New Year Anxiety? 5 Tips to Help You Get Through
You had just gotten through the month of December filled with getting gifts and spending time with family. Now you are hearing people discuss goals and plans for the new year. It can feel overwhelming to think about changes that you would like to make when it's hard to know where to even start in implementing changes towards goals. This article will work on discussing tips to help you get through the New Year goal setting anxiety.
1.) Develop A Realistic Routine:
One of the hardest parts about keeping resolutions is being able to keep up with them for over a year. We make commitments to go to the gym and even get a gym membership, but we end up only using the membership one month out of the year. Then maybe we decide to eat healthy but end up falling back after a couple of months into the routine of not. Goals like this had good intentions, but the planning was neglected.
Before starting on following through with a new goal, plan for the goal to fit your schedule. This means sitting down and examining non-judgmentally how your days normally go throughout the week. After you observe what goes on currently, then you can look towards making small incremental adjustments to the schedule that can help to reach the goal intended.
2.) Research What You are Signing Up For:
Having aspirations and creating new goals take work to see if it will truly fit your lifestyle. It is important to do your research into what you are about to undergo to see if it will truly fit goals. Also with researching and looking into external resources of information it is also important to internally do your own research into the “whys” of wanting the change. Are you doing this to impress a friend or family member? Or are you doing this because it's truly something that you want for your life alone?
3.) Identify What Is Within and Not Within Your Control:
When you have started to implement goals there are multiple factors that go into the success of the goal. Some aspects of the goal may need extra help to complete. It is also okay and sometimes necessary to ask for extra help to complete the goals that you have set for yourself. Seeking out external help from a professional like a therapist, or doctor might be necessary. There are some things that may for sure be within your own control in completing the goal, but there are also things that may be beyond your individual control.
4.) Move Through The Anxiety Instead of Pushing It Away:
Anxiety is uncomfortable to feel. Some of the ways in which individuals cope through it is through avoidance behaviors. Avoidance in time doesn’t help us but sometimes even in the long term gets us stuck in unhelpful cycles. Anxiety ultimately is a signal or message to alert us to something. Sometimes that signal is not warranted or can be flawed in function. Once we can learn to accept anxiety as a signal and not specifically a fact, we can work with it instead of against it. Meeting with an individual therapist can help you to process and explore more into your anxiety and help you to identify cycles that are holding you back from reaching the goals that you want to achieve.
5.) Look Into Self- Care:
Are you taking time off and using your PTO days? Do you find yourself working outside of work hours? Both of these things whether or not they are being done can impact your wellbeing. When we pour all of the energy into work other areas of our lives get impacted. Neglected parts of caring for ourselves will catch up to us overtime causing potential for burnout. Are you being too hard on yourself most recently? Improving how you treat yourself should also be a beneficial goal for the New Year. Reach out to us today if you are interested in learning more about therapy and the process of it. We would be happy to see if we can match your needs to improve how you take care of yourself.
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