What’s your New Year’s resolution
According to Public Health England (PHE), modern life is harming the health of the nation as 83% of 40 to 60-year-olds are overweight or exercise too little. The PHE launched a campaign recently to motivate people to come up with a New Year’s Resolution relating to a healthier lifestyle.
If you want to know what matters to people most, simply take a look at their New Year resolutions. At the start of a new year, many people indulge in retrospection and re-evaluation of their life choices.
New Year’s resolutions are the perfect opportunity to start all over again. A chance to start making changes for a better life or to make your dreams become a reality.
Well, PHE wants you to consider more exercise and a proper diet as part of your resolution this year. Perhaps if you haven’t yet done it, now’s your chance to sit down and prepare a list of essential lifestyle changes you want to make. Here at TESTIFY NEWSPAPER, we’ve decided to give you a bit of help–since the majority of people fail to stick to their resolution, you’ll need all the help you can get.
According to a YouGov poll, the most common New Year’s Resolutions are:
- Lose weight.
- Get fitter.
- Eat a more healthy diet.
- Take better care of appearance.
- See more of friends and family.
But, we’ve gone beyond the YouGov’s top 5 to give you a list of our very own top 25 resolutions.
Reinvent yourself in 2020. Reinventing yourself through the resolutions listed below can give you a whole new perspective on life and take you in directions you may never have thought were possible.
Testify Top 25 New Year’s Resolutions
1. Spend more time with the people that matter: The most important things in life aren’t things. As Michael J. Fox said “family is not an important thing. It’s everything.”
We must not neglect the people who we care about deeply and who care about us, as this is the best way to stay happy.
2. Improve your prayer life: Prayer can sometimes be challenging. Whether it’s those mumbled words over a meal in public or the heartfelt cries from a severely ill person, our prayer lives reveal so much about our relationship with God. But often, prayer gets lost during our daily activities – we get busy, lazy, or distracted. So if you’re stalled and need to jumpstart your prayer life, restart right now at the beginning of the year.
3. Stop being late all the time: Punctuality is a virtue that is held in high regard in our society. Being on time is the mark of a true professional, a dependable friend, and caring partner, so it is a good idea to pick up a few tricks that can help you stay on time.
4. Get in shape: Losing weight is one of the top resolutions in Britain, yet obesity is one of the biggest problems in the country. 77% of British men and 63% of women of middle age are overweight or obese. Obesity in adults has risen in the past 20 years.
Research shows that many people cannot identify a healthy body anymore, which suggests that being overweight has become acceptable.
“More Exercise” and “healthier diet” is something that many people wish to achieve. But it cannot happen merely through wishful thinking.
5. Develop healthier eating habits: Today, we have more junk food than we ever had in the past. Start eating healthier food, and less food overall: this is usually an extension of the previous resolution. Switching to a healthier diet can be incredibly tricky when we are surrounded by cheap and genetically-modified junk food. However, with a good amount of determination and some basic tips, you can begin to slowly develop healthier eating habits, and learn to control emotional eating.
6. Get out of debt: You can’t really move forward in life if you are weighed down by debt. The road to financial freedom is a rocky one, but it is definitely manageable with a bit of planning and self-restraint.
7. Start saving money: Once you have your debt under control, it’s time to start putting some money aside. A rainy day fund and some extra money that can go towards travelling abroad, fixing up the house, or buying a new car can help to improve the quality of your life.
8. Earn more money: Even billionaires are always looking for ways to make more money, and we ordinary folks can definitely use an additional source of income to make life a bit more comfortable. Fortunately, there are plenty of options available, like having side jobs, working as a freelancer, or using the internet to your advantage.
9. Stop procrastinating: The most significant barrier that keeps most people from reaching their goals is the desire to relax and do something fun instead of working hard. Once you get used to procrastinating, it’s difficult to stop, so you’ll need to put in a lot of work to change this bad habit.
10. Become more organised: It doesn’t matter how much time you have on your hands if you can’t manage it properly, you’ll just spend most of the day running around aimlessly. When you get organised, there will suddenly be more time to spare, and more of your goals will be accomplished.
11. Become tidier: There are a lot of people out there who can’t really get their stuff organised, and a cluttered desk or chaotic home negatively affects your productivity and even your mood. Being tidier helps you to clear the clutter, clean your house and lead to a more organised life.
12. Improve your concentration and mental skills: People have been trying to find ways to improve their focus and cognitive capacities for thousands of years, and most ancient civilizations had some combination of mental exercises and herbal medicines to help them reach this goal. Find what works for you and stick to it.
13. Read more: Books are an excellent way to gain a lot of knowledge on a huge variety of topics and are also a great exercise for your brain. It’s not that difficult to go through 20 or more books in a year – you only need to make it a habit, discover your favourite type of books and find a bit of time for reading here and there.
14. Start remembering important dates: You don’t want to keep forgetting birthdays, anniversaries and other important dates. There are plenty of memory tricks that take very little time to master, so you’ll never forget another date again.
15. Go see your doctor more often: Staying healthy should be your top priority, but many people only see their doctor when they are ill and they often wait for their condition to worsen significantly. Regular checkups are proactive and preventative measures you could adopt this year, no matter how healthy you feel at the moment.
16. Reduce stress: They say that stress is one of the biggest killers out there, and it can have a very destructive effect on both your relationships and your health. It may be an unavoidable side effect of our hectic modern lifestyles, but it can be effectively managed with the help of useful, unconventional, and easy-to-practice tricks for stress management.
17. Learn to be happier with your life: Even those that are in decent shape, make a good living, and have stress under control can still be unhappy. It takes time and patience to learn how to find joy in the little things and to work through the stress of problems.
18. Get more quality sleep: With big TV’s, computers, smartphones, tablets and all sorts of gadgets with glowing lights and beeping alerts, it can be hard to get enough sleep at night. You should be gunning for at least 8 hours of sleep a night, and there are fairly simple ways to achieve this number of hours if you plan ahead.
19. Be more polite: Good manners have always been an important part of society. Avoid offending people and ensure others perceive you as a good and trustworthy person. Know the etiquette, or manners of people in other places or countries you visit, deal with rude people in the right way, and learn how to say no.
20. Watch less TV: The average person wastes a lot of time in front of the TV. That time could be better spent on developing skills, learning, or keeping your body active. Once you manage to cut down on TV time, you will realise just how long and productive a day can really be.
21. Learn how to dress with style: You will never get a second chance to make a first impression. The way you dress says a lot about you, and wearing the right clothes can make you seem powerful and confident, which in turn can help you land a job, get promoted, and catch the eye of a wife-to-be or husband-to-be. Whether you’re male or female, it is important that you know how to dress with style.
22. Learn a new language: Not only will learning a new language help improve your communication skills, it will also look great on your résumé and possibly open up some doors for you. These days, there are plenty of resources that allow you to learn a language for free and in your spare time.
23. Volunteer and give more to charity: Devoting your time and energy to helping those in need is a noble gesture and a reward in itself, but it is also an opportunity to meet new people, learn new skills, and boost your resume.
24. Learn to control your emotions: Uncontrolled anger can get you into a lot of trouble. Toxic behaviours like jealousy and pride are destructive in all circumstances. Gaining control over your feelings allows you to keep a level head and think more rationally, even during emotionally charged conflict situations.
25. Pick up useful skills or fun hobbies: Just sitting around all day won’t get you anywhere. It is much better to use your free time in a constructive manner and pick up new skills while having fun at the same time. You will be glad that you did. No matter what it is, from cooking a new dish, to learning a new game, find out how to learn a new skill.
Break your resolution into parts
Psychologists have discovered that we’re more likely to succeed if we break our resolution into smaller goals that are specific, measurable and time-based. Break your goal into a series of steps and focus on creating sub-goals that are concrete, measurable, and time. To stay motivated, give yourself a small reward whenever you achieve a sub-goal, which will help to motivate you and give you a sense of progress.
Alex Iwuoha is a dedicated and results-driven business and marketing professional with over two decades of experience gained within senior management roles across charity, private and public sector organisations.
He is an author and a publisher, with a vast experience in business-to-business networking, and marketing solutions.
For more information, please visit www.alexiwuoha.com