New Year, New Start

Hey everyone!

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2018! I had a blast in 2017 and I can’t wait to see what this year has in store. Each New Year, I set a few resolutions, even if I don’t always stick to them. I try to keep them in mind throughout the year, but sometimes you just forget, you know? I have written some for this year, and while I don’t expect to stick to all of them, I do think I’ll get through some of them at least.

My first resolution is to drink more water. I got a new water bottle for Christmas that isn’t going to leak everywhere like my old ones did, so I think it’s time to start stepping up my hydration game. I will take the water bottle with me when I go to uni and out and about and refill it if necessary. I used to have an app on my phone that reminded me to drink water, which was really helpful, and I think at that point I was the healthiest I’ve ever been, so I’ll definitely give that a go.

The next resolution I have on my list is to get back into Parkrun. In case you don’t know, Parkrun is a free, timed 5k run done every Saturday morning that I used to do a couple of years ago. It brought me a lot of happiness, especially if I got a PB, so I want to try and get back into that again. Also, I need to work off the weight I’ve accidentally put on over Christmas. It isn’t much, but it’ll help me to be more confident in myself.

My next resolution is to read more books. I read fourteen books last year, half of which were Harry Potter books, and most of the rest of them were for uni. I have a ton of books that have been on my to-read shelf since Christmas 2016, so I want to get into those. At the moment, I have my Goodreads Reading Challenge set at 15 books, which is only one more than last year (and tiny in comparison to some people I know), but goals can be changed if need be.

The next resolution I’ve set for myself is to maintain my GPA. It currently sits at a 5, in which 7 is the best and 1 is the worst. It's not the best GPA out there, but I don’t want to have it drop since I worked so hard to get it where it is. I kind of found my groove in the second semester of uni last year and I hope to continue that into this year. Who knows, maybe I’ll even improve my GPA!

Another resolution I have is to go to sleep earlier, or just get more sleep in general. At the moment, and throughout last year, my bedtime has been around 10pm, but I never actually fell asleep until well after 11pm from staring at my phone in the dark. In theory, my plan should be to charge my phone outside of my room so I don’t get tempted, but I have to have an alarm for early uni days, so I think my real plan is to stop using my phone before I turn off my lights, which should be at around 10 or 10:30pm depending on how much uni work I have.

My next resolution kind of ties in with the previous one and it is to limit my phone usage as much as I possibly can and maybe even do a mini detox. Currently, I have to put my phone on charge at least twice a day every day because I go on social media for, wait for it, four and a half hours a day (and yes, I went to Battery in Settings to figure that out). No one should be on social media for that long. That’s around a third of my waking hours spent on my phone, and that’s not even including games and the like. My plan will be to use my phone as a kind of reward system after I’ve done all of my tasks on my to-do list, or else I’ll just delete all my social media and live like a caveman for a week.

My final resolution on my list is to enter my writing into some competitions and journals. If you’ve been here a while you’ll know that I’m taking a Creative Writing course at university to improve my creative writing skills, and since I’ve honed them a bit since this time last year, I want to see if I can get published in a journal or win a prize for my writing. I think that will be really cool. It means that I’ll have to write a lot more than I have been doing, though, since practice makes perfect and all that jazz.

Have you set any resolutions for the New Year? Do you like mine?

Love, Nicky x