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New Year Resolutions for Students & Learners

22nd Dec 2023

Whether you are set to embark on your learning journey in the New Year or whether you are someone who has already started, one thing is for sure, student life and learning can certainly be a mix of emotions, from feeling stress and pressure to feelings of success and having accomplished something great.

What ahead of the New Year can we consider when looking at managing student life and how can those feelings of pressure, stress and overwhelm be managed and supported making the journey of a student the most healthy and happy journey it can be

 

Getting Organised

Getting organised, is different for everyone and a super personal process. Wall Calendars, Paper Diary’s, and our Phone all play a role and can help remind us about our up-and-coming tasks, think about using different organisational tools which suit you best and help keep you most organised.

Notebooks, Labels, Colour Coded Folders can also form part of how we organise ourselves. The use of additional organisation materials like these can really help balance out the time we spend on our technology devices especially when our learning is delivered online.

Supporting Your Wellbeing

  • Staying aware of how important Self Care activities are and setting reminders to make these activities happen daily or weekly.
  • Knowing who you can reach out and call when you are perhaps starting to feel stressed, under pressure or overwhelmed.
  • Keeping a Wellness / Wellbeing Journal or Notebook can help you to remember that you need to take care of yourself.
  • Small changes such as the ones above could as we move ever closer to a New Year, be defined as making a “New Years Resolution”.
  • Whilst New Years Resolutions are a way of approaching change, the pressure a student can put on themselves at the beginning of a New Year to succeed, to fully commit and not fail, can turn what should be a happy, uplifting, and positive process into a stressful, overwhelming, and negative one.
  • These feelings can bread self-doubt and then contribute to people losing momentum and giving up or feeling like they cannot do it.

It is important to recognise and consider that many people are tired in January following the Christmas Period and Festivities and in January many are still navigating the Winter Blues

Supporting your Mental Health this Winter - Cavity Dental Staff Agency

It could also be possible that extra support is needed, and this can be found here through Cavity Training’s Tutors, Assessors, or the Health & Wellbeing Team.

The first step is to reach out as soon as possible. Help is always here.

Once any problems, blocks or barriers are identified, it is then the appropriate interventions / support can be put in place. It can be surprising how even just a small adjustment or intervention can really help a student move forward and go onto to reach their full potential.

We can always help ourselves by considering and adopting a much kinder and more compassionate way to approach our learning.

Recognising in advance there could well be highs and lows as you embark on your learning journey and thinking ahead how you could perhaps deal with those challenging moments when they arise, can give you a plan to work with ahead of time.

Whilst we don’t want to live planning, for every possible eventuality, understanding in advance ways how we can perhaps manage difficult and challenging moments, can just help us have the tools and mindset so we can be kinder and more compassionate to ourself and regulate our emotions in a healthier way when we possibly encounter difficult moments in our learning journey

Many people worry about failure and giving up something they started or not doing their absolute best, and this can be a huge barrier to even attempting something in the first place and can be one of the reasons for when procrastination creeps in

The truth is failure is very normal part of life for those who are striving to achieve something and this is especially true for students

Failure if we are to even call it that, is one of the most human acts we can experience in life and without it we can very rarely learn and grow to our full potential.

With that in mind, we should ahead of the New Year look to move forward and embrace failure and not fear it and can anything ever truly be defined as failure, isn’t everything in life whether we succeed the first second or third time of trying, all just a process of understanding, learning and adapting, the important thing is we do keep trying and we don’t give up unless giving up really is the right decision at that time

If for some reason you have not achieved your desired outcome / result on a particular piece of work or assessment, the worst-case scenario is you would have to do that element again. Your Tutor Assessor and The Health & Wellbeing Team can always be there to support you through that process.

Approaching change in a more relaxed and balanced mindset and keeping in mind that being kind and compassionate to yourself and incorporating good self-care routines can really help support you in sustaining change in a happier and healthy way opposed to putting yourself under so much pressure at the start of the year a message that is super important for those who are studying.

The Mental health Foundation wrote an article in 2021 during the Pandemic which looked at:

“New Year's resolutions and how they can be fuelled by unhelpful self-criticism. ‘A festival of finding ways in which we are not enough’. So, instead we propose that you try setting a theme”.

You can explore this article below and read some additional content which helps reframe the traditional thought process of New Years Resolutions into a more healthy and compassionate regard taking away the pressure a New Years Resolution can sometimes bring. Support information is also available via our Cavity Support Resource Hub by following the link below

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/blogs/set-theme-yourself-new-year

https://www.youngminds.org.uk/young-person/blog/a-different-kind-of-new-year-s-resolution/

https://nationalcounsellingsociety.org/blog/posts/beating-new-years-resolution-pressure

Health & Wellbeing Resources Archive - Cavity Dental Staff Agency