How are those New Year Resolutions Going?

Research suggests that nearly half of us who try to hold ourselves to a new year’s resolution, have given up before the month of January is over. Therefore, this means if you are reading this and you have adopted a resolution there is just under a 50% chance that you will have broken it by the end of this month. If you’re worried that this might be you, here are a few tips to get back on the straight and narrow and see through your resolution for the year, or at the very least longer than a month.

If you are finding yourself flagging, and not feeling the benefits straight away try and create a reward system to counteract this. For example, perhaps a new piece of Blood Brother clothing for every couple of months you have not failed your resolution. This reward system needs to be a strict one, that doesn’t allow you to reward yourself first and do the hard work after. So make sure to set up strict deadlines of what you must reach before you are allowed to treat yourself. There’s two way to go about this system. Firstly, have regular time windows where you get the same sort of reward, or something of similar monetary value. Or take the time to work out an exponentially rising reward system, this one can be a lot more fun, and can make you more motivated, as you know the further along the year you get the bigger the rewards become for sticking to your resolution.

If it’s becoming a time consuming resolution, think of ways to streamline it. If you are trying to eat more healthily for example, but you are finding the time to prep your food taking too long, try and do some batch cooking when you cook yourself a meal, and freeze what is left over, so then you’ll have an alternative to ordering a takeaway when you come home late and can’t be bothered to cook an elaborate meal.

Getting more exercise is the most common resolution, and one that people fall back from doing the quickest. Try and make it part of your daily routine, such as walking or cycling to work instead of using transport. The trick here is mostly to make it habitual, so even if it’s not practical to make it part of your current routine, keep the same amount of time free for it each day, or every other day at least, actively make it hard for yourself to try and run out of time to do it. Good luck!