New Year’s Resolution Ideas (And How to Make Healthy Habits Stick!)

A new year means a new start. Make the calendar work for you and set intentions that will improve your health, increase your happiness and impact those around you positively. The interesting part? You can do a lot of those things from the comfort of your very own bathroom.

We’ve put together a few ways to improve your mental health, your nutrition, and reduce your households’ environmental impact, too. First, though, we need to cover how creating healthy habits works…and why it doesn’t.

New Year’s Resolutions, Healthy Habits, and You

There might be nothing harder to break than a bad habit. That might be true, but there are ways to use your less-than-perfect behaviors to work for you, rather than against you.

Set yourself up to succeed. To start, look at your current routine and identify what behaviors you’d like to change in the new year. If you want to learn a new language and have to make a long commute, you might find a way to listen to Spanish lessons on your way to work. Looking to exercise more? Try doing a basic yoga routine while watching TV or even doing squats for two minutes while you brush your teeth!

Stick with your new habit. According to one study, it can take between 18 and 254 days to make a habit automatic. On average, it takes about 66 days!

Put your supplies in a position to succeed, too. If you know you need to clean more often, start by putting the cleaning supplies in the bathroom and setting a reminder on your phone. Even if you don’t do it immediately when the reminder goes off, having everything where you need it can reduce the friction of getting started.

New Year’s Resolution #1: Create Your Mental Health Checklist

Your energy levels, your moods, and your happiness start and end with mental health. With all the talk of self-care these days, it’s important to remember that mental health is about making goals and making time for yourself. That doesn’t always mean relaxing, either. That often includes investing time to be healthy, including exercising, cleaning, and finding ways to improve yourself.

The best mental health checklist should be personalized to meet your needs, but here are a few ideas to get you started:

Daily Mental Health Checklist

• Do something physically active, even if 10 minutes is all you have.
• Eat one meal that includes fruits or vegetables.
• Thank someone who has helped you or write down three things you are grateful for.
• Do something nice for someone.

Weekly Mental Health Checklist

• Call or text with a friend or family member you don’t see often.
• Spend at least an hour outdoors.
• Set one goal and accomplish it.
• Watch a show or read a book you’ve never heard of before.

Monthly Mental Health Checklist

• Stay off social media for a full day.
• Write a letter to someone you care about.
• Read a book.
• Plan a hike, a picnic, or outdoor event.
• Prepare a completely new meal for the first time.

 

MentalHealth.gov offers many resources to improve your mental health and create healthy habits.

New Year’s Resolution #2: Create an Environmentally Friendly Bathroom

We need to save the world, and the fight starts at your toilet. The climate crisis has become a global battle to reduce carbon emissions in every country, city, and home. Researchers have found that many changes must take place to reduce the impacts of climate change. At our current rate, the world could eclipse its “safe carbon budget” in just 11 years.

Saving Water and Energy in the Bathroom

You can save energy everywhere in your home, but don’t overlook the bathroom.

1. Take short showers. Taking shorter warm showers saves gallons of water per week and reduces your energy bill, too. The average showerhead distributes 2.1 gallons per minute. At an average shower of 8.2 minutes, a family of four uses 25,043 gallons per year! It’s easy to see how much of an impact reducing your shower to five minutes or less can have over time.

Make It a Habit: Use a timer on your phone so you have to get out to turn it off!

2. Use a bidet. Toilet paper is an obvious and egregious waste of resources. Recycled toilet paper makes up just 2% of industry sales in the United States. Every day, the world flushes the equivalent of 27,000 trees down the drain for a product that consumers use for roughly five seconds. Bidets also offer plenty of health benefits, too!

Make It a Habit: Shop our bidet seats and bidet attachments to find the right fit! If it’s there, you’ll use it.

3. Use a motion sensor. It’s easy to forget to turn off the lights, especially if you have kids. Using a motion sensor to turn on the lights when occupied and off when the occupant leaves can add up to considerable energy savings and might be a good technology to add throughout your home.

Make It a Habit: Add motion sensor lights to the rooms you use often spend relatively little time in, such as bathrooms, basements, and bedrooms.

New Year’s Resolution #3: Healthy Food Habits

Creating healthy food habits isn’t always about losing or managing your weight. Instead, look at these habits as a way to develop or maintain a positive relationship with food and get the most from your day. This isn’t about restricting or designating “bad” foods; it’s about creating more room in your diet for nutritious meals that also give you a chance to be creative.

1. Swap out processed sugar. That doesn’t mean your dessert can’t still be sweet! Instead of reaching for cookies or cake after dinner, try serving frozen fruit as a post-dinner treat or even an afternoon snack. This can help reduce your intake of processed sugar, which can add up quickly. The average American consumes 152 pounds of sugar in a single year!
2. Drink more water. Odds are, you probably aren’t drinking as much water as you think and not enough as you should. Men should drink 5 cups of water per day. Women should aim for 11.5 cups per day.
3. Make It a Habit: Each morning, fill up a water bottle and aim to finish it, and refill it however many times it takes to meet your hydration needs. It’s easier to count the number of refills than the number of cups you’ve taken in!
4. Change Your Habits. Is there a candy dish in your living room that you just can’t walk past without sampling? Do you dive into the box of donuts at the morning staff meeting? Identify food habits you feel like you can improve on and replace them by either reducing the convenience or replacing it with an option you’ll feel better about.

Make Whole Home Health a Part of Your New Year’s Resolution

Bio Bidet offers bidet attachments, bidet seats, and bidet toilets to help you improve personal hygiene, reduce toilet paper waste, and take on the world feeling refreshed. We also offer a line of air purifiers and hands-free faucets to make healthy habits easier to make and stick with all year long.

Questions about our products? Contact us today, or take the bidet quiz to find the right bidet seat or attachment for your home!