18 Jan Be Kind to Yourself This New Year!

As a new year starts, it is common to think about setting health-related goals for the year ahead. Phrases such as “I need to get back on it with the exercise” and “I am giving up alcohol completely” are  ones we often hear in the practice.

The question is, how well do these resolutions or goals pan out for you for the rest of the year? What happens when you do have that glass or two of wine or skip a couple of gym sessions due to life getting in the way?

Too often, we can be overly tough on ourselves at the beginning of the year. Most of us will have over-indulged over the festive season and why not? We all need a time to relax and have a break from restrictions around diet and exercising as long as we don’t go overboard and make ourselves feel terrible afterwards. The problem is when we have an “all or nothing” mentality, this leads us into a pattern of extremes of behaviour. We can end up in a spiral of negative-self-talk and sabotage of our well-intentioned healthy habits.

Our theme for 2022 is to stop setting aggressive goals and to show some more self-compassion and kindness towards ourselves instead.

There is nothing wrong with setting goals and being ambitious about where we want to be with our health but we need to get off the “all or nothing” bandwagon and commit to having healthy behaviours all year round instead.

Our advice is to look at your daily routines and see where you can incorporate healthier habits – whether this is around increasing the amount of exercise you are doing, getting your regular adjustments, getting more sleep, or changing some of the things you are eating and swapping them for healthier alternatives.

By making small incremental tweaks to your routine, you will have much more chance of sticking to your healthy habits all year round. You will then be healthier and happier overall. In fact, this is the very principle behind getting a regular Chiropractic adjustment.

Be kind to yourself in 2022 because let’s face it, 2020 and 2021 were super tough and we made it!