With the calendar finally turned over on 2020, Allison Richmond-Leeth wishes she could feel more excited to start fresh in a new year.
However, she admits she’s a bit nervous about all the uncertainty — about the pandemic, her career, her artwork — that still looms.
To combat that anxiety, the 25-year-old Downtown resident wrote down a list of New Year’s resolutions to help her continue to grow the art business, Soft Peach Designs, she’s focused on the past 10 months since being laid off from her event-planning job in March.
“If you’re having trouble focusing on things, having goals can help you focus in all aspects of life,” Richmond-Leeth said. “You can look back and see, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do,’ and you can do it today or next week, however long it takes you to do.”
As a goal-oriented person, she typically makes resolutions annually, however, she almost skipped them for 2021 given everything she’d endured this past year.
“I did have a moment that I thought, ‘We don’t know what will happen,’” she said. “The things I want to accomplish, I don’t know if I can with everything going on.”
She thought she might just “roll with it” but in the end she decided that having some penned goals — post artwork daily on Instagram, create a new website, grow sales — would give a year with so much unknown in it a bit of purpose.
Mental health professionals say an approach to New Year’s resolutions similar to Richmond-Leeth’s is a healthy one — to continue to take small, incremental steps toward working on areas of our lives that 2020 undoubtedly made people face.
“I’ve noticed that more people have been willing to … sit with what’s in their psyches,” said Sandra Forti, a clinical psychologist in Clintonville. “What people have been able to ignore when they’re busy, they can’t anymore. People made a lot of changes this past year that I think are going to carry over.”
Shifts, such as people finding unique ways to connect with others or educating themselves about systemic racism, are likely to stick around into this coming year, she continued.
“It’s been a time of deep reflection,” Forti continued.
But also because of that, she and other experts say skipping the New Year’s resolution in 2021 would be just fine, too.
Sophie Lazarus, a clinical psychologist at Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center, said that 2020 has caused heaps of stress for nearly everyone and these stressors haven’t magically disappeared now that January is here.
“Before you make a big change, you have to think about, ‘Do I really have the capacity or room in my life to do it?'” said Lazarus, who is also an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral health. “You need to focus on managing stress and this will most likely add to it.”
When someone is under a lot of stress, Lazarus continued, taking care of oneself — reading, connecting with others, exercising — often fall by the wayside, which doesn’t allow for major self-improvement changes.
Plus, the last feeling anyone needs right now is guilt — often the byproduct of well-intentioned resolutions.
“People tend to not follow through on them and if we don’t, we tend to be hard on ourselves,” Forti said.
In the middle of a pandemic, that’s the last thing people should be doing, she continued.
Richmond-Leeth said she’s generally not too critical when she evaluates her resolution success rate and she’s often able to pivot if her situation changes.
“Even if I don’t accomplish something, it lets me know what I want to do,” she said.
While it’s been difficult to grapple with losing her job in a field she thought she was thriving in, the Columbus College of Art & Design graduate said the pandemic allowed her to truly focus on her illustrations and paintings.
“It wouldn’t have happened if I had a full-time job,” she said. “I try to look at the pros and cons.”
That’s how she ultimately decided to create her 2021 to-do list and post it on her blog for everyone to see.
If people do decide to jot down some goals for this year, Forti recommends enlisting a support system and realizing, especially following a year like 2020, that one size does not fit all as people are struggling to various degrees.
“There’s a difference between being bored and a person whose business is going under,” Forti said.
Lazarus said people’s resolutions can be as simple — and she actually prefers they keep them that way — as being more mindful of oneself or making sure everyone is treated with kindness.
“At the onset of the pandemic, we had all this change in our lives, whether it was our livelihood, online school or not being able to see our loved ones,” she said. “Then, we had all the social and political unrest. As human beings, we don’t do well with uncertainty and not being in control. That’s where kindness comes in and a simple acknowledgement that this is hard.”
Don’t make it 2021 any harder with unrealistic New Year’s resolutions, either.
award@dispatch.com
@AllisonWard
The Link LonkJanuary 01, 2021 at 05:28PM
https://www.dispatch.com/story/lifestyle/health-fitness/2021/01/01/experts-say-go-easy-2021-new-years-resolutions-theyre-ok-even-skip/6539824002/
Go easy on New Year's resolutions in 2021, they're OK to even skip, experts say - The Columbus Dispatch
https://news.google.com/search?q=easy&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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