Relaxing resolutions
Daily Telegraph
Published on Monday February 1, 2010
Failed with your New Year’s Resolutions? Chris Alden offers some low-stress alternatives.
Meat-free Mondays
OK, so you started the new decade with the best intentions. You went to the health food shop, filled your cupboards with quinoa, rice cakes and Sesame Snaps … and then what? You spent half the night working out how to cook the quinoa, gave up, and called out for pizza – then, after a bitter argument about how “quinoa” is pronounced, polished off the rice cakes with butter on top for late-night munchies. Your mistake? Trying to change too much at once. Better to make a pledge you can stick to – like eating less red meat, which is high in saturated fat. Avoiding meat on Mondays is a low-stress way to cut down – after a Sunday roast the day before, you probably won’t even notice the difference.
Tech-free time
So, you come home from work, frazzled after a long day staring at a screen. Closing your eyes, all you see is an Excel spreadsheet floating in front of you, and there’s a dull pain roughly where your optic nerve should be. So what do you do? You flip open your laptop and spend six hours staring intensely at that, this time in the guise of “free time”. Then, after loading nine CDs to your iPod, pretending to be a farmer on Facebook, distractedly checking a few work emails and watching 17 videos of 80s pop, you go to bed late, sleep fitfully – and let the process begin again. Stop! Break the cycle! Promise yourself that one evening a week, you won’t look at anything with a screen. Instead, reclaim time for relaxing activities like reading, building a fire and doing the Telegraph crossword. Without looking online for the answers, you cheat.
Cancel the gym – spend the money on a vegetable box
If you’re already thinking of cancelling that gym membership because you don’t use it enough, why not divert some of the cash to an organic vegetable box? Unlike with a gym membership, which you spend £30-80 a month on but can soon forget all about, it’s difficult to ignore it when each week a man in a happy yellow uniform comes and delivers a box of seasonal vegetables to your door. If you don’t want to end up with a kitchen overflowing with carrots, turnips and Jerusalem artichokes, you’ll actually have to eat them – a low-stress, lower-cost way of making sure you get enough soup.
Get out and walk
If you do cancel the gym, you’re going to need a low-cost, low-stress way to exercise. The answer, of course, is to walk. Walking burns an impressive 300 calories in an hour (depending on your weight and speed) – and unlike running on a treadmill, it’s low-stress: less stress on your knees because you’re not pounding so hard, and less stress on your head because there is no TV blasting out grime music anywhere near you. Best of all, it’s virtually free.
No drinking on school nights – except Tuesdays
If you like a drink but want to cut down, chances are at some point you’ve tried the “no drinking on school nights” rule. Not a drop of alcohol, you solemnly pledge, will pass your lips if you have work next day – on the basis that if you don’t drink the night before, you will sleep better and do better at work. The theory is fine, up to a point – and that point is that if you used to drink most nights, five high-stress workdays without a glass of wine is a tough ask. Inevitably, you crack – and soon you’re back where you were before. So make the rule easier: drink on Fridays, Saturdays – and Tuesdays too. Result: you never have to go more than three days before you’re allowed a drink – and are less likely to binge when you do.
Form a lazy book group
If your resolution is to spend quality time with close friends, the thought might have occurred: why not form a book group? It’s a good idea in principle – but only if you do it the low-stress way. The golden rule, of course, is not to hold the meetings too often. For best results, have meetings every three or four months – even the most laid-back souls can finish a book in that time, and who wants to see their best friends more often anyway? For lowest possible stress, try to organise it so that numbers are kept small – other halves should not be invited, especially if they studied English literature.
Don’t stress – just floss
Of course, if you didn’t succeed in your more ambitious New Year’s Resolutions first time around, why not start February with something simpler? Daily flossing may be the way to go. It takes a limited amount of time, gives the illusion of achievement (“today, darling, I flossed for two minutes”), instils routine and discipline, and is, best of all, the perfect dinner party conversation piece for those of us who do little else with our lives (“So, what do you do in your spare time?” “I floss.”) Also – and this is really the point – it’s quite relaxing at the end of the day, and is broadly designed to stop your teeth falling out, which is a good thing.
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