Resolved: There’s No Year Like This Year To Get Moving
In a diary entry from January 1927, Anais Nin wrote, “I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.”
Most of us aren’t as devoted to constant self-evaluation. Thus the impulse to make some resolutions every year before the ball drops. In fact, the majority of Americans tend to make them, even though only a small percentage later feels that they were successful.
The practice is almost literally built into the calendar. When Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar that we use today, he established a specific tone for the first month:
“Named for Janus, the two-faced god whose spirit inhabited doorways and arches, January had special significance for the Romans. Believing that Janus symbolically looked backwards into the previous year and ahead into the future, the Romans offered sacrifices to the deity and made promises of good conduct for the coming year.”
It’s in the calendar’s DNA to inspire us to use the end of one year and the beginning of another as a time to take stock of our lives and make the changes we need to make to improve them.
But is that the best way to go about it? Especially when it comes to our health, one of the most popular resolution categories?
Bob Wells, Fitness Manager at Crunch Flatbush, agrees with Nin’s approach.
“The especially troubling thing with New Year’s goals is the idea that you can’t start on them now, but rather in a few days, a week, or months in more extreme cases,” says Bob. “We know this is simply setting one up for failure. The idea that something is so important, such as health, but that it can’t start now reinforces the idea that it’s not really important, and the high dropout rate of new gym goers just 4-6 weeks into the new year is not surprising.”
It’s not just the turning of the new year he’s talking about; it’s using any marker other than the present moment as an excuse to start on your goals later – a special event, returning from a vacation, etc.
To resist this urge, Bob takes inspiration from two very different sources:
From a rabbi: Start today! Whenever there is an important process or project that we need to do, waiting to start only increases our chances of failure.
From a former Navy Seal: Quit tomorrow. He made it through each day of grueling training by “tricking” himself that no matter how hard today was he would just quit tomorrow.
Are you one of the people who’s already made a resolution to lose weight or get in shape once the new year begins?
Are you one of the people who resists resolutions but knows that you need to do better when it comes to your health?
Forget that at midnight on December 31, 2017 becomes 2018. If you want to commit to better health, do it today.
Do it now.
Bob and the Crunch Flatbush team will be behind you all the way.
This post was sponsored by Crunch Flatbush. If you would like to reach our readers, please contact us.