New Year, NOT New You

This is the second of the Resolution Solutions for 2019, and it encapsulates how much I always want to flinch away from the ‘New Year, New You!’ articles that you find cropping up every January, particularly in certain women’s magazines.

While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to learn or try something new or get away from a self-destructive habit, for example, I find it genuinely troubling to think that these magazines think we want to turn ourselves into something completely different. Almost as if it’s suggesting that our natural selves are wholly unacceptable, that we need to erase ourselves and start again.

So, before we start whittling ideas for resolutions down, and getting into the practical planning stage, let’s go back and look at all those vague ideas we started throwing together yesterday. Let’s make sure it’s all coming from a good place, and that it will have a genuinely positive effect that’s right for you.

Try asking yourself a few tough questions at this stage, such as:

• Is this what other people think I should do (but not what I truly want to do)?
• Am I doing this just to fit in, or to impress others?
• Am I trying to make someone jealous, instead of making myself happy?
• What’s really bugging me about my life right now? Will this resolution help, or is it a distraction?
• Am I punishing myself or helping myself here?
• How is this resolution going to enhance or improve my life? Am I being realistic?
• Will everything in my life be better if I reach my goal?

By the way, the last one is a trick question. If you answer ‘yes’ then you’re definitely not being realistic, and you probably need to mull this one over a bit longer.

New Year dieting is one particularly strong example of a resolution that needs to be put under the lens of greater scrutiny. If your weight is affecting your joints, your blood pressure or your heart, that’s a completely different prospect from starving yourself down to a stick shape to fit in with what many fashion mags or men’s mags might want to foist on us. One type of resolution could greatly improve your health under the right circumstances, the other could mess up your metabolism, and make you physically weaker and quite possibly miserable.

Take your list of vague ideas and intentions and start going through it with tough love. I’ll be back tomorrow to help whittle down your resolutions that stand up to today’s difficult questions.