PROMISES, PROMISES

A new year, a new out­look, a new me; and this year I re­ally mean it!

How many times have I said that to my­self when New Year comes around, only to look back 12 months later with a sad shake of the head? It’s hard not to fall into the New Year’s res­o­lu­tion trap and to set am­bi­tious self-im­prove­ment goals that barely last the week.

By the time De­cem­ber comes, you can no longer ig­nore the fact that you only went to the gym four times (all in the first week of Jan­u­ary), you still smoke (but now in se­cret), your al­co­hol con­sump­tion has ac­tu­ally gone up, and the pro­logue of your au­to­bi­og­ra­phy is still only four lines long.

And it re­ally is a trap. Your in­abil­ity to keep to your New Year’s res­o­lu­tion fuels a de­ter­mi­na­tion to do it for real this time, and so you en­thu­si­as­ti­cally con­tinue the an­nual cycle of fail­ure that un­der­mines your self worth and in­evitably leads to the psy­chi­a­trist’s couch.

Okay, I’m ex­ag­ger­at­ing a bit, but I’m just try­ing to psy­che my­self up for the res­o­lu­tion that I’ve set for my­self this year, which I warn you is highly unimag­i­na­tive but un­for­tu­nately nec­es­sary: I have re­solved to lose some weight.

Of all the res­o­lu­tions I’ve never seen through, this is the first time I’ve had to set the goal of los­ing weight. I guess I’ve been lucky until now but a vi­cious com­bi­na­tion of an in­jury lim­it­ing my abil­ity to do phys­i­cal ex­er­cise, mid­dle age, and way too much beer have con­spired against me. One of the hard­est things about the whole thing is the sheer lack of orig­i­nal­ity, as the in­ter­net in­forms me that ’lose weight’ is the world’s most com­mon (and most bro­ken) New Year’s res­o­lu­tion.

I’ve al­ready em­barked on my jour­ney to­wards re­gain­ing some­thing of my for­mer litheness, but per­haps you are still cast­ing around for a goal that will make you more like the per­son you want to be. What, I thought to my­self, might qual­ify as an un­com­mon and yet worth­while res­o­lu­tion that is orig­i­nal and sim­ple, and so pos­si­bly more achiev­able? What fol­lows is a short list of res­o­lu­tions that are not hard to do but that can re­ally make a dif­fer­ence.

Teach your­self a party trick. Mas­ter­ing a new skill gives a wel­come boost to your self es­teem and in this case you can also en­hance your so­cial caché and pop­u­lar­ity at the same time.

Try a new food every week. While not nec­es­sar­ily com­pat­i­ble with los­ing a few kilos after the ex­cesses of the fes­tive sea­son, this is an easy way to have new ex­pe­ri­ences, in­crease your knowl­edge, and add extra nu­tri­ents to your diet and new flavours to your palate.

Go to sleep ear­lier. Spend­ing time in bed is some­thing most peo­ple enjoy but few of us get any­where near enough sleep. Give your men­tal and phys­i­cal health a boost sim­ply by cut­ting down on screen time and mak­ing the ef­fort to slip be­tween the sheets a bit ear­lier every night.

Be­come a vol­un­teer. I’m told that help­ing other peo­ple is ex­tremely re­ward­ing. De­vot­ing time to oth­ers (and get­ting out of the house and meet­ing peo­ple) might be ex­actly what we need to dis­tract us from our own prob­lems. There’s the added bonus of not want­ing to let any­one down, which means this is a res­o­lu­tion that we might ac­tu­ally stick to.

Do some­thing nice every day. If you like the idea of help­ing oth­ers but haven’t got the time to vol­un­teer, then set the goal of doing one nice thing every day. Do­nate blood, put that lit­ter in a bin rather step­ping over it, pay some­one a com­pli­ment, offer your seat to some­one who needs it, you know the type of thing, be nice, it’s a sim­ple goal to keep to and you will be bet­ter off for it, which is the whole point of self im­prove­ment after all!

Opin­ion