The holidays are winding down, you start to relax, and suddenly someone asks, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”
Panic sets in. The pressure to come up with a resolution can be daunting. Decide on something too simple and you’re not challenging yourself. Choose something too difficult and you could be setting yourself up for failure.
Take a deep breath. Give yourself some grace. Rather than trying to make a huge transformation that seems overwhelming from the start and leads you to give up before you even give yourself a chance, consider making small changes, one at a time, that result in a big difference over time.
Let’s take the overall big goal of going non toxic. Breaking down this one resolution into smaller steps that you feel able to achieve will help you feel more accomplished, which in turn will motivate you to continue.
Here’s an example of how to break down that one big resolution:
- Get familiar with this handy list of ingredients to avoid in everyday (and every-once-in-a-while) products.
- Pick one or two ingredients to avoid to watch out for on ingredient labels to determine products you could eliminate from your daily routine. Fragrance and PEGs (polyethylene glycols) are unfortunately very common and widespread, so they make identifying harmful products easy — as soon as you see one of them on the label, you know it’s a toxic choice.
- Choose an area in your home to take inventory of and gather products in groups — skin care, hair care, laundry, etc. — that contain those ingredients to avoid.
- Toss any products with an expiration date that has already passed and replace them with non toxic products.
- Replace the remaining products one by one with safe, non toxic alternatives as they run out and you need to restock.
Once that area of your home is stocked with non toxic products, move on to another area. For instance, start with your bath/shower area and ensure you and your family are using safe bar soap, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, shave gel, deodorant, etc. Move to your bathroom sink to make sure hand soap, hand cream, and toothpaste are safe. Move to your skin care and makeup area, then under the sink where you keep cleaning products, then your hair care products, and so on.
Your Pure Haven Consultant is an excellent non toxic product guide, helpful for this particular resolution. Reach out for the very best in non toxic products made from only safe, effective ingredients.
Here’s to a happy, healthy, non toxic New Year!