To set yourself up for success with your health and wellness resolutions in 2023 and beyond, start with creating goals. With actionable steps and a well-thought out plan, you can be confident that you’ll have the tools to crush your health goals and feel your best! 

A Holistic Approach to Health Goals

Health is not simply the absence of disease. According to the National Wellness Institute, there are 6 dimensions of wellness: physical, emotional, social, intellectual, occupational, and spiritual. Keep these dimensions in mind when setting goals. If a particular health goal will have a negative effect on another dimension of wellness (e.g. calorie counting’s impact on emotional health), it’s best to adjust your goal to be more holistic. Take care of all of you, not just parts of you! Here are a few ways to do just that.

Define Health Goals: The Big Picture

When picturing your future, identify the long-term health goals that you wish to accomplish. While “long-term” is a subjective amount of time, for this purpose let’s say long-term means six months or more. 

Do you wish to run a marathon before your next birthday, or lower your cholesterol levels to the normal range by your annual check up? These are great milestones to work towards as long-term health goals. 

Consider your passions and what motivates you to get up each day. In this stage, it is important to determine the reason why you want to achieve your goals. For example, improving your cholesterol levels is a fabulous health objective, but it becomes so much more meaningful if you’re motivated to do so because you want to lower your risk of heart disease so that you can increase both your longevity and quality of life to be able to enjoy time with your family, take trips, and watch your kids grow up. 

Setting Health Goals: The Specifics

Here’s how to take your health goals from a giant leap to one step at a time.

Create SMART, Short-Term Health Goals

While long-term goals help give a sense of direction for where to focus our energy, they can seem a little daunting without breaking them down into smaller goals. Short-term goals provide the framework you need to achieve your long-term health goals. 

When goal-setting, make sure to create SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Creating a SMART goal helps narrow your focus, set parameters, ensure that it’s realistic, and actually addresses what it is supposed to. Here are some examples of SMART and simple health goals:

• Desire: I want to eat healthier.

SMART goal: I will add a piece of fruit to my breakfast every weekday.

• Desire: I want to reduce my stress levels.

SMART goal: I will do a 2-minute breathing exercise daily before lunch. 

• Desire: I want to lower my cholesterol.

SMART goal: I will eat 3 fully plant-based dinners a week.

Achieving Health Goals: 5 Tips To Stay On Track

Once you’ve envisioned your future and created SMART health goals to help you get there, you might feel eager to begin. And that’s wonderful! But you also need some hacks for the long haul in order to achieve health goals on those days you’re not feeling it. Here are five tips for sticking with your health and wellness plan.

1: Don’t Take On Too Many Health Goals At Once

Sometimes we get so excited about planning for our future that we want to tackle our whole list of self-improvement and then some. While the enthusiasm is great, it can quickly lead to feeling overwhelmed or burned out. Instead, set yourself up for success by focusing on just one or two SMART health goals at a time. Once these begin to feel habitual you’re in a good place to either expand upon your initial goals or introduce new objectives.

2: Create A Plan To Integrate Health Goals

Humans are creatures of habit. Starting to work on a new health goal requires us to deviate from our current routine to some degree. Before beginning, create a plan for how – and where – this new goal will fit into your life. 

Let’s say you commit to running for 20 minutes a day, 4 days a week with the goal of achieving an 8-minute mile pace within 2 months. What time of day will this fit into your schedule? Which days of the week works best to incorporate those runs? By creating an actionable and realistic plan for integrating running into your routine, you’ll keep your health goals from being too ambiguous.  

3: Identify Potential Barriers to Health Goals

Before you begin, consider what potential barriers there are to your health goals. Doing so will allow you to minimize interferences because you’ve already anticipated them and created a workaround to keep them from derailing you. 

Let’s revisit the running example: if you decide that a run fits best into your schedule right after work in the evenings, a potential barrier could be that it’s been awhile since you ate lunch so you’re too hungry to expend energy running. In anticipation of this hurdle, plan to have an afternoon snack on your run days. 

4: Stay Committed to Your Health Goals

There is a common misconception that we need a steady stream of motivation in order to put in the work day to day. Motivation might be what sparks our initial interest in creating health goals but we can’t rely on it alone to fuel the entire process of working toward our objectives. 

When it comes to following through with your health goals, commitment is more important than motivation. Motivation often follows action; think about that last time you were dragging on your way to the gym. For those who rely solely on motivation, it can be all too easy to talk yourself out of something that doesn’t feel pleasant or exciting at the moment. But for those who are committed, they often find themselves feeling more motivated to see the process through once they begin their workout. 

5: Approach Health Goals With Flexibility

When it comes to health goals, many people get trapped in an “all-or-nothing” mentality. Despite your best effort to create realistic goals and set a plan in place to help you achieve them, life happens. If you are too rigid in how you approach goals, it can be easy to get in the mindset of thinking that because you already missed one workout, the whole week is a bust, so you might as well take the rest of the week off and start over again Monday. 

If you are more flexible in your approach to health goals, your thought process might instead be: “I already missed one workout and I don’t have the time to do my full 45-minute workout today, but I do have 15 minutes so I’ll just shorten it in order to fit in some movement.” Those 15 minutes are still so beneficial and a step in the right direction toward achieving your health goals! Just because you don’t complete your full exercise routine as originally intended doesn’t mean that the modified workout is a waste of time. 

This New Year, set your health goals, keep them SMART, and stay on track. You’re worth it, and we are rooting for you!