Natural Living

Carole Caplin: How to make New Year’s resolutions that last

The insider view on the holistic health world from the UK’s top lifestyle and fitness expert Carole Caplin

The insider view on the holistic health world from the UK’s top lifestyle and fitness expert Carole Caplin
New Year – time for change, bold resolutions, a different way of being. Yes! – except is there any time in the year that feels more déjà vu? Or is it just me? Take this month’s column for instance. I’m very fortunate in that I can write about pretty much anything I think might interest you. But it’s the January issue and I can sense that ever-sopolite but insistent pressure I’ve felt from other editors in the past at this time of year to come up with yet another fistful of life enhancing tips for the New Year.

Why do we want this annual list of suggestions and why do we feel impelled to turn some of them into resolutions – more often than not the same resolutions we made last year, and the year before that? Well, maybe it’s because New Year’s resolutions tend to end in failure and instead of thinking properly about why that might be, we simply resolve to make them all over again, next year.

So, instead of coming up with some novel resolutions for next year, I am going to use this space to give some thought to why we may not have kept the ones we made for last year!

Identifying our needs

Why would we keep resolutions if they aren’t actually ours at all? The family, social relationships and work commitments which inhabit our lives make it difficult to identify what we really want.

Instead, it is much easier (less frightening even) to concentrate on what we think we should want or, what we think our nearest and dearest want us to want. And, paradoxically for a columnist like me, the problem is made worse by a plethora of “New Year, New You” articles filling up the pages of newspapers and magazines right now – so, if you are already too confused to know what you should be wanting for yourself over the next 12 months, just open the paper or switch on daytime TV and you’ll find out. Even if we have chosen a resolution for the best of reasons, it isn’t going to survive long in a vacuum; our resolutions need to be spurred by something that really matters to us. We might be overweight and losing a stone is certainly a good idea, but it is never going to happen unless that idea is connected to something concrete and important like a wedding, or being able to join the kids on an activity holiday, or regaining our health. It’s tough to be disciplined enough to achieve a goal (especially one that involves giving things up).

We need big incentives.

Moreover, we are all masters of inertia, holding on to jobs, relationships, lifestyles and situations long after their use-by-dates have expired because, except in the most extreme cases, what we know seems so much less threatening than what we don’t.

But there’s still a part of us that craves change and the New Year’s resolution answers this craving perfectly. It is a ritualised small change and our almost inevitable failure to sustain even this becomes another happy reassurance about the impossibility of altering anything important in our lives – if I can’t give up chocolate, how can I possibly give up my career…?

Given that our failure to keep resolutions turns out to be one of the main reasons why we make them in the first place, is there a way to mark the turning of the year which might liberate us from the deadening feeling of being trapped in an endless re-run? Well how about this? Instead of using the New Year as an excuse to make empty declarations about what we are going to start, to stop, to gain or to lose, perhaps we should use this time to look back and take stock, to reflect on what we have actually achieved, or failed to do.

Self-realisation

Real change takes intention and follow-through, but before those it requires thought and self realisation. When better to lay these foundations than during the long mid-winter nights of January – cuddling up under the duvet, eating hearty, warming food and allowing your body and mind to get over the Christmas furore? As we come towards February then we’ll look at the way forward to a healthy plan of action. Happy pressure-free New Year.

Article by

Carole Caplin

Health and Wellbeing Expert

is a leading UK health and wellbeing expert and and physical fitness coach

Discover more

Article by

Carole Caplin

Health and Wellbeing Expert

is a leading UK health and wellbeing expert and and physical fitness coach

Discover more