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.
