8 New Year’s Resolutions You Can Actually Keep

Every time we see the light from an incoming new year, all the lemmings scramble to plan their perky fresh start. Year after year we will join a gym, quit smoking, clean up our lives and finally deal with those nasty personal shortcomings. We tell ourselves: “this will be the year!”

But we all know how this is going to play out don’t we? Great plans are made, but even with all the resolve and will power, it all slides off the rails by February.

I am going to suggest that some of the reasons you can’t get the big things done is because of the clutter in your life. Maybe if you dealt with some of the detritus that has washed up on your beach it would clear the way for progress.

Here are 8 things you might consider doing to free up your mojo for the new year:

1. Go through your Facebook friends list and unfriend everybody who doesn’t make you happy. Be brave, just jettison the people who don’t add value to your life. Do it in real life too.
2. People are telling you to diet and exercise. Have you done much of it in the last few years? Ya, didn’t think so. Instead, just do one thing you like when you feel like it. You won’t want to stick to stuff you hate, so just do something fun. Take the stairs, park far away from the store. Try that and save your gym money.
3. You likely stumbled onto this post through Twitter, and not to be ungrateful for the link, but get off Twitter. It is mostly just noise and causes agitation. Do you need it?
4. Take a look around – do you have piles of unread magazines, books you haven’t gotten to and projects you keep meaning to start? Clean that crap out… it just sits there judging you for not getting to it. When you get it out of your home, you can’t hear the disdain anymore.
5. Try saying no to more stuff. It feels hard at first, but trust me, if you are over extending yourself all the time, saying NO feels fricken’ awesome.  And mean it when you say it.
6. Say yes to stuff. Make yourself say yes to a person who wants to see you (unless they are an asshat, in which case say no). If they add value to your life, make you feel good, or are nice to you, make time for them, and mean that too.
7. It wouldn’t be a New Year list if it didn’t include nutrition advice. Instead of paying some scammer diet company to feed you flax seeds and grass crammed into plastic caplets, just make one easy change. Choose foods based on their colour. Choose deep coloured foods over light ones (and no I don’t mean Doritos). Your brain will run more efficiently.
8. Stop buying stupid stuff. Look at what you need, and what makes you happy. Impulse buys can be a lot like empty calories, they just take your money and your soul.

I am not one to give a crap what other people think I should be doing, or look like, or even enjoy. However I do know that the pressure from everybody around us can override our own best sense. Especially when we follow people’s highlight reel and compare it to our own back stage. Social media can be great, but sometimes it is depressing.

So never mind all the people who plan to run “a half” by March or are setting these big goals that don’t resonate with you. Screw them. Start small, and do what works in your life.

Clear the decks and get your groove back, it is going to be a great year.

(This post originally ran on Magnolia Ripkin’s Advice Blog.)