Get the Most Out of Your New Year Practices!

Do you want to get the most out of any New Year detox, exercise resolution, or any other goal? Patience and kindness for yourself is the way. I know, it’s not big and flashy, but it is the way to be the most successful and satisfied with your progress.  

Are you joining some of us at Partnered Healing for a gentle New Year detox/cleanse? Last week we shared via email the information and invitation to join a gentle detox. If you decided to take part in that, congratulations on taking a healthy step into 2026! If you decided not to, congratulations on recognizing when “No” is the correct answer for your individual Soul and Body! 

So that you can have the best outcome possible with any practices you are undertaking, we need to tend to your nervous system, a major player in your level of success and satisfaction.

I want to invite all of you to check in on how you are speaking to yourself about this cleanse ritual or any other New Year practices you may be doing right now. Does that inner dialogue run inherently positive? Are you cheerleading for yourself? I’m guessing mostly not. Not because I think you are failing, but because I know how our cultural conditioning and how the nervous system generally work. 

When we set up a new plan for anything, no matter how awesome it is, our brains tend to read that two ways:

1) I am not good enough as I am

2) New things are scary

Both of these send an actual red flag danger sign to your nervous system leading to some degree of activation of the fight/flight/freeze/fawn/faint response. 

The nervous system’s response to doing something new is resistance. 

It actually thinks it is keeping you safe by keeping you away from accomplishing what you want to accomplish because that thing is new and different. It believes you are in danger from new and different things. The brain will always choose familiar over unfamiliar, even if the familiar is not that good. Please just stop and think about this for a moment. Your brilliant and overworked nervous system is tasked with keeping you safe and alive but so much of what it is trying to protect you against are things you want to see in your life. This is the push/pull nature of human personal growth. 

So what do we do about this? We show our nervous systems we are safe through observation, gentleness, and regulation while also doing the new thing. This will help you stay calm and regulated, get the most biological health benefits out of your new practice, and develop new neural pathways for mental resilience.

Observation

Recognize when your self-talk becomes critical or negative, conveying messages that you are not good enough as you are, that you are not trying hard enough, that you are failing, angry, frustrated, or want to give up. Also observe thoughts like you don’t have enough time, enough support, or enough resources to accomplish what you want to do. This is a sneaky form of resistance. 

Gentleness

Use gentleness with yourself and your body. Do you need to modify a protocol so that you don’t give up, so that you don’t hate it, so that it feels more gentle to your body? Modification is wildly undervalued. We often think the only right way to do something is to do it the way it is prescribed. In fact the only right way to do something is to do it the way that feels best for your body and nervous system. 

Regulation 

There are a number of things out there touted to support your nervous system but the following two options are life-long tools for regulation, peace, presence, and vitality. 

That’s right. These things will help you in every aspect of your life, not just New Year resolutions. 

Journalspeak is a practice developed by Nicole Sachs in which you use writing or typing to pour out the energy of emotions that build up over time in your experience. This is particularly useful during a detox or cleanse because as the body begins to detox at a cellular level, many emotions start to rise. I encourage you to take the opportunity to pour out the anger, shame, despair, grief, and fear that can rise with any detox, and frankly are present in humans on any given day simply because we are humans and we feel things. 

In Journalspeak, we spend 20 minutes a day writing out all the feelings, as dark and inadmissible as they may feel, on the page. It does not need to be legible or shareable, In fact, just like you flush the toilet on the byproducts of a cleanse, so do you shred up/throw away the journal pages after you’ve emptied out the feelings. It’s meant to be cleansing, a pressure release valve, emptying out negative, hurtful, and scary emotions in a safe and protected way to keep them from staying stuck in your body causing inflammation and pain. 

We then follow that up with a 10 minute meditation or somatic practice to calm the body. My favorite somatic practices are offered by Liz Tenuto, aka The Workout Witch.

And if all of this feels like too much to add in, that is ok too. It is enough for you to know that your nervous system is trying all the time to keep you safe and to be aware that these things are here for you anytime you decide you are ready. 

We wish you the very best health as you tackle whatever changes you have in mind for yourself this January. 

For more in depth information about nervous system regulation and how to best support your own personal healing and growth journey, please talk with your Partnered Healing Provider about personalized coaching.

Join us! Monthly Partnered Healing Community Group meetings in which we discuss various health and daily vitality related topics, and experience hands-on applications in a nurturing small community group. Hosted by coaches Jessica Cochran and Lindsay Duke.

Written by Jessica Cochran BSN RN

Integrative Life Coach

Certified Coach in The Sarno x Sachs Solution: Nervous System Regulation and Chronic Pain Recovery