New Year, New You: Making Time for Wellness

After indulging a bit too much this holiday season, it’s common for us to incorporate health and wellness into our new year’s resolutions. However, we all know that it’s easy to make new year’s resolutions and it’s even easier to break them. It’s all too easy for us to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of life. We prioritize everything else over our health; our family, friends, and work tend to come first. In order to make a healthy lifestyle change that we can stick to for the long-term, we need to turn our intentions into actions. Melissa Stephenson, a positive living blogger for the Huffington Post, gives us a few tips on how to prioritize wellness in our daily lives.

1. Start with little bits. Try meditating for two minutes in the morning or go for a walk during your lunch break with a co-worker or friend. These little actions add up and can make it easier to transition to change.

2. Actually identify your wellness goals and priorities. You can’t make a plan of action without defining your goals first. Set your goal: eat at least one serving of vegetables at every meal; workout at least three days a week, and so on. Next, tell a friend and write your goal down in a journal to keep you accountable. 

3. Track what you're doing and acknowledge your results. Use a journal to keep track of your wellness goals and efforts. By keeping track of your actions, you can see what’s working and what’s not. You can also visually see how well you have been doing, whether you like to add a star sticker or a simple check mark to show that you have meet your weekly goal, and that can motivate you to keep going. 

4. Build wellness activities into your life and routine. Use little tricks to make it easy for yourself to naturally include wellness efforts into your daily life. For example, hide the unhealthy snacks behind pre-sliced veggies in the fridge, so before you grab the junk food you see the prepared veggies first and are reminded to choose them. 

5. Schedule it. If you set aside time for wellness, you are more likely to do it. Schedule your lunchtime walk, evening workout, or meal prep for the week. Remember, if you fail to plan you are planning to fail. 

6. Wellness Day. Pick a day of the week and treat yourself to healthy meals and activities. Start off with a healthy breakfast and spend the day being active with friends. Try going on a hike on a new trail or if you’ve never tried yoga before, today is the day to do it! 

7. Surround yourself with wellness. Surrounding yourself with people that already live a healthy lifestyle is important for making wellness part of your life. Tell your friends and family about your goals and you may find that they are trying to make the same change too. A support system will keep you accountable and makes the lifestyle change a lot easier. 

8. Understand your inspiration. In order to truly prioritize wellness in your life, you must see its value. Find an image or quote that resonates with why you are making this wellness change in your life and make it your phone or desktop background and hang it on your fridge. This will remind you of why you value wellness and what you are willing to do for it. 

Do you still need help in achieving your wellness goals? At Community Well, we have many services to help you achieve healing and wellness. From holistic life coaching to stress reduction and therapy, we have a service here for everyone that can help you achieve your goals. Check out our health and wellness page for more of our holistic health services.