Say Goodbye to January Resolutions?
This time of year, we're inundated with messages about tackling the new year with a vengeance, goal setting, and other (seemingly dubious) New Year's resolution(s). If you're anything like I am, all this talk about making the coming year "the best year yet" can feel like a lot of pressure.
As always, here, I'm writing about life from the Chinese medical theory perspective, and if you feel overwhelmed by the New Year resolution scramble, you'll be relieved to know that January 1 is actually not the ideal time to start new things.
January falls right in the middle of the winter months, which is yin time, the time for introspection, slowing down, resting, restoring--think of a bear hibernating in the winter, hunkered down with her fat stores to sleep for a few months. She's not out hunting or making a new den; these are yang activities, and they require necessary rest.
Despite that we tend to have too little of it, yin is an essential part of life. Yin is what supports our yang, so when we engage in too much yang activity with too little yin--burning the candle at both ends, so to speak--we deplete our yin. A common cultural belief is that we can sleep when we're dead, that life is simply "mind over matter" and requires grit to push through fatigue or illness, but that's simply not true. Doing so depletes our yin, which is harder to rebuild and overtime, will compromise our yang functions, so it's important to value rest time just as we do work time. Meditation is a prime example of how taking time to slow down actually increases productivity, as well as physical and mental health. You can read about that here, here, and here.
According to Chinese medical theory, a better time to start afresh would be in the springtime, where yin begins to turn into yang; the weather begins to warm, flowers bloom, animals have babies, the days get longer. If you get overwhelmed by the pressure of January 1 but would still like to set some goals for yourself, know that you're actually much more in tune with nature by delaying the start of your new decisions--or at least starting off slowly and then ramping up with the seasons. Take some time now to think about how you'd like this next year to look, feel, and function for you.
Personally, I'm going to be using a Commit30 Planner this year, which is both planner and goal setter by way of first asking you to think about what's important to you in various categories, not just health/fitness and work. Then, it guides you to break down the year into months, months into weeks, and weeks into days to make everything manageable. (Also, there's a free downloadable month if you want to try it out and see if it's a good fit for you). If you've read Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, she touches on this concept, as well, that we spend time doing things we think we should enjoy but actually don't so that in the end, it's more beneficial to us if we are clear about what it is we want to be doing with our time and find ways to make that happen.
