[New] health and wellbeing New Year, New Goals

After the hype of the festive season, being around family and loved ones for long periods of time, some people’s mood can drop with the imminent new year on the horizon. This has been known to be called the “January Blues and Blue Monday”. This negative outlook is attributed because of bad/ cold weather, shorter hours of daylight, the start of another year, carrying your troubles into a new year and not knowing what lies ahead can be daunting.

So how can we help to change our mindset to a more positive state for this time of the year and to ensure it has continuity. Rather than looking at it as a time of negativity, it should be focused upon as a time for a new start, new change and new beginnings. This can be achieved by setting realistic goals rather than new year resolutions and making them ones that are achievable. For example, losing weight, rather than set goals to lose unrealistic amounts of weight in a short period of time, start the goal with the loss of weight, being small and increase the weight loss gradually.

This way you are more likely to stick to the goal and have a better realistic chance of achieving it. Whereas if you set your sights too high, you’re less likely to achieve them and this will contribute to your low mood and make the goals inconsequential. This will also feed into your negative mood and can make you feel justified that the goal setting exercise was never going to work in the first place.

The importance of setting goals is imperative in having a positive mindset. This is because when you set a realistic goal it gives you something to focus and aim towards, also when you achieve it, the motivation and confidence within builds and inspires you to continue and set further goals.

We all deserve to have something to look forward to because that incentivises us to know we have something planned in the future which we are aiming towards. This can be a short break, meeting up with friends, attending a spa day/retreat. All these motivate you to look forward rather than focusing on the past.