2023 has well and truly begun… have you made progress with your check-list for the year? Odds are, a couple of things have been dropped or ignored from this list already; in fact studies show that a majority of people give up on their new year’s resolutions by February. We all like penning wish lists and bucket lists, and of course, envisioning goals is important so that you can work towards achieving them – but when it comes to health, “goal-setting” can get tricky.
Your health and how you manage it is influenced by so many variables that are not necessarily in your control. You may draw up a roadmap of fitness milestones and even sign up with a personal trainer. However, hitting milestones in the gym is not the same as managing your health, especially if you’re living with a chronic health condition. Monitoring your cardiac condition or diabetes for instance, requires a holistic, regulated, long-term approach; and simply making a resolution to be on top of things can put immense pressure on you without really having any positive impact on your health. A change in perspective, approach and tools can make a world of a difference for your health this year, and for years to come!
Shifting the focus from resolutions to habits.
While jumping into goal setting is helpful in some cases, what can be even more effective when it comes to the management of health conditions is creating habits. While a goal, or a resolution so to speak, may be a tangible end-product, our habits are what get us there. Goals have an end date; habits are consistent and more impactful when it comes to matters of health and creating a healthier lifestyle. Furthermore, our resolutions often tend to call for extreme changes to our lifestyles, making them really easy to break, really soon. They’re almost a recipe for failure as when we are pressured towards a goal, motivation seeps away in no time. Consider using that time to create a base for smaller incremental lifestyle changes that your body and mind will soon consider a habit, instead!
Acquiring effective and achievable habits also gives us more control, since these aren’t based on external factors. For example, you may have a goal to keep your glucose level within a certain limit in mind and have resolved to cut out a certain type of food entirely for a certain time period… but one social event can easily derail that resolve and you succumb, all while beating yourself up with guilt. What could really help long-term, instead, is creating and sticking to a habit where you make checking your glucose levels a part of your daily habits to know what is positively or negatively affecting it and make realistic meal plans for yourself. This is now possible with health tech like continuous glucose monitors that track your glucose levels painlessly for you. Health becomes more manageable when you focus on realistic alterations that seamlessly become a part of your life, rather than being special time-bound events.
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