By Dr. Ross Walker
November 2020

2020 is a year the vast majority of us would like to forget. This time last year most of us had never heard the word coronavirus. COVID-19 hadn’t been invented and concepts like lockdown, social distancing and “doing the three” had not really entered our consciousness.

It has been such a bizarre and frightening time for most of us and although Australia has handled the pandemic better than most, COVID-19 has still profoundly affected the way most of us have lived.

Regardless, it is now that time of the year when most of us typically experience the very common burnout. 2020 can only make this burnout even more prominent in our minds and body with most of our thoughts turning to the Christmas break. Although Christmas should always be a time for rest, reflection and rejuvenation, it often becomes a time for excessive partying, overeating, overindulging in other bad habits, not to mention those interactions with relatives whom some of us hardly see throughout the year.

Interestingly, my daughter, Dr Ali Walker, who has a PhD in Human Consciousness, told me that there is now a term for this overdose of relatives at Christmas. The term is hyper-co-presence. I would prefer to call this an unavoidable overdose!

Rather than heading towards the inevitable Christmas weight gain, the very common New Year’s Day hangover, the perennially failed New Year’s resolutions, along with the unresolved family conflicts, why not commit before the holiday season gets into full swing to really make this Christmas break the chance to make a fresh start. Put the global traumas of 2020 behind you by following what I call my 5 Point Power Plan:

1. Decision
2. Correct your limiting patterns
3. Create a new pattern
4. Train the habit
5. Live the program

1. Decision:
Decide what life habits you want to break and which ones are not working for you. Decide which relatives and possibly friends you have had conflicts and troubles with. Make a commitment to resolve these issues. A very good start here is to create a journal or a diary where you actually write down in decreasing order of importance your life goals for the coming year including the list of bad habits that are not serving you well and you wish to change. Write in your journal the basis of your conflicts with the important people in your life with a plan for the resolution of these issues.

2. Correct your limiting patterns:
What is stopping you right now from not making these changes? If, for example, you wish to cease smoking but every Friday night you go down to the hotel with your friends and have a few drinks, this will certainly weaken your resolve and this pattern may need to change. Many people, as another example, are comfort eaters, often sitting in front of the television consuming unnecessary food. Rather than doing so, now that it is daylight saving with longer days, why not go for a walk instead.

3. Create a new pattern:
Nature abhors a vacuum. When you change a bad habit that has occupied a significant amount of your time, whether it be excessive eating, drinking or smoking, it should be replaced with a better, more, healthier habit. One of the greatest examples I have witnessed in my medical practice was a patient of mine who was a serious alcoholic. He consumed around 20 schooners of beer per day leading to a severe dilated cardiomyopathy. This gentleman made the decision to stop alcohol on my very strong advice and replaced this with an interest in Egyptology. All of the money he used to spend on alcohol was placed in a bank account. He had eventually saved up enough money to take him and his wife to Egypt where he had the trip of a lifetime. His severe heart disease returned to normal and he is still a faithful patient of mine 25 years later.

4. Train the habit:
Napoleon Hill wrote a book many years ago, Think and Grow Rich. In this book, he stated the two greatest success principles—discipline and perseverance. Any new habit requires discipline. You need to discipline yourself for a full month for this new habit to be trained and to become a normal part of your life. It is very important, also, to associate rewards with this new habit. For example, once I had destroyed my knee through too much sport, I needed to replace my very enjoyable soccer and squash games with a less rigorous form of exercise. I therefore started using an exercise bike 12 years ago but my reward was to watch enjoyable TV series whilst exercising. I did this to associate pleasure with the habit rather than the boredom of the exercise bike for 45 minutes staring out the window. I am delighted to say that I have already broken three exercise bikes through excessive use.

5. Live the program:
Here is where the perseverance comes in. A number of years ago I wrote a book “Diets Don’t Work”. The reason diets don’t work is that you go on a diet in the same way as you go on a holiday. You always come back from the holiday. 12-week programs also have a finite ending which see you return to your old habits. When you have created new, good and healthy habits, these need to stay with you for the rest of your life. You need to have a commitment to maintaining these habits as part of your new way of thinking.

Life is not about making the big decision to be healthy and happy, it is about making 30-50 small decisions every day of your life. Decisions like “I won’t eat that biscuit”, “I’ll walk up the stairs rather than take the escalator”, “I will not yell at that fool who just cut in front of me in the traffic”. These are split second decisions that can either take you towards good health and happiness or bad health and unhappiness. Why wait for the new year to make these decisions and resolutions? Also, if you have had long standing unresolved conflicts with people that erode your sense of well-being, why not make the commitment to resolve these. If you take nothing else from this article, remember it is always better to be kind rather than right. Why not start right now before the, often bad, habits of the Christmas break take over.