The Third Monday in January

I heard on NPR recently that the third Monday in January is one of the most depressed days of the year for many. All of the holiday bills have arrived. People feel like they’ve already failed at their New Year’s resolutions, and the current year will not be any different or brighter than the previous year.

We’ve already discussed why setting goals instead of resolutions is a better option, but let’s tackle the question of whether 2010 will be any different or brighter than 2009. Of course it can be if you want it to be and are willing to make some adjustments. There are roughly 50 weeks left in the year, and you don’t have to make all your changes in the first two weeks of 2010.

For many years, January was one of the busiest months of the year for me at work. It was just impossible for me to hit the latest year running on my New Year’s resolutions or goals since I was working killer hours at work. I whined to Trish about it once, and she asked me why I didn’t treat February 1 as my own personal New Year’s Day. What a simple suggestion, but it made all the difference. I started doing that, and my Februaries became so much more productive.

I didn’t try to do everything on February 1 though. I made plans and tried to tackle one area or change at a time. For example, if your goal is to become healthier through changes in diet and exercise, you may want to incorporate one new thing into your life every week. Start off your first week by keeping a food diary. The next week, you may set a goal of going to the gym 2-3 times in the next 7 days. The third week may be devoted to trying to eat at least 3 servings of vegetables a day. During the fourth week, you may want to work in some strength training into your fitness routine by lifting some weights or attending a yoga class. Ideally, you would keep up with each one of these changes so that by the end of the month, you are doing 4 new things that will help you become healthier. At the end of the year, you would have incorporated 52 changes into your lifestyle that make it healthier. A book that looks at weight loss through one change every 4 days is Martha Beck's The Four-Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace.

These changes need not take much time or even effort to implement. Psychology professor Richard Wiseman’s new book 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot looks at many recent studies on why people act they way they do and is full of steps you can take in less than a minute to change your life. He examines the areas of happiness, persuasion, motivation, creativity (he’s not that wild about brainstorming), attraction, relationships, stress, decision making, parenting, and personality. He critiques where typical self-help and common sense advice get it wrong and shares what the latest scientific studies say will work. If this intrigues you, you can listen online to an hour interview with him entitled Brain Science on NPR’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show before you read the book.

In his chapter on motivation, he reviews how people successfully make big changes in their lives such as losing weight. They must create the ideal plan that identifies what their overall goal is, create a step-by-step plan for how they will achieve that goal, identify the benefits of achieving their overall goal, and go public by sharing their goal with others. He even suggests blogging about it. Does this sound familiar? It does to me because it succinctly captures how I lost 30 pounds last year.

How are you feeling on this third Monday of January? Do you have any stories or advice to share about how you have successfully made changes - big or small - in your life?