Sir, – Given the time of year, it is probably inevitable that jokes about them are as popular as the resolutions currently being abandoned. As a strong believer in such time-bound commitments, I read a lot of such cynical opinions with the thought that different people think differently. Which you’d expect.
However, the article by Muiris Houston (Don’t waste your time on new years health resolutions, Health + Family, January 2nd) provided something of an “aha” moment. While citing examples of resolutions like “improving fitness, losing weight, and improving diet”, Dr Houston advises “don’t bother”. I look at this area completely differently and reckon I’ve made several sustained changes in my life based around a new year. And the examples he offers seem to me not to even count as “resolutions” but as vague aspirations. A few examples might illustrate approaches that can work for some people.
Early in my career, knowing that my free time as a doctor would be limited, I determined one year to run for an average of 10 minutes a day. Back then it required writing the times in a diary, and given the requirements of on-call work, often longish runs followed several busy hospital days. But you can’t make such excuses to yourself so easily as, even on a chaotic day, you can probably find 10 minutes.
The total of 70 minutes a week was easily calculated, and even in the depths of Irish winter was possible. This resolution remained a habit for over a decade but ultimately morphed into a plan to cycle 200km a month. I rarely fail in this largely because this isn’t an enormous commitment, occasionally in summer requiring less than eight hours. Advances in technology have helped too, with mobile phones recording and adding up the data effortlessly.
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Somewhere else along the way I decided that eating a piece of fruit every day was a good plan – and a grape would do. Of course you usually don’t just eat one grape or berry, and so this can lead a healthier diet. It promotes eating breakfast as a habit, with less temptation to snack all day.
My suggestion is to take things that are achievable in the very long term and that take little time. Using the technology of smartphones (such as to average out the 8,000 steps a day I clock up) is easy and most of us carry them anyway, making it harder to fool yourself.
Some can become addictions however. In 2016, having subscribed to The Irish Times, I read a letter from a GP friend in it recommending influenza vaccination. I replied, supporting his suggestion. It was early January and it occurred to me as a new subscriber it might make me pay attention to the news if I aimed to write a letter to the paper at least monthly, and thereby contribute to its coverage and outlook. That one might have been a mistake. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.