New Years Resolution: Less Stress
A New Year's Resolution that you can achieve. Reduce stress - it can change your life.
New Year's Eve has always been a time for reviewing the past and then looking forward to what can be. It's a time to reflect on the lifestyle changes you want to make.
The Only New Year's Resolution You Need to Make
To me, New Year’s Eve is a chance to review your year and see where you can make improvements in the quality of your life and in your relationships. If you want this New Year’s resolution to be realized, why not focus on one single theme and let that theme permeate to every part of your life. One single theme that guides your every action, your every interaction, and ultimately all of your behaviours. Let it become a way of life and by the end of the year, it won’t even have felt like a chore.
I have found that when making New Year’s Resolutions, the ones that are actually realized are the ones that focus on what you want rather than what you don’t want.
My suggestion for a New Year’s resolution has to do with how you live your life on a daily basis. This is one resolution that can radically affect every aspect of your life. How you manage stress, how you make time for your self, and how you relax. Rather than saying I am going to reduce stress, which is a bit like focusing on what you don’t want, put it this way: My life is more peaceful, my body and mind calmer, and my relations easier. The less stress you endure, and the less stress impacts your life, you will feel more balanced and better able to achieve those really big resolutions that somehow never get realized because you put too much pressure on your self.
Rationale Behind one New Year’s Resolution: Stress Management
Stress affects your health, your relationships, your work habits, your ability to be joyful and your behaviour. Some of the more popular New Year’s Resolutions typically are lose weight, quit smoking, quit drinking, and be kinder to others. If reducing stress was the only New Year’s resolution you ever made, you most likely would achieve those things over the long haul. It is very difficult to change your behaviour when your nervous system is in overdrive. You will tend to over eat, overreact, over sleep, over worry, become over sensitive, irritable, and angry, and therefore less able to interact with others in a kind way.
Here are some suggestions to making your life more peaceful, your body and mind calmer, and your relations easier:
- Make time for your self
- Have regular bodywork (i.e. massage, reflexology, shiatsu or acupressure)
- Be kind to your self and do something every day that you enjoy
- Practice daily meditation or listen to relaxing music
- Yoga, stretching, exercising, walking
- Laugh a lot
- Never take on more than you know you can cope with
- Learn to say no
- Get professional help if you feel depressed or are extremely anxious
- Focus on the positive – on what you want
- Be thankful
- Be in the moment
Happy New Year, and may you find your peace and calm.
© Copyright, Sylvia Carlson, 2006. Reproduction without permission prohibited.
