New year, new me?

For many people, the start of a new year signifies new beginnings. A common phrase you hear is ‘new year, new me.’ People certainly love to use a new calendar as a year to start over, to begin good habits and break bad ones. It can be easy to see a new year as a blank slate, a time when anything can happen if you try hard enough.

While I love setting new habits and certainly have set a few New Year’s resolutions myself, I think people put far too much pressure on themselves this time of year.

A common resolution or goal is to lose weight or work out more. Everyone is feeling pumped to start their new workout regime Jan. 1. However, every consequent day after that, people find it much harder to find that motivation. Gyms host deals in January, knowing a majority of the people who buy memberships at the beginning of the year will not come back.

When it comes to eating healthier, people will purge their pantry of anything considered unhealthy. Fridges are filled with the makings for salads and smoothies, switching lemon water in for the daily coffee.

While there is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to better yourself, New Year’s resolutions generally are viewed as an all-or-nothing deal. When a person breaks down and sleeps in rather than going to the gym, they view themselves as a failure and give up. Rather than eating your premade salad at lunch, you cheat and get McDonalds. Suddenly, the whole day and diet is ruined, so you might as well eat whatever you want.

When you make one mistake in following your resolutions, it can feel like you ruined the whole deal. Your blank slate has been marred by a single blunder, so you might as well go back to old habits.

The problem with this thinking is that’s now how habits are formed, that’s not how changes are made. We are human. We are not perfect. No matter how hard we try, we are going to mess things up one way or another. The important thing is to keep moving forward.

This is as much of a reminder to myself as it is to others. A few months ago, my coworker Cheyenne Roche and I started running. When we first started, we were far from in shape. We started easy. All we wanted was to run once around the block without stopping to walk. This equated to about 0.33 of a mile, taking us four minutes, and it sucked. Throughout the following weeks, we slowly added more distance.

We didn’t run every day. Not only are break days important, but we knew we wouldn’t keep it up if we forced ourselves to run every day. Some weeks we missed a day, but that was alright, because we were still getting out there each week.

Right before Christmas, we hit the one mile mark. We didn’t necessarily run a mile every time we went out, but we were consistently doing it. Then I got sick. Not the stomach bug or the flu, but just a really bad cold. I was able to do a lot of normal stuff, but running was out of the option for me.

I got nervous about that. Sure, we had been running pretty steadily for a few months, but now what? Would I have the motivation to start again once I had stopped? Would I be able to go back to a full mile?

While I’m not fully back to normal, we did start running again this week. It sucked, I was miserable, but we did it. The first day back, we got a full mile again, which was awesome. The second run we only did half a mile, but we were still out there.

In the past, when I’ve tried to start workout habits, they haven’t worked, for a number of reasons. It certainly is harder to give up when you have a workout buddy to keep you accountable.

I also knew from the beginning that I was going to be easy on myself. I don’t like running. I knew that from the beginning. However, just the fact that I am going out and doing it is awesome to me. I don’t need to be perfect at it. I don’t need to go 100% every time. As long as I’m trying, I’m pretty happy with myself.

No matter what your New Year’s resolutions are, I hope you are easy on yourself. I promise you will fail, and that’s ok. The important part is that you keep going even when you do fail. Improving yourself isn’t easy, so take it one step at a time.