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Inspiration

Forget New Year’s resolutions—Now is the time to change

New Year, New You. Nonsense.

“This year I’ll be different.”  I disagree.

If you want to improve areas of your health or habits, then you can choose to act differently at any time in life.  Except you don’t.  Because it’s too damn easy to do what you’ve always done.  Sure, you can change one or two things for a week or two after all the booze and mince pies. But, after January, it’s back to the usual way! How’s your New Year’s resolution working out for you on 24th September?

The time is always now. If you really want to change something in your life, you can do so any time. Why wait for the calendar to change?. And, this change thing—you can either wait until you’re in too much mental or physical pain to not change, or you can proactively make a positive change to avoid getting into mental and physical pain in the first place. Have a look at this quote from Hippocrates, from 2000 years ago:

“Illnesses do not come out of the blue.  They are developed from small daily sins against Nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear.”

But not changing and waiting for a health crisis to occur is the more popular way to do things in our world now. Too many of us wait until we break, then look on Amazon or Google for a magic pill to fix ourselves. Only after that we may then seek help of somebody more in the know.    

We can visit the doctor to try and fix us but in doing this, we give away our personal power to someone in a white coat who’ll give us pills that can suppress our symptoms temporarily.  But you can take as many pills as you like (and continue taking the same actions—wasting your own time and money in the process) or you can be honest with yourself and take 100% responsibility for your actions and try and get to the root cause of ill-health!

Yep, the latter is the less convenient route for sure, as avoidance and burying problems is always easier in the short term. But if you take a more uncomfortable, honest look around—and hopefully get to the root cause of why you’re out of whack—then you can steer your own ship away from danger, thus creating a happier long-term future.

Person cycling in a forest.
Time to begin…
Photo by Rikki Chan on Unsplash

When you know why you’re unhealthy, it’s easier to create a system to help get you away from an illness. Change is the only constant in our world, and you either change for the better or for the worse. Each action you take is like casting a vote on who you’re wanting to be in the future. So are you voting for a better version of you, or an unhealthier version of you?

One example for you: if your goal is to lose weight and feel better about yourself, but you continue to eat junk food and choose not to prioritise sleep, well sure, you can take a bunch of anti-depressants to numb negative feelings. Or you can start to prioritise eating better and getting the right amount of sleep. Taking pills to suppress symptoms is like mopping up the floor whilst the sink is still overflowing.  If you unblock the sink, you can put your mop away.

The time is always now. You can wait to get sick to change, or you can proactively create your health. You may need some assistance with the second option—change ain’t easy—and having a health coach on your team can be a short cut to a better state of health. We focus on long-term lifestyle solutions, not quick-fix, temporary, ‘New Year’ (mostly likely three or four weeks) sticking plaster! And, if you’re healthier in the long term, you’ll be happier in the long-term. Think of the magic that can happen in that state of being.

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