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New Year is the most exciting time of the year as it brings with it the opportunity to rebuild our life and re-create a more healthy, more productive, smart, and better version of ourselves.
But New Year’s resolutions are often like the box of super nutrient herbal tea brought and stored with much enthusiasm and fervor in your kitchen cabinet. Because every time you want to reach out to it, you end up picking up the black tea bags or worst yet the coffee beans jar instead. So it lays there the whole year occupying space in the storage (and your mind) and adding to your guilt each time you pretend to yourself it was invisible.
The catch with New Year Resolutions is that most of them are formulated as the last attempt to cover up for the previous year’s failures. And so we end up with disillusioned goals we actually could never accomplish (quit smoking, double your salary, jog for an hour every day and never touch that chocolate butter muffin again).
This only adds up to the frustration and inner dissent rather than doing any real good.
As for the resolutions they never last beyond the initial few weeks of the first month (sometimes days). The best way to break this cycle of guilt and disappointment is to give up on vague, unattainable aspirations and make some realistic resolutions instead that are easier to stick to and more meaningful.
Here are 25 New Year Resolutions you should actually be making for a more fulfilling and productive new year.
1. Stop spending time with people you secretly despise. You don’t need to like everyone you meet and you don’t need to hang out with everyone you know. It is really that simple!
2. Show your love to your partner, prepare a dish for your friends, and take up the Zumba classes you have been planning for months. Let everything you do excite you. Do things with enthusiasm or don’t do them at all.
3. Go technology free for a day at least once in a week. Log out of your chats, switch off your social channel notifications – just use the phone the good old-fashioned way for calling or messaging.
4. Pay attention when you speak to someone. Don’t check your phone- Just listen!
5. Do a healthy deed every day, eat a green leafy lunch, go for a jog, stretch, or dance away… take your pick. Ditch vain resolutions like ‘lose twenty pounds in six months’.
6. Stop spying on your exes on social networks and truly embody ‘Letting Go’.
7. Enjoy silence, solitude, and an occasional drink just with yourself!
8. Focus on the bigger picture and not get demotivated, snappy, and irritable by small daily inconveniences and failures. A long wait in traffic is hardly a reason to honk deafeningly at every car ahead in the queue.
9. Accept yourself the way you are irrespective of your height, color, structure, hair, and don’t let that waistline define your self-worth.
10. Don’t judge others for the above either!
11. Do things that make you happy and not just because they make for great tweets and Facebook statuses.
12. Be it the work project you picked up at the office, the evening yoga classes you enrolled for or the volunteer work course you took up during holidays, don’t leave anything midway….finish what you start!
13. Spend more time with people who matter and less with those who don’t.
14. Click fewer pictures; enjoy the moment a bit more. Appreciate being in the moment without trying it to document it online every time.
15. Share a smile with a stranger, leave your space in the queue for an elder, help your neighbor carry her groceries – live with compassion and give back to the world without expecting any returns. Do things that have nothing to do with you!
16. Pick up the old personal journal, find your long-forgotten stamp collection, dust the guitar…Pick up a hobby you had abandoned because of lack of time and actually make time for it.
17. Keep your promises, stay true to your words – Say things you mean. Don’t sugarcoat unless talking to a toddler!
18. Say Hi to your neighbors. Get to know them. Share a tea moment!
19. Try and make your favorite dishes in your kitchen instead of ordering takeaways. It would do both your pocket and health a lot of good.
20. Clean up your desk, sort your cabinet, and throw away the unnecessary stuff leaving only what is useful (and fits!).
21. Grow your own vegetables. The joy of picking a fresh tomato from your own garden for your pasta sauce is incredible.
22. Don’t check your Twitter feeds (or Facebook news feed) during working hours and see this simple discipline increase your daily productivity manifolds.
23. Buy the things you need and not the ones you think you would in the future. Stick to your shopping list!
24. Put your dirty laundry in the basket, your tea cup in the dishwasher, and leave a dry bath floor before you leave. Clean up as you go!
25. And for the days you slept over, the days you skipped the gym, the evenings you spent doing nothing at all, and the extra helping of the birthday cake you devoured at the office party…enjoy them all without any pang of guilt!
