New Year’s Day, a day for resolutions, often lightly made and soon forgotten. We even build in failure right from the very start. As in:

Have you made a New Year’s Resolution? Well, I’d like to lose weight but I’ve never managed it before.

(No surprises then, when it doesn’t work this time!)

 So why do so many of us make resolutions and then find it impossible to follow through? Why bother making them in the first place?

 Where does the idea of New Year’s resolutions come from? 

New Year’s Resolutions date back to the Babylonians, some 4000 years ago. The New Year was a time to return borrowed farm equipment and pay back debts; a time, therefore, to set things straight and start afresh.

Two thousand years or so later the ancient Romans re-established the tradition, giving gifts and making promises in honour of the deity Janus.  Janus was depicted as double-faced, allowing him to look back into the past and forward into the future. The Romans believed that making promises to Janus would bring good fortune in the year to come.

Why bother making resolutions today?

In my mind, the process of consciously choosing to do something and taking action in support of that puts me in the driving seat of my life.  All too often we drift along, letting others make decisions for us or believing that whatever happens is outside our control. To quote William Irwin Thomson, the poet and cultural historian:

If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.

Being in the driving seat is empowering. It frees us from passivity and brings personal energy and focus.

So if you choose to make a New Year’s Resolution this year, how do you stick to it?

Here are my 7 steps to good resolutions:

1. Take time to make your resolution.

As Nancy Kline says:

The quality of everything human beings do depends on the thinking we do first.

Set some time aside and, like Janus, look back over the past year. What has worked for you? What hasn’t? What would you rather have? Then go forward in time and imagine yourself at the end of a successful 2012. What do you notice as you look back over the year? What changes have you made?

2.      Choose your words well.

Be precise about how you word your resolution. Run it through the following checks:

• is it stated in the positive?

e.g.  I want to drink healthily as opposed to I want to stop drinking so much  or  quit drinking

I want to weigh 10 stone rather than Iwant to lose weight

• avoid putting the problem into your resolution.

e.g. I want to stop eating chocolate. This is the don’t think of a pink elephant rule. If you tell yourself not to eat chocolate, guess what, you’ll spend all your time thinking about it! I want to eat healthily is going to move you towards your goal more effectively.

• is it specific and and measurable? How much will you weigh and by what date? When, how often and for how long will you go to the gym? When will you join that evening class? Will you be down to ten cigarettes a day by the end of January?

• Is this something you really want? Beware of goals that contain shoulds and oughts as these are clues that, on some level, you don’t really want this or you may be doing it to please another. If you are not 100% convinced, explore the reasons why or choose another goal.

3.        Is it realistic?

Do you have the resources needed to carry it out? As well as money, resources include things like time, support, energy. What impact will achieving your goal have on others?

4.        What’s in it for you?

This may seem an obvious question but we often choose a goal without fully exploring why we want it.

When we do, we may find we need to modify it, or it isn’t right for us after all or it’s something that someone else wants for us! For example, why do you want to lose weight? Because you want to run a half-marathon, be able to pay football with the kids, walk uphill without getting out of breath? All these reasons are far more powerful and motivating than because the doctor tells me to.  Find personal reasons that will genuinely motivate you.

5.     How will you know when you have achieved your goal?

What will your evidence be? What will you see/hear/feel? What will others notice?

This process is very important as its giving instructions to your unconscious mind.  Using your imagination to step into the time when you have achieved your goal is a powerful technique to prepare for success. 

6.      Plan for setbacks! 

You will inevitably stumble and fail on some occasions. This is the time when people often give up and say to themselves Well, I knew all along that I wouldn’t be able to do it.

Think through all the times when you know that sticking to your resolution is going to be hard. Plan how to deal with that. Know that you will crave that cigarette, want that biscuit, prefer  to stay warm indoors rather than go for a walk. How will you support yourself then?

7.     Practise personal forgiveness.

If you do “break” your resolution, view it as just a temporary setback and start again. After all, you are learning something new. Just think of the determination a young kid shows when they are first learning to ride a bike. The wobbles and crashes and scraped knees... and still they keep going! And that look of pure joy when they whizz off!

How useful did you find these 7 steps? Do you have any other tips for making and keeping resolutions?

Stress can make you fat?

Maybe this is not the best time to be talking about putting on weight, as Christmas approaches and we traditionally eat far more than usual.  Rather than dampening your festive sprit, my aim is to share insights about stress and how it can lead to weight gain.  Now is also an especially good time to start planning the changes you’d like to see in the New Year.

The stress response and the way in which it impacts on weight gain is complex.  Here are the bottom-line facts for you to digest:

1. When we feel stressed, the body secretes hormones. Some of these (glucocorticoids) increase our appetite.  The stress response makes the body work harder in certain ways.  Increasing appetite is the natural way to re-stock our energy cupboard.

 2. Sugary, starchy and fatty foods provide quick fixes. It’s cakes, biscuits and chocolate that many crave when in the grip of stress.  Even people who normally eat healthily, reach for these comfort foods when stressed.

3. We eat more and also store more. Glucocorticoids cause the body to deposit fat, specifically in the abdominal area, rather than in other places.  Bodies are sometimes described as apple or pear-shaped.  When we are stressed, we tend to become apple-shaped, with fat stored around the middle, rather than pear, where fat is stored on the bottom and hips.

4. This apple-type of weight gain means that you may otherwise be very slim, yet with excess abdominal fat.

5. To confound it all, recent research shows that abdominal fat may actually help to suppress the stress response, making us feel better. Nature’s way of helping us to cope.

So, why do apple-shaped bodies get such a bad press when putting on weight round the middle helps us to feel less stressed? We may not like the spare tyre, but if it’s helping us to cope, then maybe that’s the price we choose to pay?

The answer is that excess abdominal fat is clearly linked to metabolic and cardio-vascular problems. The more we rely on eating sugary and fatty foods as a day-to-day coping strategy, the less likely we are to look for healthy ways to tackle stress. We may, for example, stop exercising which compounds the problem.  Exercise is not only good for burning calories but changes the way the body responds to stress, helping recovery and building resilience.  Exercise also brings huge psychological pay-offs.

So, if you are trying to lose weight, don’t overlook a key factor: tackling your stress. As well as exercise, try yoga, meditation, dancing or gardening...

September is a month of natural transitions as the sun loses its strength and the days shorten. We adjust again to school and work routines and lower light levels. These changes alone can lend an air of sadness to September days.

All the more so when you have an additional change on your plate: that of your son or daughter leaving home for the first time to go to University. This is the situation in which I find myself as my son slowly (and I mean slowly) dismantles his bedroom and piles up things in readiness for the trip to Newcastle that we’ll be making together next Saturday.

We are inevitably approaching his departure in different ways. He is hugely excited about big-city- life (all the more so after spending his school years in a small town), eagerly anticipating the inebriation of Freshers’ week and making new friends. Oh, and his studies, of course!

And what of my feelings?  Well, these depend on whether it’s my heart or my head talking. My head says that he is ready to go and I’m ready to let him. After 19 years of nurturing, protecting, advising, baling-out and reining-in, I feel it’s my time now for an easier life.

And my heart? Well, no surprises there, the normal mix of sadness and anxiety that are an inevitable part of parenting.  Only this time my anxiety won’t be about waiting for him to come home after a party in a dodgy area of the city or from a Thailand trip or from a rave under the motorway arches ....  it’s a much more significant adventure that he is embarking upon and most of the time I will have not a clue what he is up to.

So how do we deal with this breaking of the loving bond? Here are three things that work for me:

1. Remind yourself that if your son or daughter was fearful of change and wanted to stay at home, that would not be a good thing for either of you. The fact that s/he is looking forward to leaving home is evidence that you’ve done a good job.

2. Practice accepting your sadness.  Often we fight our feelings and try to push them under. But like a cork in a bottle, they pop up sometime or other, usually when we are least expecting. So I recommend that you deal with your feelings as they arise. Setting some time aside to do this is healthy and ultimately healing.  

3. Remember  that sadness is at the other end of the scale of happiness. It is proof of your love, so it’s a good and normal thing. Seek out friends who went through this last year and you will find that, difficult though the lead up to the departure may be, after a few weeks, they felt a new lease of life.

I hope this helps.  Before you know where you are, they’ll be back with piles of washing, eating you out of house and home and leaving their dirty cups in the bedroom again - just as if they’ve never left.

So how are you preparing for the empty nest?

Sleeping well: why spending time in natural light helps you to sleep better. 

Setting off from home on Wednesday for an early morning meeting, I really noticed the changing of the seasons. There was dew on my car, the air smelt crisp and the sunlight was of a different quality. It was a beautiful morning, heralding the Autumn.

Many of us had the time and the inclination to enjoy being outside over the summer.  As the days shorten and we return to work, we naturally spend more time indoors.  Lack of natural daylight, however, is not good for us.

Fascinating research by Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at the ­University of Oxford, shows how important it is for us to maximise our exposure to natural light over the winter months.  Humans, like most animals, have an internal body clock that is governed by the 24 hour cycle of night and day.  This Circadian cycle affects the functioning of many body systems, such as the immune and digestive systems. It also regulates brain activity, including readiness to sleep, and is involved in cognitive functioning and mental health.  Did you know, for example, that some drugs are more effective if administered at a certain time of day? Or that 12 noon is the best time for a rational argument when your verbal reasoning skills peak? And, that for people experiencing depression, afternoon is the hardest time?

In the winter, many of us get up and travel to work in the dark, spend all day in artificial light and return home in the dark. This lack of exposure to natural light means that our internal clock can drift out of rhythm with the external world, leading to less than optimal functioning of a wide range of physiological processes, including our ability to sleep well.

So, to keep healthy and ensure that you maintain good sleeping patterns in the autumn and winter months, it’s vital that you spend time outside each day around noon when light levels are at their highest. Even if it’s a cloudy day.

I wonder how many of you plan this into your working week? Does your workplace encourage this?