And just like that we’re nearly a month into 2022! The end of January tends to mark the time when everyone starts forgetting about their New Year’s resolutions. Maybe you’ve spent the last three weeks dedicated to getting 8 hours of sleep every night or not eating any processed sugar, but chances are that by now the motivation to keep up with whatever lofty commitment you made for the year is already starting to waver. Realistically, it makes sense that traditional New Year’s resolutions often become some of what feels like the first “failures” of the year. It’s incredibly overwhelming to assign a major lifestyle or mental or emotional shift and its momentum to an entire year. Frankly, basic New Year’s goals like “getting healthy” are overdone and inherently difficult to achieve. Vague and broad goals don’t create ways to measure our progress and various successes, so we ultimately forget why we are trying to achieve them in the first place.
Of course, the idea of a New Year’s resolution is meant to be encouraging and productive, but the reality is that massive goals looming over the fresh start of a new year can become pretty negative. It seems like developing a list of resolutions results in everyone spending their January 1st cataloging all of their “bad” habits and deciding which parts of their lives they need to “fix” now and which parts they can let lag on for another year. We should spend the holiday weekend looking towards the new year with hope, gratitude, and peace, not analyzing the past for everything that can’t “go wrong” in the near future. Just because there is a new number on the calendar doesn’t mean that we all need to suddenly overhaul our lives — and that is precisely why instead of resolutions, we should be choosing a New Year’s Adventure (trademark pending). A New Year’s Adventure doesn’t depend on breaking a bad habit or achieving all of our lifelong goals, it’s about bringing something new and fun into your life along with a brand new year. This is not to say that there is no place for self improvement in our lives, but I don’t think that place needs to be New Year’s. A New Year’s Adventure is something positive, exciting, interesting, simple and measurable, and it helps us all grow into our next year of life! Here are a few ideas to think about if this approach to 2022 resonates with you:
- Learn a party trick
- Make a new friend
- Learn to cook your favorite meal (or a meal you’ve never tried before)
- Try 10 new foods
- Get your photo taken in 5 interesting places
- Volunteer for a cause that you care about
- Practice a weekly act of kindness
- Visit a place you’ve never been to in your hometown
- Listen to a new genre of music
- Make an original piece of artwork
- Learn 10 phrases in a new language
- Create your own signature cocktail
- Go camping
- Spend 5 days living zero-waste
- Visit a museum you’ve never been to