– The Mental Health Benefits of New Year’s Resolutions

By: Chris Roberts, MACP, LPC-MHSP (Masters of Arts in Counseling and Psychology.  Licensed Professional Counselor with Mental Health Service Provider designation) Two Trees Counseling Nashville.  Relational Psychodynamic Therapy Certified Therapist Trainer and Consultant.

 

HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I’m not going to be arrogant enough to suggest that New Year’s Resolutions are completely and totally beneficial for your mental health.  Besides, that would put a pressure and seriousness about them that should take all the fun out of it.  However, I am going to play around with the concept of setting goals in our lives, both short-term and long-term, and how looking forward and looking back on our year can give us an observation platform to take notice of our lives.

GOALS IN THERAPY IN NASHVILLE AND EVERYWHERE IN OUR LIVES

Setting goals is normal manner in which we engage with life.  How many hours are we going to work this week? How much money do we need/want to make this year?  What do we want our grades to be at the end of the semester?  How many pages a week are we going to read?  How many times a month do we want to exercise?  What time are we going to go to bed each night?  All of these, and millions others, are the everyday existence of goals that we set for ourselves and for our life.  Most of us, however, very rarely sit down to take an accounting of the goals we set and how we do or don’t accomplish them.  Hence, why New Year’s Resolutions can be used as a time to not only reflect on our past year, but organize ourselves for the upcoming year.  But here’s the most important part- WITHOUT JUDGMENT.  I wrote that in all caps so you could hear me shouting it.  Judgment is our worst enemy when it comes to setting and evaluating goals.  We think that judgement will motivate us.  But it never does.  And I mean NEVER.  Judgment, and it’s twin sibling shame, cause us to shut down, to sneak away, to not want to look, and to definitely not using any of our experience with curiosity and intrigue. 

As I wrote in a previous blog, imagination can be our best friend in situations like this.  We need a strong dose of imagination to begin to play around with what we want OUR goals to be.  It can be easy to take other people’s goals and make them our own. And obviously, we get our motivation and ideas from other people.  But, we need to make sure the goals we find in other people’s lives actually fit with what we want for our life.  This takes time.  And a strong helping of imagination and creativity.

CAN INDIVIDUAL THERAPY HELP WITH NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS?

Individual therapy in Nashville, TN isn’t designed to work specifically with New Year’s Resolutions, or any resolutions in general.  However, given the extent to which we set goals for ourselves, oftentimes unconsciously, individual counseling is an extremely useful place to begin to understand ourselves and our lives through the goals that we establish.  For instance, let’s say I want to learn to speak French.  On the outside, this would appear to have nothing to do with mental health therapy.  And for the most part, it doesn’t.  But, if in one of your therapy sessions with your licensed professional counselor, you stated that you were going to learn French this year, perhaps your therapist might say, “That sounds really cool.  Where did you come up with that idea?  How are you planning to go about accomplishing that?”  Now, we are in the work of therapy.  Why?  Because learning a new language is a significant feat that takes lots of time and effort and discipline.  What happened or is happening in this client’s life that makes them want to learn a new language, and specifically French?  Now, we are getting at motivation.  Is this a sustainable goal based on the person’s own, personal desire?

Also, how are they going to go about creating a plan to learn French?  Does their plan seem reasonable given their current life?  Have they thought about the time they will have to devote to this task?  What other items might get less attention due to their focus on this item?  How does this client, in general, relate to goals?  How compassionate are they with themselves when they don’t reach the goal?

GOALS IN THERAPY THROUGH INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING

Therapy in and of itself has goals.  A good therapist should talk with their clients, every so often, to check in and make sure their goals are clear and that the therapy is moving the client towards their goal.  The client and the therapist should be asking themselves regularly, “What are we doing here?  What do I want differently in my life?  Are the conversations I’m having in therapy lining up with the things I want to work on in my life?  Is the therapist helping me move towards the goals I am setting for my life.  How do the goals we are establishing connect the overall outcome I am hoping for in therapy?”

All of these questions and more are not only helpful, but they become therapeutic in and of themselves!  It is risky to set goals, especially goals that can be measured.  They give us feedback about our lives and ourselves.  It is scary to look back on the goals we set and determine if we met them or not.  Most of us don’t take the time to set specific, conscious goals, especially ones that take longer than a month or a year.  But, we all need long term goals that remind us that life is bigger than tomorrow, or our next stressful task.  We need to have large enough goals that we have to round up resources and stretch ourselves to new and uncomfortable places.

HOW A THERAPIST IN NASHVILLE, TN CAN HELP

A therapist can’t come up with your goals for you.  However, a therapist can help you plumb the depths of why you don’t set goals, or why you don’t accomplish your goals, or why you might have difficulty in determining your own goals.  Goals are a good representation for how hopeful you feel about your life.  A lack of goal setting does not necessarily mean you aren’t hopeful.  But, if you don’t consistently feel hopeful, and you notice you also don’t set goals, there may be a beneficial connection between the two.

If you are looking for a therapist in the Nashville area, or anywhere in the state of Tennessee, Chris Roberts would love to talk to you.  Chris can be reached at: chris@nashvillecounselor.net, or at (615) 800-9260.