One step at a time

Did you manage dry January or was it more a dry couple of days in January?  Did your New Year resolution to go to the gym at least three times a week last beyond the first week of the month?  Perhaps there are still left over chocolates that sabotage your diet.

New Year resolutions are almost always doomed to fail.  We start off with the best of intentions but the cold weather and the general gloom at the beginning of the year weaken the best resolve we have and then we give up.

When we give up we then berate ourselves.  We tell ourselves we are hopeless and we have no willpower.  This further saps our confidence in ourselves and we become less and less able to make the changes we want to make.

Why do we beat ourselves up?  What is the point in making ourselves feel worse?  If our friends came to us and told us that they were a failure because they ate a bar of chocolate or failed to go to the gym, we wouldn’t tell them how useless and hopeless they were.  We would encourage them to try again.  Tell them that they can lose weight, get fit or find a better job, whatever their resolution is.

Why don’t we try it that way and encourage ourselves?  If we have over eaten or if we drank too much over the weekend why don’t we tell ourselves we can start again?  After all, a year is just 52 weeks so we can pick ourselves up on the 1st February and start again.

One of the mistakes is trying to do too much.  In January we write a shopping list.  We will lose weight, get fit, find a new job etc.  What if we picked one small thing like cutting out the chocolate biscuits with our morning coffee as our resolution for February, rather than cutting out everything nice in January?  After three weeks we wouldn’t miss the biscuits at all and we have achieved our resolution and if we slipped up one day that doesn’t mean total failure it just means you failed on that day.  In March we can go back to the gym perhaps just once a week to start with and when it becomes a habit we can add more visits.  

If we treat the start of each month as a New Year when December comes around we can surprise ourselves with a whole new us.  Remember that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step: let February be the month you start a new resolution however small.

I have worked as a hypnotherapist in Leatherhead and London and I also teach hypnotherapy and train new hypnotherapists. I offer a full range of services including anxiety coping mechanisms, stress relief, weight loss, stop smoking and treatment for phobias online via Zoom. Please get in touch to find out more.