Happy New Year
Still full swing with the resolutions you made the other night, the one that welcomed in the unpredictable, unique year 2019?
Spur of the moment is such a good motivator. When the horns are blaring, pans banging, cheers rising, balls dropping, nothing seems simpler than changing your life for the better. Stepping up a fitness routine, altering your diet from cookies to salad, resisting the temptation to smoke. These are manageable ideals at midnight.
Transforming the ideal to reality by light of day, not so manageable. When you have to do it rather than think it, focusing single-mindedly amid a swarm of competing stimuli, it’s easy to rather not.
So how do you regain the rush of energetic enthusiasm you need to start on a resolution, which is where you’ve got to begin before you make it a habit?
Falling out of shame might be one place.
Many a resolution rises out of shame at the behavior of that person inside you who’s doing all those things you know are not good for you, like eating cookies or smoking cigarettes or postponing going to the gym because your shoelace is broken. So you go on the offensive against those bad habits and the alter ego indulging them.
That’s a war you’re likely to lose. The habits are as firmly rooted as weeds, and the alter ego fully committed to nourishing them.
Maybe the two of you could try making peace?
It makes sense. I’d be better able to move the awkwardly positioned couch I’m eyeing if two of us were lifting together, rather than one of us sitting on it while the other lifts.
I hope it works, because part of my scheme for a better 2019 is talking my selves into cooperating.
A habit of going to the gym is where we’re starting. The workout habit my gym-goer self assiduously cultivated over a decade disintegrated over no more than 10 weeks. Now my gym-goer is making advances to my stay-homer to see if they can’t get together again. They’ve had one date, and both agreed it felt good. Will they manage a second? Or will the habit of doing nothing prove insurmountable?
If they manage, the rewards I remember will start to kick in, making the habit easier. The gym’s a place I like to be; it’s full of opportunity and people to help realize that opportunity. But the first step is getting ourselves there.
In this first Bay Weekly of 2019, our 27th year in this newspaper business, we bring you a paper full of ideas, inspiration and tangible help in making this a year of increased wellbeing.
We’ve asked our health and wellness partners — the people who make wellbeing their business — to share the best expert advice they have to give.
Some — like wearing sunglasses to defend your eyes against winter glare — are head-scratchingly obvious. Or would be if we happened to think of them.
Others, like holistic health therapies, feel so good (and are often covered by insurance) that the question is not why but why not.
Still others, like kung fu and tai chi — training to use your body to reduce wear and tear so that you can continue training even as you get older — seem so logical that you really can see yourself as a martial artist in 2019.
Even hypnosis. Maybe that’s the mediation you need to get the many parts of the team you call yourself pulling in the same direction.
Meanwhile, our columnists — Dennis Doyle of The Sporting Life, Wayne Bierbaum of Creature Feature and our new Gardening for Health columnist Maria Price — advise that any outdoor activity doubles your reward.
As well as gathering advice, in this issue you’ll learn where to go and who to see to help you make 2019 the year you take better care of yourself, so you can help take better care of our world.