Start Fresh

Sometimes, you just need to hit the reset. Life gets dull, breakups happen, and jobs get tough. Whether you're interested in learning to unwind and recalibrate your engines after a rough day, a tough week, or a terrible month, you can learn to make little changes in your life that will help you get a fresh start, and a new lease.

Steps

Hitting Reset on Life

  1. Try a change of scenery. After a while, seeing the same old sights and same old faces can start to drag you down. Sometimes, we need a little bit more stimulation, and making a move, long or short, can fit the bill. Psychologist Susan Clayton says that where you live, and how you define your home, is part of your self-definition.[1] Meaning that, if you're tired of where you are, you're tired of how you're living.
    • It can be financially difficult or impractical to uproot yourself and move to a different state, or a different country, but you an try making a jump to a new neighborhood, to get a different angle on your city. Switch roommates.
    • Alternatively, try doing a thorough re-arrangement or cleaning job in your house as it is. If it looks new, it'll feel new.
  2. Take more breaks. Learning to unpack the psychological burden you carry throughout the day is absolutely essential to living a happy, healthy existence. It's important to take frequent breaks throughout the day, whether you're doing physical work or mental work, to give yourself the change to come back to that work with fresh eyes. Breaks help you stay on task and maintain schedules.
    • Try taking a break every 50-90 minutes to stay on schedule, for about 10-20 minutes. Studies show that this length of break is the most effective at keeping you on task, more so than trying to work through without taking any breaks at all.[2]
  3. Exercise more. Getting exercise has mood-enhancing and anxiety-preventing qualities, and recent studies reveal that people who exercise more are more readily equipped to deal with the stresses and anxieties of everyday life.[3] It's also a great way to hit the reset after a particularly stressful day or week. Sweat it out instead of stressing over it.
  4. Change your appearance. Making subtle or significant changes in your appearance can have a big effect on the way you perceive yourself and the way you carry yourself, and the way you're perceived by others, especially in the workplace.[4] Dress the way you want to be perceived by others.
    • While it's easy to suggest that dressing up more will give you a more trustworthy and reliable affect[5] it's just as important to look how you want to be perceived, to get a fresh outlook on your life.
    • Maybe you don't want to look reliable. Get a tattoo, or hook yourself up with a raggedy leather jacket to surprise your friends. Start fresh by embracing the look you admire.
  5. Cancel your social networking accounts for a while. These days, much of the way we think about other people and ourselves has to do with our presence online. Hitting reset on your social networking accounts might require deleting or suspending them temporarily, to give yourself a break, and recalibrate your online presence.
    • Delete everything you don't want online and change your passwords. Make everything slightly different, so it'll feel new if and when you decide to restart.
    • Start things up again when you're ready, using a new user name, or a slightly different one, to pick new friends. Start a new e-mail address to start a new account, if necessary.
    • Stay off, if you find yourself able to cope without checking your Facebook feed all the time.
  6. Sleep it off. Don't neglect the psychological benefit of a good night of sleep on your ability to recalibrate and get a fresh start on things. Sleep deprivation affects your cognitive function significantly, which can have adverse affects on your mood, your ability to perform simple tasks effectively, and your overall physical health and well-being.[6] If you want to feel better about each new day, make sure you get enough rest between those days.
  7. Consider more drastic changes. Want to disappear completely? If you're really desperate for a reset, more significant life changes may be in order. Check out the following wikiHows to learn how to switch things around in drastic ways:
  8. Try to be realistic about your situation. In a famous study performed on Californians and Nebraskans, both groups concluded that Californians must have a higher happiness index, because the weather was better. The catch was, both groups recorded identical happiness scores.[7] The grass may always seem greener, but we tend to overemphasize the effect of superficial things like weather and geography on our happiness. The biggest thing to change if you want a fresh start is yourself.

Getting Over a Bad Relationship

  1. Get rid of mementos. If you want a fresh start after a breakup, get rid of all the things that will remind you of your ex. There's little sense in keeping mementos of the good times, because they'll be more likely to remind you of the loss in the long run. If you have old photographs, mementos and trinkets from your relationship, you'll be able to get over that relationship and start fresh a whole lot faster the sooner you get rid of that stuff.
    • Make it a ritual. Take all those photos and delete them, one by one. Burn the letters in the backyard, saying, "Be gone, jerk" with every one.
  2. Think it over, but don't obsess. It's good to take some time to reflect after a break-up, to allow yourself to figure out what went wrong, and figure out what you could do better next time. It's good to do this, but not to let it go so far that it becomes an obsession. If you find yourself unable to think about anything but your ex, it's important to get moving on and looking forward.
    • If you find yourself obsessing, or rethinking the break-up, or even wanting to rekindle that flame, train yourself to remember something negative. Think of all the things you dislike about your partner. You won't be obsessing over them for long, if you do that.
  3. Keep your distance. Don't give yourself the opportunity to rethink the decision to break up. A fresh start means you need to avoid your old partner's hangouts and do everything it takes to not see this person, think about this person, or do things you did with this person. Make significant changes, emotionally and physically, to recalibrate your life, post-breakup.
    • Don't regress. No reconsidering the decision. Relationships that end once fail more often than they succeed.[8]
  4. Lean on your friends. Spend time with the people you still care about, and who care about you. Don't be afraid to talk about it, or to get together and rip on your ex. Laugh it off together and support each other.
    • If you and your partner had many of the same friends, don't be afraid to stake your claim and stand up for yourself. You don't need to cower in your room and avoid the situation because you're afraid of seeing your ex, or because you're worried about negotiating that tangled web.
    • At the same time, it's important to recognize when friendships might be over as well. If a friendship was situational, and that situation had to do with your relationship that's now over, don't be afraid of moving on and making new friends.
  5. Change something that has nothing to do with your partner. Do something by yourself, something that your ex may have disapproved of, or something that your ex wouldn't have gone in for. Take a flamenco class, or start doing Cross-Fit, or play your favorite music super-loud, first thing in the morning. Get a crazy haircut. Celebrate your singleness with a new activity.
    • Think of something that your partner held back in you. If you never had the time to work on your creative projects, because your partner was always criticizing, or distracting you, let yourself be creative again. Throw yourself into some kind of project that would have been impossible with your partner.
  6. Wait a while before dating again. While jumping into a new relationship might seem like a fast-track to a fresh start, it's loaded with the potential for sour emotions and trouble. Don't bring the baggage of that relationship into someone else's life. Depending on how long your relationship was, you may need a couple weeks, or even a couple months, to really get over things.
    • If you find something you think you're genuinely compatible with, and you think you may be able to be with them, without staying focused on comparing it to your old relationship, that's how you know you're ready to start again.

Switching Careers

  1. Visualize your ideal day. If you think making a career shift might help you get a fresh start, try some simple visualization exercises to figure out what might make you happier. Focus on the following prompts to Try to figure out what you want:
    • What would your perfect day consist of?
    • How do you make money? What are you responsibilities?
    • What qualifications do you need to get this job?
    • Is it important for you to have a job with "status"?
    • How much do you make?
    • Where do you live? How do you live?
    • Who do you work with? In what capacity?
  2. Try taking a personality test. If you struggle to figure out what it is that you want, it's a good idea to take a pre-employment testing or personality test. While these aren't foolproof, or rigid, they might be able to clue you in to jobs that would fit in well with your personality traits, and help you to narrow down your search. It's a good way for collecting some ideas.
    • One of the most popular personality tests is the Jung Typology Profiler Workplace (JTPW) personality test. Lots of other types of personality tests can be found here.
  3. Talk to a career counsellor. Career counsellors are easy to come by in most medium-sized towns, and can help you find work and translate your skills into employment for modest fees. If you feel like a change would do you good, but you can't figure out what to change to, or how, a career counselor can be an excellent guide.
  4. Re-evaluate your priorities. Lots of people are brought up to think that the only option is to aim at an abstract greatness, ending up studying a subject in college they didn't care about, and floundering in a job they hate, or struggling to find anything at all. Careers in manufacturing and skill-based trade labor, the type of which you often don't learn in school, are an honorable and honest line of work that's often marginalized. With a few years of training, you can can make good money doing any of the following:

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/the-psychology-of-home-why-where-you-live-means-so-much/249800/
  2. ↑ http://www.inc.com/neil-patel/when-how-and-how-often-to-take-a-break.html
  3. ↑ http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/12/exercise.aspx
  4. ↑ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hrdq.1208/abstract
  5. ↑ http://lifehacker.com/5992874/the-psychology-behind-how-clothing-influences-how-people-see-you-at-work
  6. ↑ http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/matters/consequences/sleep-performance-and-public-safety
  7. ↑ http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/08/change-your-life-fresh-start
  8. ↑ http://life.familyeducation.com/divorce/legal-separation/45521.html

Tips

  • This would be very good for New Year's Day/Eve.

Related Articles

Retrieved from "https://kipkis.com/index.php?title=Start_Fresh&oldid=283034"