#Wellbeing, #New Year, #2024, #Mental Health, #Goals
As the bells of the New Year fade, holidays end and the return to work looms large on the horizon, many people undertake the serious and often initially energetic task of goal setting for the year ahead. For many, this is about losing weight, getting fitter, working less, enjoying life more and a variety of other noble pursuits.
However, with the idea of transforming yourself for the new year, comes a certain degree of pressure to achieve all of these goals, often in unsustainable or unrealistic ways. Changing habits is difficult and will require you to balance the goal’s difficulty level (it needs to be difficult enough to be a challenge to keep you interested and inspired) and have enough achievement (sufficient to motivate you to keep going). When setting goals, SMART objectives are very helpful.
S = Short. Keep your goal short with a specific outcome e.g. lose 14 lbs in 14 weeks.
M = Measurable. Have a way to measure your goal and have a target to aim for e.g. lbs/kgs for weight loss. Steps for exercise. Hours of sleep per night etc.
A = Achievable. Don’t be too demanding of yourself or place the difficulty of the task too high. Aim for something between 65% and 85% of your tolerance for discomfort level works for many.
R = Realistic. Have a way to assess how realistic the goal is rather than a fantasy of how it might be in a completely ideal word.
T = Timely. Break the goal down an put time markers in to help measure progress and set goals.
E.g. In the first two weeks of the new year, I will lose 2 lbs by eating no more than 1800 calories each day and by walking daily for 30 minutes. My weight now is ___ lbs and I aim to be ___ in two weeks time. I will track my promise to myself each day and check and re-check how realistic and achievable this is for me daily. At the end of each week I will celebrate my wins and review what didn’t go to plan and why. For those things which disrupted my goal I will think about ways to deal with the disruption, e.g. planning better, having healthier snacks on standby and exercising indoors if the weather is bad. I will gather supportive friends and family to help keep me on track.
When goal setting, try to state your goals in terms of approaching a good outcome, rather than avoiding a bad outcome. E.g. instead of saying, I will not eat chocolate, pastries or biscuits, say instead, I will eat one extra piece of fruit and two extra vegetables each day.
Finally, no matter what goals you set yourself, do so in your own time, and in a self-compassionate way. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t hit a target. Re-assess the goal, it’s level of realism and achievability, address what went wrong and start again. This builds your frustration tolerance over time and vastly improves your chance of success.