It’s a new year, and you are working toward a new you! Congratulations for making a commitment and prioritizing your health. Setting realistic goals and sticking to them can often feel like an uphill climb, but with CBD products, achieving your health and wellness goals might be easier than you think.
Today, we’ll demonstrate:
- How to set realistic goals for your health and wellness
- Why it can be so hard to change your habits
- How to achieve a goal successfully, plus goal-setting examples
- The keys to achieving your goals with confidence
- How to use CBD products for all your health and wellness goals to see more success
While living a healthy lifestyle is often at the heart of new goals, we know there are other factors to success: determination, a healthy mindset, and a good support system, which is where CBD comes into the conversation.
Setting Realistic Goals for Your New Year
We make our well-meaning lists this time of year:
- Be more physically active: Get to the gym or take more walks, do yoga
- Lose weight: Yeah, all that same stuff again…gym, yoga, maybe some running
- Improve eating habits: Cut down on foods high in saturated fat, eat more fruits and vegetables (or more green vegetables), focus on the food groups, cut down on highly processed foods or foods with added sugar
- Reach and maintain a healthy weight (see all of the above)
- Get better sleep
- Commit to self-care
- Improve mental health
The lists can get long and overwhelming. But making some serious changes can reduce your risk of heart disease and diabetes, maybe even help you live a little healthier and longer. Setting realistic and achievable goals, or breaking down your goals into smaller steps, may make all the difference, or keep you from falling off the resolution wagon as early as week three.
Start Small: Set Realistic Goals
Author and motivational speaker Tessa Koller gives some of her expert advice in Make These 17 Health Goals Into Daily Habits for Better Overall Wellness.
Her tips remind us of a few key points to remember when setting your goals, so that you can transform them into daily habits:
- New habits can take up to 60 days to “make them stick.” (Notice how around February each year gym attendance declines?)
- It can be easier to set goals that you can work into your current lifestyle. This “start small” method can help you build smaller habits that add up to bigger lifestyle changes.
- Koller also reminds us to get good sleep, which is foundational for improved health. She reminds us that “Optimal health should always be your desired outcome.” (See our favorite CBD for sleep options.)
Keep your goals small and simple, or if you plan a larger goal — like running a marathon this year — then break down your goal into smaller steps that are easier to accomplish. Each of these smaller “wins” will help to propel you toward your larger goal.
Write Down Your Plan
There’s a reason we see calendars, planners, and organizing apps around the beginning of the year.
This is because there is real psychology behind writing down your goals — it’s because writing things down actually helps us to achieve more success.
Forbes explains: “Vividly describing your goals in written form is strongly associated with goal success, and people who very vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to successfully accomplish their goals than people who don’t.”
So, whatever your goals — write them down. Post them where you can see them each day.
Dealing with Failures
There are going to be days when you fail. Don’t dwell on those failures, but get up the next day, read over your goals, and start again. Be cognizant of any negative circular thinking patterns that churn your guilt over these failures into feeling defeated. Hit the internal “reset” button, get a good night’s sleep, then try again the next day.
Why Is It So Hard to Change Habits?
When you aim to change a habit, you are working against the muscle memory of every cell in your body. Think of all the small things you do each day the exact same way, day after day: your morning routine or sleep hygiene habits. Those habits are stored as internal memory in your mind and body.
Psychology
We often repeat similar behavior patterns each day because it makes us feel a sense of control, and it makes us feel safe. For a new habit to “stick” we have to work against what makes us feel most comfortable, and for many people, no matter how determined, this can be difficult.
Internal messages can also make it harder to make new and healthier choices for yourself. Old internal messages, ones that are no longer serving you, can be “rewired” within your mind. For many people, therapy can help to sort out these negative internal messages and replace them with new ones.
People also use mantras to rewire this kind of thinking. Retrain yourself to focus on the positive, and on that new and healthier you that you’ve always wanted to be.
Turn: I can’t do this. Into: Let’s do this!
Turn: I don’t deserve to be happy.
Into: Every effort I make is a win! I am strong, I am powerful, I am worth it!
Repeat your mantras when the messaging in your mind threatens to derail your efforts.
By all means, if you are experiencing mental health roadblocks that are holding you back, talk to your doctor about your struggles. They can recommend a personal mental health plan for you.
Your Brain
There’s also a whole lot of neuroscience stuff involved in changing a habit, related to how we learn, interpret information, and make decisions. You may find that learning a little more about how all this works can help to empower you and at least make you feel a little less guilty when you experience setbacks.
In Psychology Today, Diana Hill, Ph.D. uses a familiar example to demonstrate how hard it can be to change the hardwiring of a bad habit in our brain. Think of when you feel mentally bored or uncomfortable and how quickly that turns into “check the computer, check the phone, check it all over again and again.” This is a great example of using a behavior to try to make yourself feel better, even though the behavior is not productive nor does it usually relieve the core problem.
Hill describes this behavior as experiential avoidance. The cycle is: trigger → behavior → results. It may help you to understand how this cycle works and to focus your mind heavily on the results (and less on the triggers that will come): reminding yourself each day that your new habits, new behaviors, new choices, will create different results — and that these results are not only desirable, but important to you. In this way you can help to keep yourself motivated to press toward developing new habits.
CBD Products to Help You Reach Your Goals
You may wonder why CBD is a part of this conversation about setting realistic goals and achieving them. This is because CBD products offer wellness support when you really need it.
From supporting muscle recovery for your new gym routine to improving your relaxation at bedtime, we’ve got your wellness support covered. You just need to know what products best support your goals for the coming year.
CBD Products for Fitness Goals
CBD is making a huge impact in the athletic community. Many athletes are turning to CBD for better sleep (which is so important to any training routine) and for supported and more comfortable muscle recovery.
Just take a look at these professional athletes who now dedicate part of their lives to sharing their positive experiences with CBD. Nascar Champion Jimmie Johnson, MMA fighter Daniel Cormier, freestyle motocross professional Vicki Golden, and crossfit athlete Annie Thorisdottir are just a few of the athletes who have joined cbdMD to do more, be more, and achieve more with CBD.
Athlete or couch-champion, we all want to have better health. That may begin with setting realistic goals.
Examples of realistic goals:
- Run a race you’ve been wanting to enter
- Establish a daily yoga routine
- Lose some weight
- Change your diet
- Quit smoking
- Get in more fresh air/spend more time outdoors
- Start a simple walking routine
How CBD can be an active supporter on your team:
- Take advantage of the entourage effect: Using a combination of cannabinoids creates what is called the entourage effect. Cannabinoids work together synergistically to provide enhanced benefits for your overall health and wellness. CBD full spectrum tinctures are a great place to start boosting your workout support.
- CBD helps your sleep so your body can heal well (muscle recovery). If pain keeps you up, try a pain-relieving CBD topical on your sore muscles.
- Take cbdMD MAX daily to manage everyday joint pain and improve mobility so you can enjoy your physical activities – and even take up new ones!
CBD Products for Mental Health Goals
Many people make mental health goals for the year. Though these goals are a little more open-ended, generalized, or harder to get to a “finish line,” they are no less important than the ones we set for our physical bodies.
Examples of realistic goals:
- Manage stress
- Work on mindfulness, wellness, and inner calm
- Live more positively or with more gratitude
- Improve focus or job performance
- Stop worrying over small things
- Spend more time relaxing
Recommended products:
- Choose the CBD oil tinctures that best support you for improved overall wellness and a greater sense of calm.
- Try a CBD sleep aid to improve your quality of sleep.
- Consider CBD for calming (with or without THC) to help manage your body’s responses to daily stress.
- Use CBD topicals for stress-related aches and pains.
CBD Products for General Wellness and Personal Goals
Generalized wellness goals can also help to improve your quality of life. Here are a few common ones and what CBD products can offer the most support.
Examples of realistic goals:
- Get better sleep (this bears repeating!)
- Be more focused and productive
- Feel better or look better
- Active goals like learning a new hobby, travel, or spending more time outdoors
Recommended products:
- Begin with a CBD tincture or CBD softgel daily regimen to support your general health and wellness in a myriad of ways.
- Try the CBD drink mixes for on-the-go support.
- Use CBD gummies, which come in a variety of flavors and perks to help support your new goals.
- Consider CBD stress helpers to help find your focus and manage your body’s responses to daily stress.
Whatever Your Goals for the New Year — CBD Can Help!
Make your lists! Choose what goals are important enough for you to make super challenging, and where you may need more realistic goals (or ones divided into simpler tasks) to keep you on track this year. We’re happy to bring you products that support you on this journey, and we believe that with CBD support, there’s no limit to what you might accomplish!
