Everyday Habits To help create a better you

Every year, millions of Americans ring in the New Year with a list of things they want to change about themselves in the following year. The majority of these resolutions have to do with leading a better, healthier life in some way. Losing weight, eating better or exercising/ getting in shape consistently top the list. Also consistent, however, is the fact that year after year, less than 10% of people report feeling they accomplished their goals and stuck to their resolutions. While there are a number of different reasons why this probably happens, the biggest one is probably simply that when setting a goal for an entire year, it's easy to get swept away in grandiose plans. The reality is that small, daily changes have a far greater potential to become habits and patterns that stand a far greater chance of having success in helping creating a better you. Here are 3 great daily habits to get into to help become a better you.

1. Start your day with a self-pep talk

Perhaps one of the most destructive behaviors we can engage in is negative self-talk. While you can certainly start your day with a motivational podcast, ultimately you will never have a more powerful advocate than yourself. A podcast can certainly motivate and inspire you, but it will ultimately fall flat if all you do is turn around and sabotage yourself with negative self-talk. While it may seem awkward at first, perhaps one of the very best things you can do for yourself is to start your day by looking in the mirror and telling yourself how much you believe in your own potential.

2. Take care of your appearance

Taking care of your appearance doesn't necessarily mean always being dressed to the nines or never leaving your house without a full face of makeup. It also doesn't mean you never wear your most comfortable pair of old hole-y sweats around the house. What it does mean is investing just a bit of time every day in your own physical body.

People who are depressed often have little interest in self-care, but it's hard to determine what comes first, the chicken or the egg. did they lose interest in self-care as a result of being depressed or did they become depressed as a result of slowly letting go of self-care? While one or the other may not necessarily have come first, it does seem clear good emotional health and good self-care go hand-in-hand.

Self-care can be as simple as shaving your legs every day because it makes you feel better or giving yourself a hair oil treatment, manicure or pedicure just because it's something you enjoy. The best self-care is not that which you feel obligated to do such as wearing makeup or pantyhose, it's that which makes you feel better about yourself.

3. Mind your emotions

In a world that is obsessed with caring for, maintaining and even healing the physical body, the importance of good emotional health is often overlooked or even dismissed. In fact, we don't even call it emotional health, we call it mental health, as if there is something wrong with experiencing emotion. Not only is there nothing wrong with experiencing emotion, but learning to pay attention to what you are feeling can go a long way towards helping you experience better health all around.

Anger, stress and worry are all emotions that can have a strongly detrimental effect on our physical health. All too often, people are taught to pay no mind to their emotions as if they don't matter. In many cases, this means we simply end up burying our emotions rather than sorting through them and dealing with them. In some cases, people simply don't have the tools and resources to even deal with their emotions even if they could identify what they are, so they just simply deny, ignore or bury them instead.

This can sometimes lead to them becoming a pressure-cooker just waiting to explode. In other cases, those buried emotions can sometimes literally eat them alive from the inside out, in the form of ulcers, heart disease and any other number of physical ailments. Finding daily ways to explore and address emotions like anger, stress or even depression can go a long way towards making sure you are managing them rather than them owning you.