24 New Year's Health Resolutions for Your Healthiest Year Yet
Updated December 7, 2023.
Another year has come and gone, which means it’s time to create intentions for the upcoming year ahead. And there’s no better time than the present to take inventory of the health resolutions to better care for your well-being in 2024. By eliminating stressors, practicing self-care, and improving your mental and physical health, you can be a proactive participant in your health and wellness to make 2024 your healthiest year yet.
Explore 24 New Year’s health resolutions for bettering your mind, body, and spirit that you make your own, or use as inspiration for what your health resolutions might look like for 2024 and beyond.
1. Move Your Body for 30 Minutes, 3 Days a Week
Staying active can boost your energy levels, improve your mood, control your weight, and promote better sleep. Aim for 30 minutes of aerobic activity at least three days per week. If you’re strapped for time, you can break it up throughout the day. For example, get your heart rate up for 10 minutes before work, 10 minutes during your lunch break, and 10 minutes after work. This can look like any activity that you enjoy and gets your heart pumping — like a lunchtime walk, stretches during a cameras-off meeting, or yoga before bed. This can look like any activity that you enjoy and gets your heart pumping — like a lunchtime walk, stretches during a cameras-off meeting, or yoga before bed.
2. Be Proactive About Your Health
Now, you can get access to fast, easy telehealth visits through Everlywell! Licensed clinicians make it simple for you to address your health needs with high-quality care, prescriptions, and recommendations — all through video calls. Your provider will ask questions to learn about your symptoms, health concerns, and goals. They will work with you to create an actionable, personalized care plan that may include lab testing, one-time prescriptions, and lifestyle recommendations.
Everlywell is also making it easier than ever to invest in your wellness year-round. Why settle for once-a-year (or fewer) lab tests when you can regularly get insight into your health with at-home lab tests? Whether you aren’t sure what aspect of your health you want to prioritize, or if you want more knowledge about your overall wellness, you can stay up to date with an Everlywell at-home lab test membership. Here's how it works:
- Pay $39/month
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You can learn more about Virtual Care Visits here or get more information about the Everlywell+ membership here.
3. Create a Nightly Routine That Helps You Sleep
We all know the effects that a poor night’s sleep can have on your day. Approximately 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep problems — so if you’re not getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep each night, consider finding ways to improve your quality and quantity of sleep.
Stress is one of the main culprits that can inhibit our ability to unwind at the end of each day and ease into a restful sleep. Finding ways to make a nightly routine that reduces your stress at night can improve your sleep quality. Find what nighttime stress-relievers you can incorporate into your nightly routine, such as yoga, deep breathing exercises, a warm bath, aromatherapy, or unplugging from electronics.
4. Organize Your Home
Out with the old and in with the new year! A common resolution is to clean and organize, and it’s no wonder why it’s so popular — living in a clean, organized, and inspiring space can help you live and feel better throughout the year. Clearing out unused items within your space is a great place to start, or by making it a goal to declutter and reorganize one space in your home each week.
Decluttering can help ease anxious feelings and cultivate a happy and healthy environment. This can also help prevent certain allergens, like dust and dander, from building up in your home and causing unwanted symptoms, like watery eyes or sneezing.
5. Incorporate Gut-Friendly Foods Into Meals
Your gut houses trillions of bacteria, which carry out vital roles for keeping your body functioning properly. To fuel the healthy bacteria in your gut, a diet full of dietary fibers, prebiotics and probiotics is important. These can often be found in fermented foods, such as yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, kefir, and kombucha.
Making it a resolution to take care of your gut can not only help with gut-based issues, like bloating or constipation, but can help promote overall health. Studies suggest that impaired gut health plays a part in low-grade systemic inflammation, which is a key risk factor for heart disease.
If you're experiencing stomach discomfort you believe may be related to food, our Food Sensitivity Test measures your body's immune response to 96 everyday foods to help guide a two-part elimination diet.
6. Drink Water With Every Meal
If your resolution is as simple as “drink more water,” you’re making a bigger health resolution than you may realize. Dehydration can lower energy levels and even affect brain function, so it’s important to ensure you’re drinking enough water each day.
A few easy ways to up your daily water intake include:
- Getting a water bottle with a straw that you keep near you while you work, work out, and eat
- Drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning
- Replacing soda and juice in your fridge with flavored sparkling water
- Infusing water with fresh herbs or fruit for natural sweetness and flavor
- Setting a goal to drink two glasses of water with every meal
7. Cut Back on Processed and Added Sugars
Many people make their resolution something broad like “eat better,” but narrowing it down to something more specific, like watching your sugar intake, can help you make strides in your health journey. Limiting added sugars from both food and beverages in your diet is important for your overall health, as added sugars can contribute to an elevated risk for certain chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
Consider making your resolution to experiment with temporarily removing or limiting sugar from your diet. To do this, focus on whole foods like fruits, vegetables, lean meats, fish, nuts, and unprocessed foods. You can also replace table and processed sugars with natural sugar substitutes such as whole fruit, xylitol, stevia, erythritol, or monk fruit. If you have a sweet tooth you just can’t kick, try replacing nightly desserts with naturally sweet foods such as dates, smoothies, or frozen yogurt. Keep in mind some smoothies and frozen yogurt may have added sugars depending on brand and what's in them.
8. Find Your Version of Self-Care
Consider dedicating time each day for self-care, no matter what this looks like to you. This could mean carving out time to journal before work, meditating before bed, or spend a night by yourself with no plans.
The important aspect of self-care is to make it an activity that you enjoy, and one that will benefit your mental, physical, and/or emotional health (bonus if it hits on all three).
9. Spend Time Outside Each Day
Some New Year’s resolutions focus on big-picture goals or life changes, and others can be as simple as getting outside more often. Spending time outdoors, like going for walks, hiking, or just being around nature, can lead to significant health benefits like boosted mood and improved energy levels; plus, exposure to the sun helps your body produce vitamin D.
Dedicating time for getting out of the house and enjoying the fresh air can help lift your spirits, especially if you work from home and don’t have regular times to leave the house.
10. Pre-Schedule Health Check-ins and Appointments
In our current climate, maintaining your health and wellness is critical. Though it may not be the most glamorous resolution, making a commitment to schedule all of your important health appointments is a relatively easy way to prioritize your wellness going into the new year.
This doesn’t mean you need to get every appointment scheduled for January 1 — rather, you could pre-schedule your yearly gynecologist visit, dental exam, and physical for the coming months.
Once the appointments are scheduled, use our health and appointment stickers in your planner, on your calendar, or anywhere else you keep track of important dates.
Pre-planning can give you the peace of mind that you’re doing at least one thing to prioritize your health and care for yourself, especially if you live a busy lifestyle and find that health appointments are the things often taking a back seat to other commitments.
You can also schedule out time for taking an at-home health test that makes it easy to check in on various areas of your health and wellness, such as your thyroid, heart health, and more.
11. Additional Healthy Resolutions for 2024
When adopting new health resolutions or goals for the new year, the most important thing is to make them work for you and your body. Remember that health doesn’t mean just physical health, so health resolutions can be anything that involves nourishing your mind and internal health, as well as physical health.
Below are a few other health resolutions, tips, and intentions to consider adopting this year:
- Take your vitamins and supplements
- Make time for a hobby every week
- Incorporate fruits and vegetables into each meal
- Minimize your screen time
- Wear sunscreen/SPF every day
- Replace TV before bed with reading
- Meditate for 10 minutes a day
- Create a morning routine to structure your day
- Get outside and take one walk a day
- Minimize your intake of processed foods
- Practice affirmations in the mirror every day
- Get a standing desk or sit less throughout the workday
- Utilize sick days as mental health days, as needed
Remember, these are meant to improve your health and wellness, so the last thing you want to do is stress yourself out. Taking gradual steps for your health and focusing on progress over perfection is how you’ll create healthy habits — not just for this year, but for many years to come.
When beginning the new year, we encourage you to see this as an opportunity to improve yourself and set healthy intentions to improve all areas of your life. Look at the fresh slate of a new year as a chance to recommit yourself to a healthy lifestyle.