access to a gym, it’s still possible to achieve this by walking for 30 minutes daily, Monday through Friday. Essentially, adopting and maintaining a regular exercise routine into your daily life can help you to feel strong physically and mentally, providing you with lasting feelings of accomplishment and self-worth.
Appreciate Your Strengths
Having confidence in yourself and your abilities also supports your self esteem. When you know you’re good at something and have the ability to succeed, valuing yourself and supporting your sense of self worth becomes easier. Recognizing the strengths you have and your own passions is an essential part of building and maintaining your self esteem.
While many of us may lack the confidence to begin something new, it’s still necessary to get started to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to do it. Below are just a few ways to help identify your strengths and how to work towards them:
- Commit time to identifying what you know your strengths are, even if you don’t feel like they’re developed enough. Write a list to visualize them to help motivate yourself toward making them even better.
- You can also take an assessment from trusted others and ask them to list down the things they think your strengths are.
- After making your list of strengths, make a list of the things you most-want to do or achieve, or even that simply interest you about work or life.
- Go back to that list of your strengths that others think you have and consider how to match them with your interests. If there are some additional traits you need to develop to become more of a successful part of the things you’re interested in, this matching will help you know what you can work on to get closer to reaching your goals.
Understand & Accept Your “Flaws”
Every person on our planet has flaws, which is to say things we wish could change or want to improve on. But to prevent these “flaws” from taking over our self-esteem, it is essential to separate the “flaws” that can be improved from those that are unchangeable. With unchangeable “flaws,” there are really just two options: you dwell on them or you can find acceptance. By accepting unchangeable parts of yourself you can start moving beyond the confines of the negativity you associate with them, whether it be clinical depression or even low-self-esteem.
It’s important to note that accepting your flaws isn’t that same as convincing yourself to like them. It just means choosing to no longer let that which is unchangeable have control over you. For example, instead of resisting or feeling completely overwhelmed by negative thoughts or feelings, accept them. They may not be likable. But you should allow yourself to feel them. This sort of thought process will help you accept your greater value as a person. As your self-esteem increases, your confidence and sense of well-being will also continue to grow.
Prioritize Self Care
Incorporating self-care techniques into your life is another reliable and comforting way to boost your self-esteem. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, self-care prioritizes committing time to do things that help improve your quality of life, both for your physical health and mental health. In terms of mental health, self-care is a great way to help you manage stress, decrease your risk of illness, and improve your energy levels.
Self-care techniques include everything from maintaining a healthy and diverse diet, sticking to a regular sleeping schedule, including a relaxing activity in your daily routine, setting goals and priorities for yourself, and practicing gratitude by writing down the things you’re grateful for. Even small acts of self-care, like challenging your negative thought patterns with positive outlooks can have a substantial impact.
At Renewed Vitality, we strive to help every person in the Berks County community lead healthier lives with improved self esteem. We’re also the center for the area’s best facility for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and other treatments. We proudly serve both men and women with innovative and practiced care that relieves hormone imbalance symptoms, improving and restoring quality of life for patients at any age. To learn more, don’t hesitate to contact Renewed Vitality today!
Eventually every woman begins to experience some of the symptoms of menopause, and even when you know it’s coming, it can still be a challenging time! As the partner of someone who is going through menopause, it can be difficult for you to know what the right course of action is. You want to help the person that you love, but oftentimes it doesn’t seem like there’s much you can do at all, and you end up feeling powerless to make this transition easier for them.
While you certainly can’t stop the natural process of you and your partner aging, there are some ways that you can show support and help your partner as they go through menopause. Here are some good things to keep in mind.
Learn What to Expect
One of the best ways for you to support your partner is to do your homework. If you’re not familiar with what the effects of menopause actually look like and what your partner is and will soon be experiencing, now is the time find out!
Educate yourself on things like mood swings, hot flashes and night sweats, sleep problems, weight gain, hair thinning, and the many other physical effects that menopause can have. Not only will this help you to be more understanding of what your partner is going through, it can keep you from blundering into awkward situations where you make hurtful comments about something that they can’t control.
Be Understanding of Mood Swings
While not everyone experiences mood swings during menopause, it is a common symptom. The occasional bad mood is normal, but sudden and intense changes of mood that disrupt a person’s daily life and relationships are most likely a result of changing hormone levels during menopause.
Even when you know that your partner’s crankiness is caused by menopausal mood swings, pointing this out to them is probably not the best idea. No one likes to be told they’re being irrational and hormonal when they really feel upset! Instead, try not to take them personally and if needed, discuss the situation with your partner later when they’re in a better headspace.
Communicate
You’re never going to be able to get through this next phase in your relationship together if you and your partner simply rely on assumptions about each other to understand what’s going on between you. Now is the time to focus on open and honest communication more than ever.
Discuss with your partner what the best ways are that you can offer support, and what you need from them in order to feel content and fulfilled in your relationship. Build a plan for how to handle fights and other disagreements. Practice active listening and being mutually patient with each other. All of these things can help your relationship to become stronger through this transitional phase.
Stay Healthy Together
Focusing on physical health like diet and exercise can help to make the symptoms of menopause easier to manage, so make forming healthy habits a part of your relationship that you do together!
Evening walks, weekend yoga sessions, or healthy cooking classes can be a great way for you and your partner to spend time with each other, and building in these healthy practices will help to make menopause a less challenging time for them. Plus, you get to reap the benefits of a healthier lifestyle as well!
Look Into Treatments
Sometimes, the symptoms of menopause are unpleasant enough that treatment is required. If this is something that your partner is open to, you can help them by assisting in researching possible treatments and therapies that can alleviate their symptoms and make their life easier as they continue to age.
Hormone replacement therapy (or HRT) has been shown to be extremely helpful in alleviating the symptoms of menopause, and at Renewd Vitality in Wyomissing, PA is the premier facility for HRT in the Berks County area. If your partner is interested in hormone replacement therapy for menopause, contact us today!
It’s no secret that as you age, sex can start to look different from how it did when you were younger. This is a combination of many different factors, from the shifting mental, emotional, and social influences on your life to physical and chemical changes in your body. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing– it’s natural for your sex drive to change and slow down as you get older, and you can still have a healthy sex life no matter your age. It’s good to know what changes to expect, however, and that if you’re struggling with changes to your sex drive as you age, there are routes you can take to help combat the less-than-enjoyable effects. Here’s a quick breakdown of what the evolution of an adult’s sex drive typically looks like. Remember, everyone is different, so these are not hard and fast milestones so much as generalizations.
20s and 30s
You might assume that both men and women have their highest libidos around the same age, but that’s surprisingly not true! In men, testosterone is high in the 20s, and sex drive is usually high along with it.
For women, libido is a little lower during the 20s but tends to go up in the 30s. Sex drive is a very complicated subject, and scientists haven’t conclusively proven why this happens, but it’s generally assumed that there’s a correlation between the increase of sex drive and the decrease in fertility that happens in the late 20s to 30s. High fertility in your 20s might lead to an evolutionary instinct to be more selective about sex.
Pregnancy
Most women who have children do so sometime in their 20s and 30s, and this has some serious effects of sex drive, not just during the pregnancy, but afterwards as well. It’s common to experience a boost in libido during the second trimester and be disinterested in sex at other times, but this isn’t the case for everyone. Some women experience an unusually high sex drive during pregnancy, or an unusually low one, or they might be anxious about whether it’s safe (the answer is typically yes, but double check with your doctor if you’re nervous). The stress of raising children can also lead to a decrease in sex drive after the baby arrives.
40s
Around the age of 35, testosterone levels in men start to drop, which can cause a decrease in sex drive as well. These changing hormone levels continue into the 40s, and the decrease might be fairly gradual for some men or faster for others.
Women, on the other hand, tend to have fairly high sex drives and active sex lives in their 40s. Some studies indicate that women around this age are more likely to have sex more often and earlier on in a relationship, as well as having more intense fantasies.
50s
For men, sex drive around this age is usually significantly lower than it was earlier in life, although there’s no reason for this to get in the way of a healthy sex life. Erectile dysfunction does become more common in men as they get older, but this actually has less to do with age and more to do with other health problems that become common with age, like obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and high cholesterol. Medications for these conditions and others can also lead to erectile dysfunction, and you should discuss it with your doctor if it’s becoming a problem.
For women, lowered stress levels from environmental factors like the kids moving out or less worry around getting pregnant might lead to an increased interest in sex, but the onset of menopause can throw a bit of a wrench in the works with hormonoal changes leading to things like vaginal dryness, lowered libido, and mood changes or sleep problems. These are also things you should discuss with your doctor.
What Can I Do?
If you’re struggling with the effects of aging on your sex life, hormone replacement therapy might be a great option for you! At Renewed Vitality, our bioidentical hormones are more efficient and have less adverse effects than synthetic hormones, and giving yourself a boost of testosterone or estrogen as needed can help to get you feeling more normal and get your sex life back on track. If you’re interested in this treatment, please contact us here to learn more!
Let’s face it: dating is no cakewalk even when you’re young, but when you get older, it gets more and more difficult. You become busier, your needs and standards become more concrete, and depending on your situation, you might be getting back into the dating game after being out of it for a while. Sometimes, the whole thing might feel like more trouble than it’s worth, but just because dating in your 50s and above isn’t as easy as dating in your 20s, that doesn’t mean that you should simply content yourself to be alone if it isn’t what you really want! Finding and building a happy relationship in your older years is 100% possible, and whether you’re divorced, widowed, getting out of a long relationship or just never dated much to begin with, you can still find love at any age. Dating later in life can look quite a bit different to dating in young adulthood, so here are some tips for dating over 50 that you might find useful!
Don’t Apologize for Your Age
First and foremost, you should never feel like your age is something you have to conceal, be embarrassed about, or explain away. Trying to look or act younger than you are isn’t going to improve the impression you make on people– in fact, it’ll probably seem fake and might put people off. You may feel the urge to airbrush wrinkles out of profile pictures or even lie about your age, but that’s an urge worth resisting.
Age is not something to be ashamed of! You’ve lived a wonderful life, experienced many fun and interesting things, and you still have a long way to go on your journey with more goals to achieve. Don’t be scared to let people see that about you. Confidence and embracing who you are will always be attractive.
Don’t Dwell on Past Relationships
You can tell a lot about someone by the way they talk about their ex. This is both a pointer for you and a tool that you can use to screen potential significant others. Relationships, especially long-standing ones, can be messy, but if a person talks about a past love or spouse with a lot of anger and hatred, especially while you’re still just getting to know them, it’s almost always a red flag, especially if they have more than one story of a relationship turned sour. Remember, if they have one “crazy” ex, it’s probably the ex. If they have multiple crazy exes, it’s probably them that’s the crazy one.
If you have a relationship in your past, try to always talk about your former partner with as much respect and composure as possible, even if things didn’t end on the best of terms. Additionally, although it can be hard, fight the urge to compare your new relationship to a past one. You’re getting to know a new person now, so try to put aside your expectations and meet them with an open mind!
Embrace Technology
If you’ve been out of the dating game a while, getting back into the swing of things can make you feel like you went to sleep and accidentally woke up years in the future. Things have changed a lot in the dating world, and adjusting to it can be tricky. However, once you get over the fear factor, you might find that the rise of technology in dating is actually very useful. Dating apps are a great way to get the ball rolling on meeting people nearby, particularly if you don’t have a lot of time to meet people out and about. There are even apps aimed specifically at older age groups, so don’t be afraid to get in there and give them a try. Don’t be scared to get flirtatious over text either!
Additionally, technology can help with the safety element of dating. Now you can do a quick google search of a potential partner, and it’s always better to find out about that mugshot right from the start than it is to be surprised by it down the line. On most phones today, there’s also a feature that lets you share your geographical location with a contact, which is a good thing to do as a safety precaution before you head out on a date with someone you don’t know that well.
Have Fun!
Take a deep breath and try to relax. Trying to balance your busy life with finding love can be stressful, but remember that dating is supposed to be fun! One of the downsides of dating as a young adult is that the pressure to get married and have a family before you’re “past your prime” is intense. When you date at an older age, one of the main perks is that the pressure is off! You can still date with the intention of getting married, and having a family together isn’t off the table, but you can take things at a relaxed, more casual pace and fall in love with someone in your own time. Feel free to let loose, be playful, and enjoy where the next years of your life are going to take you. Good luck!
Mental wellness and sex are a lot more closely connected than they might seem at first glance. Although they’re incredibly different from person to person, everyone needs to have balance between these two factors. Whether they engage in intimacy with one person, multiple people, or individually, good mental health is tied to a healthy sex life, and a healthy sex life is tied to good mental health. With age, it can be common for sex drive to decrease, which can have unexpected results on a person’s mental wellbeing, so making an effort to keep your sex life active later in life can be very helpful! Here are some of the benefits of a healthy sex life on your mental wellness.
Relationship Benefits
If you’re in a relationship, keeping up with your sex life can do a lot of good things for you and your partner. Physical intimacy encourages communication and bonding between partners, boosts self esteem and self image, and can help lower relational anxiety, or anxiousness around relating to or bonding with other people. Overall, it helps to bring you closer together and make your relationship stronger and happier, which is never a bad thing!
Lowered Stress
Sex offers all the same benefits of exercise, so it has the added side bonus of lowering your stress levels by releasing your body’s feel-good hormones, endorphins and oxytocin. Overall they help you to feel more relaxed and stave off feelings of anxiety and depression.
Improved Mood
Just like your daily mental health walk helps you to feel happier, so does sex! The same hormones that are associated with lowered stress levels, endorphins and oxytocin, as well as serotonin, can help you to feel happier and put some more pep in your step throughout the day.
Better Sleep
A healthy and active sex life will be a big help to your sleep patterns. The brain chemicals released during sex help you to feel relaxed and sleepy, which can help you get a better night’s shut-eye. Poor sleep can be extremely detrimental to your mental health, even just one night and especially if it becomes a chronic problem, so by helping you to sleep better, sex can also better equip you to handle your mental wellness.
Between changes in your sex drive as you age, increased stress, and a busy lifestyle, keeping your sex life active and healthy can start to feel like an afterthought, but the benefits you can get from making it a priority in your life are worth the effort it takes to make time for it. Whether you’re in a committed or casual relationship or you’re single, you can still enjoy all the mental health benefits, not to mention the physical health benefits!
If you’re struggling with sexual issues like low libido, speaking to a professional can make a huge difference. Renewed Vitality in Berks County is the area’s premier facility for hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which can be exceptionally helpful in terms of improving your sex life, especially as you age. We have both male and female patients, and we offer safe, effective treatments to help with hormone imbalances and restore your quality of life. Contact us to learn more about what this treatment can do for you!
It’s true that getting older often brings benefits like greater experience and a more refined perspective on life. But from a purely physical point of view, most people associate aging with wrinkles, reduced athletic capability, and a decrease in sexual performance. But sexual dysfunction and age aren’t as clearly connected as you might think, with some men maintaining sexual activity well into old age.
Since sexual activity inevitably changes over time, when should men stop having sex? The good news is that, generally speaking, you don’t have to stop! People’s sexual appetites and capabilities vary because everyone’s aging process and sexuality are at least somewhat unique. But what happens if your body is exhibiting symptoms that make it harder to have sex as you age? Let’s take a closer look at some of these issues and how to treat and mitigate them.
Sexuality Changes Over Time
It can take older men more time to become aroused, and they may need longer recovery times after orgasming. Erectile dysfunction is also quite common as men age, with up to two-thirds of men over 70 years old reporting symptoms. From a medical perspective, this is often related to declining testosterone levels, and can also be affected by many age-related conditions and the medications used to mitigate them.
Intimacy is crucial for everyone, including older men. In addition to adjusting medications and how men may treat their other physical health conditions, it also useful for older men to change how they think about sexual performance. For example, if age or health-related problems prevent or reduce your sexual performance, it’s often a great idea to focus more on sexual activities that don’t need an erection or ejaculation to be pleasurable.
How to Stay Sexually Active as an Older Man
While it’s expected that the vast majority of people will experience a decline in sexual activity as they enter their latter years, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have to stop having sex altogether or even much at all.
Along with staying healthy by practicing good nutrition and regular exercise, older men should treat medical conditions as they come up and, if required, use preventative medication to stop issues such as erectile dysfunction. This can help you maintain fulfilling sexual relationships as you age and establish greater peace of mind about sexual performance.
Maintaining a Healthy Lifestyle
For reliable and satisfying sexual activity as men age, incorporating good physical health activities usually means better sexual health and stronger sexual desire. Even basic things like regular exerise, a balanced diet, and kicking bad habits like smoking or drinking too much alcohol can all contribute to a healthy sex like even into your 70s and 80s.
Using Erectile Dysfunction (ED) Medication
While it’s true that erectile dysfunction can occur in men of all ages, there’s a much higher incidence rate in older men. In particular, research has found that men have about a 40 percent risk of encountering some degree of ED in their 40s, increasing subtintailyl more every decade.
While this may seem intimidating, there are great modern ED prescriptions that can make it easy to maintain an erection, even if you’re experiencing symptoms of ED. If you’re experiencing such symptoms, be sure to talk with your doctor to get a better understanding of the best medication options for you.
Treat Any Underlying Medical Issues
It’s possible for many sexual performance challenges to be caused or worsened by specific health conditions. For instance, erectile dysfunction often results from high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems, diabetes, and other physical conditions that become bigger issues as men age.
If you have a chronic disease or other health conditions that could affect your sexual performance, keep in close contact with your healthcare provider and, potentially, use medication to control your condition(s)’s symptoms for a more satisfying quality of life.
It’s also crucial to take an active approach to maintaining your health by checking for age-related medical issues that could impact your sexual satisfaction and capability. By staying on top of your overall health, you may be able to address issues as they come up for improved health and sexual performance across the decades.
Taking Action
If you’ve been feeling dissatisfied with your sexual performance or sex life in general as a result of age, we hope this info will help you take action toward a more rewarding sex life in your later years. By speaking with a medical professional about potential medications and physical or emotional issues related to sex, you’ll be taking the first steps to a better quality of life.
Feel free to reach out and contact us with any questions about how to treat and mitigate symptoms of age-related sexual decline. here are great ways to adapt to your body’s changing needs, and by exploring these possibilities, you can maintain a great sex life for years to come!
Everybody starts the new year with the best of intentions. There’s something so exciting about a completely blank slate, knowing that this next year of your life can be anything, but sadly, keeping New Year’s resolutions is rarely as simple as perseverance and willpower. There are a lot of factors that can make it difficult to stick to your goals for the year, whether you’re hoping to get in shape, get more organized, quit a bad habit, or even just have a happier year than you’ve had in a while. However, if you can address the external factors that are holding you back from achieving your goals, you might find that suddenly everything, not just your New Year’s resolutions, becomes easier. Here are some common reasons that New Year’s resolutions fail, and what you can do to ensure that you don’t fall victim to them.
Your Goal Was Not Specific Enough
When setting a goal for the year, vagueness is never going to be your friend. Not having a clear and direct path to take will make it difficult for you to get started in the first place, meaning you’ll essentially have failed before you begin. Alternatively, even if you do make significant progress towards a goal, if you haven’t set yourself a benchmark of success, you’ll never feel that you’ve made enough progress, and you won’t be satisfied with your own hard work. Setting very clear and concrete goals is the way to go with New Year’s resolutions, so for example, don’t set a goal of just “lose weight,” instead set a goal to “lose 20 pounds by June.” Instead of “get organized,” set a goal of “set up a filing system for my important documents and donate half of what’s in my closet.” Having these definitive end goals to work towards will make a huge difference!
You Have No Support System or Accountability
Reaching a goal is not easy, and reaching a goal alone is next to impossible. If you’re trying to charge bravely ahead into your New Year’s resolutions with no one in your corner to back you up, it’s going to be way more difficult than it would be if you had a support system in place. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to have someone working towards the same goal as you, just that you need a person or group who can celebrate your successes with you and encourage you when you’re struggling. However, if you can work towards the same goal with another person, that’s great too! Having other people who are going to be able to hold you accountable is incredibly important for New Year’s resolutions.
You Didn’t Celebrate Small Successes
The value of recognizing smaller milestones on your way to achieving your larger goal is frequently overlooked and can lead to you being discouraged about the process. If you set out to lose twenty pounds this year, for example, you might think it’s a waste of time to do something nice for yourself to celebrate when you lose five or ten pounds, but recognizing your own small successes and helping keep yourself motivated is more important than you might think. If you don’t allow yourself to appreciate how far you’ve come before you’ve reached your final goal, it’s easy to forget that you’re putting in a lot of hard work to do something good for yourself and deserve a little celebration along the way. Set yourself some milestones that you think are good places on your journey for a quick victory lap, and then do something fun when you reach them, like dinner with friends, a trip to the spa, or buying yourself a small treat.
Your Hormones Were Unbalanced
There are many other physical or mental reasons that you might have trouble sticking with a New Year’s resolution, such as high levels of stress, poor sleep, low mood, and more. Surprisingly, a lot of these challenges can actually come back to the same root cause: your hormones might be out of balance. Nearly every function in the body relies on your hormones, and if they aren’t present in the levels that they need to be, this can result in the kind of symptoms that make keeping New Year’s resolutions feel impossible, such as mood swings and irritability, not getting enough sleep, brain fog or impulsivity, and even the inability to shed stubborn pounds.
Getting your hormones balanced is one of the best things you can do for your New Year’s resolutions, and also for your overall well-being this year. With hormone imbalances as a likely root for many mental and physical issues you may be facing, coming into Renewed Vitality for testing and treatment might just be the missing piece you needed to start feeling better. Contact us to schedule a consultation today, and see how rebalancing your hormones could change your life.
The holidays are a time full of fun food and drink, and celebrating with a glass of champagne or a few cocktails is all part of the fun of this special time of year. However, now that January has arrived and brought around New Year’s resolutions, it’s common for people to step back and take a look at what they’ve been putting into their body over the past few weeks. While there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a few drinks, many people find that they’ve overindulged during the holidays and feel that it would be beneficial to cut back. That’s where the idea of a dry January comes in.
Dry January involves completely avoiding alcohol for an entire month. Unsurprisingly, between the holidays and the stress of the ongoing pandemic, many people are feeling like they might have been drinking a bit too much lately and are considering cutting back. Having a dry January can have a lot of benefits on your physical and mental health, so if you’re taking part in this 31-day challenge, here are some of the perks that you can expect to see!
Weight Loss or Decreased Bloating
If you’re a regular drinker, once you cut out alcohol you might notice the effects on your physique. Alcoholic beverages are liquid calories, especially carbohydrate-heavy beers or sugary cocktails. Additionally, like all high-calorie drinks, alcohol adds to your calorie intake without keeping you full, which raises your intake even further since you’ll still need to eat. Alcohol also forces your body to retain water, so even if you don’t actually shed any pounds during your dry January, you might find that you look slimmer or more toned thanks to decreased puffiness and bloating.
Better Hormone Function
Hormones are your body’s chemical messengers, and alcohol can impair the function of the glands that release them. Because hormones control just about everything in your body, this means that habitual drinking can have widespread effects on everything from your blood sugar to your sleep to your cortisol levels. If you’re a regular drinker, you might not even notice how much your alcohol intake is affecting you until you do something like a dry January. As the month goes on, you’ll probably notice that you just feel better, and can’t really put your finger on what specifically improved. In reality, it’s probably your hormone function!
Stronger Immune System
While research on this subject is limited, there is evidence to suggest that drinking alcohol, especially binge drinking, can suppress your immune system. Alcohol abuse is associated with a higher risk for infectious diseases due to its effects on your immune cells. Especially now during the pandemic, maintaining a healthy immune response is on a lot of people’s minds, and while cutting out alcohol is certainly not a replacement for proper self-protection against Covid-19 and other winter diseases like the flu, it will certainly do your immune system some good.
Improved Relationship with Alcohol
You might think that your relationship with alcohol is perfectly fine and you’re not dependent on it at all, but taking a month off for a dry January might give you a completely different perspective on how drinking fits into your life. You may find that you mindlessly drink more out of habit than anything else, or that the nightly cocktail or glass of wine you usually reach for to relax isn’t actually necessary for you to unwind after a long day. On top of that, taking a break from drinking will alter your alcohol tolerance, so that going forward, when you indulge on a special occasion, you won’t need to drink as much to feel the effects.
More Money for Other Things
Let’s face it: alcohol is expensive. When it’s a habitual expense that’s so ingrained into your regular budget, it’s easier to forget about it, but the more you drink, the more money you’re dropping at bars and restaurants and on trips to the liquor store. Taking a month off from booze might have some effects on your bank account that you’ll be pretty happy about. You may find at the end of the month that you like having the extra cash too much to return to drinking the same amount! Whether you’re tucking the extra money away in a savings account for a rainy day or spending it on a new and exciting hobby, you’re sure to find uses for it that are just as good (if not better) than spending it on alcohol.
Whether you’re looking to improve your physical health or your mental health, taking a dry January is sure to give you the boost you’re looking for. And if you’re late to the party this month, take a dry February! The hashtag might not be as popular, but you’ll still reap the benefits of reassessing your relationship with alcohol and prioritizing your own wellbeing.
