A happy new healthy year with these tips

by Taryn Davies | 30 December 2012

Have a happy and healthy 2013

Sick and tired of feeling deflated after your New Year’s resolution has failed, and your wish to become a slimmer, healthier, cleverer you seemingly hasn’t materialised? Want some guaranteed results instead?

Why not embark on Guardian columnist Oliver’ Burkeman’s alternative path to happiness?

Oliver has written alternative and exclusive, counter-intuitive New Year tips.

1. DON'T MAKE NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

…or at least not in the traditional manner: big, ambitious goals may provide a brief surge of motivation, but when that fades, you'll end up feeling worse. Trying to transform your life, all at once, is doomed to fail: research suggests that willpower is a depletable resource, so the more you use on developing a better exercise habit, for example, the less discipline you'll have left over to resist the temptation of cheeseburgers or get up earlier. Instead, make tiny, successive resolutions, all the way through the year. If you don't exercise at all, start with something ludicrous and therefore non-intimidating -- a 15-second walk, say -- then increase your time day by day.

2. DON'T WAIT TO "GET MOTIVATED"

A key tenet of positive thinking is the importance of getting motivated -- and New Year, the conventional wisdom goes, is the best time to do it. (A main purpose of New Year's resolutions, after all, is to make you feel "pumped up" to make a change.) But there's a hidden hazard with such advice: it promotes the idea that you need to achieve a specific state of mind before you can get down to work. When you can't find the requisite peppy emotions, though, this just adds another hurdle between you and taking action: you end up struggling to feel a certain way, rather than simply doing what needs to be done. Much more effective than "getting motivated" -- or its close cousin, "feeling inspired" to do creative work -- is the recognition that you don't have to feel like doing something in order to do it. You can accept the negative feelings for what they are, and act anyway.

3. INSTEAD OF POSITIVE THINKING, SEE THOUGHTS AS "MENTAL WEATHER"

Meditation is in fashion, these days, as a way to combat stress. But in its original form, it's more than a calming technique - it's a radical challenge to today's "cult of optimism". The Buddha advised cultivating "non-attachment": not a stance of passivity towards life, but, rather, a capacity to stop holding tightly to specific thoughts or emotions. Meditation can help you learn to see thoughts as "mental weather" -- sometimes bad, sometimes good, but not part of "you". Positive thinking, from this viewpoint, is like raging against the fact that it's raining. Better to let the rain blow over.

4. A DIFFERENT KIND OF RESOLUTION: "EMBRACE INSECURITY"

We set goals, including at New Year, partly to feel confident about how the future will turn out. We want security -- secure relationships, financial security, and a more general sense of safety. But Buddhists and members of other spiritual traditions have long recognised that, in doing so, we're chasing a phantom. "Security is mostly a superstition," said Helen Keller -- and striving too hard for it is precisely what causes feelings of insecurity in the first place. Worse, if you ever actually achieved perfect safety, you wouldn't like it -- because uncertainty, which means not knowing how the future will unfold, is the precondition for any kind of fruitful change. The only way to be completely, unchangingly secure, for ever, is to be dead.

5. DON'T MAKE DETAILED LIFE-PLANS - INSTEAD, USE "EFFECTUATION"

Another piece of conventional New Year wisdom is to be specific in your plans. But studies of successful entrepreneurs show that they rarely make detailed business plans, then fight to turn them into reality. Instead, they just start, and keep correcting their course as they go. Rather than deciding on some ambitious goal then finding a way to make it happen, "effectuation" involves looking first at your means, not your ends. What skills, resources and social connections do you have access to, and what could you create with them? "Effectuators" don't act like high-end chefs, sourcing rare ingredients for the perfect dish. They're more like time-pressed home cooks, looking to see what's in the fridge and the cupboards, and starting from there.

6. FOCUS ON HOW BADLY THINGS COULD GO

The ancient Greek and Roman Stoics understood that there's great tranquility to be found in focusing not on the best-case scenario - as modern happiness gurus insist - but on the worst. Trying to persuade yourself that everything will turn out for the best can lead you into a trap: it subtly reinforces your belief that life would be utterly terrible if things didn't turn out well. Picturing the worst-case scenario in detail, by contrast, renders your fears limited and finite. The worst thing about any event, as the Stoic-influenced psychologist Albert Ellis liked to say, "is usually your exaggerated belief in its horror."

7. DON'T VISUALISE SUCCESSFUL OUTCOMES

It's a staple of self-help bestsellers such as The Secret, but recent research shows that vividly picturing success - creating "mental movies" of crossing the finish line in a race, or accumulating great wealth, or meeting the perfect partner - can backfire badly. When thirsty experimental subjects were asked to visualise drinking an icy glass of water, for example, their energy levels actually dropped: they were less motivated to find real water because they'd imagined some. Their bodies relaxed, as if they'd already achieved their goal. Focus on your very next action, not on the finishing-line.

8. REPLACE "SELF-ESTEEM" WITH "SELF-ACCEPTANCE"

Who'd argue with the advantages of having high self-esteem? Quite a few contemporary psychotherapists, it turns out. Repeating self-help affirmations like "I am a lovable person!", studies show, can often make people feel worse: it prompts them to generate convincing counter-arguments, about why they're not unlovable. Worse, cultivating high self-esteem involves "self-rating" -- giving your whole personality one overall grade -- which makes it easier to give yourself a low grade when you're feeling bad. Don't make self-acceptance conditional on thinking you're a "good person", or you'll slide back down to low self-esteem when you do something less than good (which you will).

9. TAKE HEED OF THE "BACKWARDS LAW"

The 1960s countercultural philosopher called the principle at the heart of negative thinking "the backwards law". "When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink," he wrote, "but when you try to sink, you float." Trying really hard to be happy makes you miserable; struggling to eliminate anxiety makes you anxious. It's like the old challenge about "not thinking of a polar bear": can you maintain a mind free of all polar- bear-related thoughts for a whole minute? Have a go. As soon as you try, you fail. This principle is especially worth bearing in mind at New Year. What if struggling so hard to change yourself is part of the problem, not the solution?

10. MAKE DEATH A PART OF LIFE

These days, most of us make strenuous psychological efforts to deny the inevitable fact of mortality, and we confine the dying process to hospices and nursing homes. But the largely forgotten tradition of "memento mori" - which persists today in the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead - takes the opposite view. By building reminders of death into daily life, we can make it less terrifying, while simultaneously infusing life with more meaning. The Buddha told his monks to meditate in mortuaries and graveyards. You might not want to go that far. But the old thought experiment of imagining your own funeral is a powerful one: looking back, how would you want to have used your life?