You’ll need all your escape room skills…and more…to be able to find your way out of this one
You are led into 2020; the door to 2019 shut firmly behind you.
You have one year.
Can you follow your New Year resolutions, make your way past the obstacles, and find your way to a New You?
The thing about New Year’s Resolutions
The majority – the vast majority, in fact – of New Year’s Resolutions have three features in common
- They’re adopted with a lot of sincerity…almost blood oath-level sincerity.
- More often than not, they turn out to be pies in the sky.
- The sincerity fades by February.
It turns out that only 8% of people actually achieve their New Year’s goals; and only 20% keep their New Year’s resolutions. That’s according to a study conducted by the University of Scranton.
Both of those are lower than the success level of the most difficult escape games here in our Orange County escape room.
So, what can be done about that?
Well, three factors crucial to keeping New Year’s resolutions and achieving New Year’s goals seem to be
- Relevance
- Motivation
- Milestones
Relevance
An irrelevant resolution, no matter how popular it is or noble it sounds, will most probably not be kept.
Now, what do I mean by ‘irrelevant’?
I mean that your New Year resolution must be specifically relevant to you.
‘I will reduce my junk food intake’, while both popular and generally relevant, is not relevant to anyone specific.
On the other hand, ‘I will progressively reduce my junk food intake, first to every alternate day, then to twice a week, and ultimately to once a week. This will help me reduce my spending on food by 10%, and also help me get fitter’ is a resolution that’s a lot more relevant to the person making it.
Motivation
Zig Zigler once said, ‘People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.’
- With a project at work, there’s an entire team motivating you to give your best.
- With your family, there’s the faces of your loved ones motivating you to do your best.
- With you…you have yourself motivating you to do your best.
In other words, to have a better shot at achieving your New Year resolution, you need to develop a system of continuous self-motivation.
Elements of such a system of self-motivation could include
- A reminder of why you adopted that resolution
- Trying to judge how your efforts at maintaining your resolution affects the people in your life
- Visualizing the progress you are making towards meeting your resolution…which brings me to the next point, which is…
Milestones
As I was saying, you should visualize the progress you are making towards meeting your resolution.
Every step that you achieve towards your resolution is an achievement and should be celebrated as such.
This creates a sense of accomplishment which will push you forward to keep moving forward till you are part of the 8% (you know, the 8% who achieve their New Year resolution).
5 New Year’s resolution ideas for 2020
In other words, how to move past the tumult of the year gone by and transition to a happier and healthier you.
Include more vegetables into your diet
Increasing the amount of vegetables in your diet increases your consumption of essential vitamins and minerals while going slow on things like saturated fat and cholesterol.
Research suggests that this can help you with a whole host of things ranging from weight loss to heart disease. With our lives turning increasingly sedentary, reducing the risk of lifestyle diseases is surely a relevant goal.
As far as tracking goals is concerned, you can use apps like Calorie Counter by FatSecret; for motivation, you can find a ‘weight-loss buddy’ to compare notes with periodically.
Best of all, you don’t have to munch greens while hating every second of it. There are a whole host of healthy, veggie-based recipes out there, just waiting to be done!
Get some indoor greenery
House plants make the air less dry by moderately increasing humidity. They may also be able to filter out some dirt and microbes from the air.
Studies show that having and caring for plants in your home can
- Boost your mood and reduce things like fatigue, coughing and itchy eyes
- Improve concentration and productivity
- Make your room look…pretty amazing
In fact, ‘horticultural therapy’ has proven effective in helping people overcome depression and fight trauma.
It’s hard to imagine busting stress and boosting productivity would be irrelevant for anybody; and you will be able to experience achieving your resolution through your improved Quality of Life.
Reconnect with the near and dear ones
Our lives are increasingly shifting online, and getting disconnected from each other in the real world.
It makes a whole lot of sense to switch off email alerts, log off of social media and get together with your family and your friends in real life.
Meet up like that every month. And make plans to make these meetings special.
Good ideas for family night outs would be
- Friendly family and friends competition – art contest, or cooking contest
- Picnic and barbecue
- Day out somewhere along the California coastline
- Escape room night
- Museum tour
In fair and especially in foul, it is family and friends who may turn out to be your savior. So it’s critical to deepen your bonds and reconnect with them, even within our world of work emails and social media updates.
Deal with distractions
Speaking of work emails and social media updates, how many times have you checked your phone while reading this blog?
At least once, right?
Even as we plug ourselves into the online world and try to increase productivity, we face an ever more fierce assault on our focus from that same online world.
- Phone alerts
- Webpages with content that’s just too interesting to just refer once and click away from
- Separate tasks that just keep seeping into each other
Phone alerts
You need to evolve a SOP to deal with various alerts.
For example, while some phone alerts (like social media pings) clearly can be blocked, how about a message from the bank?
Or an email from work that may not have any connection with what you’re doing?
You can shut off phone alerts, and instead, decide that you’re going to go through emails and messages
- On your lunch break (which allows you to reply to important ones on the same day); and
- Before bed (which allows you to make plans for the next day, if any are needed)
Webpages that you just can’t get away from
You visited a webpage to check one fact and ended up spending a whole hour on that page, gorging on the other, simply amazing, content that’s on there.
Once again, an all too common experience, right?
You can consider using Chrome extensions and apps that allow you to block certain websites and limit your time on other websites; once you exceed your time limit, the app will block you from visiting that website.
Keeping track of tasks
We all love to multitask. And, sometimes, it does pay off.
But there are times when multitasking is best avoided. Sometimes, tasks seem to seep into one another; in other words, tasks which might be related in some way end up distracting you so you can’t get either done.
If you find this happening, carve out a linear task sequence and focus on one task at a time.
You will end up saving time and be able to deliver a better result.
Volunteer
Get involved with something…besides work.
It could be anything from cleaning up a park to raising funds for a hospital or helping out at an animal shelter.
These kinds of commitments create a much-needed positive vibe. They are a great way of ‘getting away from it all’ without actually going on a trip. You may also end up making some great new friends.
What do you think of this new escape game?
Do you agree with our ideas for New Year’s resolutions? What resolutions are you adopting? Tweet your New Year’s resolutions under the hashtag #NewYearsResolutions #FiabOrangeCounty #Foxinabox