CbdMD : Setting Realistic Goals – Start Here | Stay Well...

It's a new year, and you are working toward a new you. Setting realistic goals and sticking to them can often feel like mind over matter, but with CBD products to help you meet your every goal, and with these tips, you can be well on your way to achieving your new health and wellness goals for the year.

Today, we'll demonstrate:

• How to set realistic goals for your health and wellness.
• Why it can be so hard to change your habits.
• How to achieve a goal successfully, plus goal-setting examples.
• The keys to achieving your goals with confidence.
• How to use CBD products for all your health and wellness goals and see more success.

As you set realistic goals for your year, you need a plan for how to achieve them. While living a healthy lifestyle is often at the heart of new goals, we know there are other factors to success: determination, a healthy mindset, and a good support system, which is where CBD comes into the conversation.

Setting Realistic Goals for Your New Year

The new year often begins with well-meaning lists: be more physically active, lose weight, find improved mental health, develop better eating habits, cut down on foods high in saturated fat, eat more fruits and vegetables or more green vegetables, focus on the food groups, cut down on highly processed foods or foods with added sugar to reach and maintain a healthy weight, and more likely than not a new commitment to hit the gym.

You start thinking about heart disease and worry that you need to make some serious changes in your life to stay healthy for yourself, your family, and for all the things you want to get out into the world and do - like travel or take up a new hobby or buy that first home.

These are all smart goals, but without setting realistic goals and putting an actionable plan in place, and without the added help of a good support system, your new lifestyle could quickly turn into short-term goals that fall away as the months of the new year tick by.

Start Small: Set Realistic Goals

Author and motivational speaker Tessa Koller gives some of her expert advice in Make These 17 Health Goals Into Daily Habits for Better Overall Wellness, reminding us of a few key points to remember when setting your goals to change your daily habits:

• New habits can take up to 60 days to "make them stick." (Notice how around February each year gym attendance declines?)
• It can be easier to set goals that you can work into your current lifestyle. This "start small" method can help you build smaller habits that add up to bigger lifestyle changes.
• Koller also reminds us to get good sleep - as good sleep can be foundational for overall improved health. She reminds us that "Optimal health should always be your desired outcome."

Keep your goals small and simple, or if you plan a larger goal - like running a marathon this year - then break down your goal into smaller steps that are easier to reach. Each of these smaller "wins" will help to propel you toward your larger goal.

Write Down Your Plan

There is psychology behind why you see calendars, planners, organizing apps, and all those sparkly notebooks full of checklists, journal prompts, and yes, stickers, all surfacing around the beginning of the year. It is because there is real psychology behind why people begin writing things down and making those lists, right about the same time they are planning goals for the year - it's because writing things down actually helps us to achieve more success.

Forbes explains that this works in two ways: external storage and encoding. In terms of external storage, think of this as an outer written account of your plans, which functions as a visual reminder and keeps you on track. In terms of encoding, think of your written goals as the "the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain's hippocampus where they're analyzed." In this way, writing down our goals helps to retrain the brain to think of something new and help us to make decisions that will move us toward those goals.

So, whatever your goals - write them down. Post them where you can see them each day. It helps to remember that there are going to be days when you fail. Make a plan to not dwell on those failures but to get up the next day, read over your goals, and start again.

Why Is It So Hard to Change Habits?

There is real science behind habit formation, and when you aim to change a habit, you are working against the muscle memory of every cell in your body. Think of all the small things you do each day the exact same way, day after day: your routines each morning, how you prepare the spot where you will eat your lunch, those last few things you do before you fall asleep. Those habits are stored as internal memory in your mind and body.

Psychology

We often repeat similar behavior patterns each day because it makes us feel a sense of control, and it makes us feel safe. For a new habit to "stick", we have to work against what makes us feel most comfortable, and for many people, no matter how determined, this can be difficult or even scary new territory.

Your internal messages can also make it harder to make new and healthier choices for yourself. These old internal messages, ones that are no longer serving you, can be "rewired" within your mind. For one, therapy can help, and for another, mantras that retrain your thinking can help you to focus on the positive, and that new and healthier you that you've always wanted to be.

Turn: I can't do this. Into: Let's do this!

Turn: I don't deserve to be happy.

Into: Every effort I make is a win! I am strong, I am powerful, I am worth it!

Repeat your mantras when the messaging in your mind threatens to derail your efforts. If you are experiencing mental health roadblocks that are holding you back, talk to your doctor about your struggles. They can recommend a personal mental health plan for you that can build the support system you need to break out of the rut of negative self-talk or manage mental health challenges that make it harder for you to reach your goals.

Your Brain

There's a whole lot of neuroscience stuff involved in changing a habit, related to how we learn, interpret information, and make decisions. You may find that learning a little more about how all this works can help to empower you and at least make you feel a little less guilty when you experience setbacks.

For example: In Psychology Today, Diana Hill, Ph.D. uses a familiar example to demonstrate how hard it can be to change the hardwiring of a bad habit in our brain. Think of when you feel mentally bored or uncomfortable and how quickly that turns into "check the computer, check the phone, check it all over again and again." This is a great example of using a behavior to try to make yourself feel better, even though the behavior is not productive nor does it usually relieve the core problem.

Hill describes this behavior as experiential avoidance. The cycle is: trigger → behavior → results. It may help you to understand how this cycle works and to focus your mind heavily on the results (and less on the triggers that will come): reminding yourself each day that your new habits, new behaviors, new choices, will create different results - and that these results are not only desirable but important to you. In this way, you can help to keep yourself motivated to press toward developing new habits.

CBD Products to Help You Reach Your Goals

You may wonder why CBD is a part of this conversation about setting realistic goals and achieving them. This is because CBD products offer wellness support when you really need it. We've begun a "Start Here | Stay Well" wellness campaign, which isn't just for the new year but to help support your efforts all year in creating the new you that you've always envisioned.

Below, we take a look at realistic goals for fitness, mental health, and overall life improvement, and recommend the best CBD support products for each.

CBD Products for Fitness Goals

CBD is making a huge impact in the athletic community. Just take a look at these professional athletes who now dedicate part of their lives to sharing their positive experiences with CBD. Masters champion Bubba Watson, MMA fighter Daniel Cormier, freestyle motocross professional Vicki Golden, bodybuilder James "Flex" Lewis, surfer Nathan Florence, and crossfit athlete Annie Thorisdottir are just a few of the athletes who have joined cbdMD to do more, be more, and achieve more with CBD.

Athlete or couch-champion, we all want to have better health. That may begin with goals such as these:

Examples of realistic goals:

• Run a race you've been wanting to enter.
• Establish a daily yoga routine.
• Lose some weight or change your diet.
• Quit smoking.
• Get in more fresh air/spend more time outdoors.

Whether you are just getting started or if you are looking to improve your athletic performance, there are a few ways CBD can be an active supporter on your team.

• The entourage effect: Using a combination of cannabinoids creates what is called the entourage effect. Cannabinoids work together synergistically to provide enhanced benefits for your overall health and wellness. CBD full spectrum tinctures are a great place to start, taken twice daily without fail, to keep that entourage effect working for you.
• CBD helps your sleep, crucial sleep that your body needs to heal itself.
• Curcumin CBD Oil Capsules, with curcumin + CBD + 15 mg BioPerine can help to keep you on track with all your fitness goals for the year.
• Get some CBD topical products for your gym bag to help with the aches and pains of pushing your body. Follow-up with a CBD soothing bath salts with CBD plus arnica, for a soaking bath, to soothe muscles.

CBD Products for Mental Health Goals

Many people make mental health goals for the year. Though these goals are a little more open-ended, generalized, or harder to get to a "finish line," they are no less important than the ones we set for our physical bodies.

Examples of realistic goals:

• Manage stress.
• Work on mindfulness, wellness, and inner calm.
• Live more positively or with more gratitude.
• Improve focus or job performance.
• Stop ruminating or worrying over small things.
• Read more or spend more time relaxing.

Recommended products:

1. Begin with a broad spectrum CBD tincture or a full spectrum CBD tincture to take twice daily for overall wellness and a greater sense of calm.
2. Try a CBD sleep aid to improve your quality of sleep.
3. Consider CBD stress helpers to help manage your body's responses to daily stress.
4. Use CBD topicals for stress-related aches and pains.
5. Reward yourself with CBD bath bombs to soak away the stress and get in that reading time.

CBD Products for General Wellness and Personal Goals

Generalized wellness goals can also help to improve your quality of life. Here are a few common ones and what CBD products can offer the most support:

Examples of realistic goals:

• Get better sleep.
• Manage daily aches and pains.
• Feel better or look better.
• Active goals like learning a new hobby, travel, or spending more time outdoors.

Recommended products:

1. Begin with a CBD tincture or CBD softgel daily regimen to support your general health and wellness, and to improve the quality of your sleep, which helps your health in a myriad of ways.
2. Use CBD Immune Boost Gummies to support a healthy immune system.
3. Self-care often begins with how we care for our skin. Try the new CBD skin care botanicals for that radiant skin you've always wanted.

Whatever Your Goals for the New Year - CBD Can Help!

Start Here | Stay Well isn't just a campaign slogan or a fancy phrase that looks good on a T-shirt. It's the best way we can explain what it's like to start a CBD journey toward improved health and wellness. It's the culmination of so many people just like you who tell us every day what's going on in their lives and how CBD has helped them to make changes and generate positive forward momentum. It begins with setting those realistic goals, yes, but then, it's in the little decisions along the way that we see true change that lasts. Share your goals with us on Twitter or Facebook and tell us how you're doing!