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Georgia — There has possibly been a chance that Happy #WorldHealthEsteemMonth has surfaced on your social feed. This newly established month was determined to help people learn how to appreciate our improvements and work toward New Year's resolutions.
Usually, when New Year's resolutions cross the mind, goal setting and achieving new accomplishments set for the year is what is pictured. How about self-reflecting on how far you have come and realizing that the mindset is the ultimate shape shifter of appreciating who you are now? That appreciation of how far you have come and recognizing that accepting yourself is a significant step toward making improvements for the foreseeable future.
Working on making the most out of World Health Esteem Month begins with understanding what improvements may mean to you and how those ideal goals can be achieved. Studies have proven that writing down information increases memory retention in mind; therefore, applying the retention technique to recording one's goals can heighten accountability for tracking improvements.
These improvements toward shifting that mindset from wanting to improve healthy eating habits due to discomfort with body image to striving to commit to healthy eating habits because of wanting to maintain nutritional standards will lead to stable confidence from an appreciative place. Writing down goals and recording them in a physical journal is a type of neural encoding that permits retention inside the state of mind. It can help people's self-esteem increase as they check off each resolution by committing to even minor lifestyle adjustments.
Entering the new year, recalling some attempts but still needing to achieve resolutions fully can make anyone experience discouragement because of feeling like a failure if one does not reach every milestone. That is the opposite of what World Health Esteem Month is focused on and meant for.
There are ways to go about World Health Esteem Month, beginning with setting a routine on when to rise in the morning, eat, work, work out, and sleep. Then, keeping track of a post-work reflection journal or document. Maintaining a consistent routine and record of improvements will reveal how far you have come. A psychologist named Albert Bandura in 1997 argued that mastery experiences are one of the primary sources directly related to self-confidence, leading to increased self-esteem as we learn how to perform an activity successfully.
Ashleigh Ewald (she/her/hers) is a Georgia-based journalist who attends Oglethorpe University. Follow her on IG: @ashleighewaldofficial.
Edited by NaTyshca Pickett