Chill out!
Dr. Nicole Van Groningen, an internal medicine physician based in Los Angeles, is sharing her No. 1 tip for managing your “winter arc” goals — limit the number of goals.
TikTok users are using the winter arc, which began Tuesday and runs to the end of the year, as a time of transformational change. “Individuals use the coldest, darkest days of the year as a means to refocus, pre-visualize, and arrive at their desired destination,” one influencer explained.
“It’s like this 90-day period in which the weather cools down and we can turn inward, reflect on the goals that we want to set, the habits that we want to start doing, and be really intentional about the people that we want to be in these last three months of the year, going into 2025,” Van Groningen added in her Tuesday TikTok. “I’m a huge fan of that.”
But Van Groningen isn’t a big fan of overloading yourself — she proposes picking a few small habits to work on altogether or one larger habit at a time.
Since the winter arc is three months long, Van Groningen suggests tackling one goal per month. Otherwise, you risk backsliding into old habits because it’s too hard to overhaul your life all at once.
“I think that the pitfall people fall into is trying to do way too much,” she said. “I saw this lovely girl had all these amazing goals that she wanted to do — about eight different habits that she wanted to implement on a daily basis — including changes to her sleep routine, fitness routine, nutrition, goals around journaling, around work stuff, around hobbies.”
For her part, Van Groningen wants to use the winter arc to journal more and create fun, valuable content.
Another TikTok creator plans to work out four or five times a week, drink a gallon of water a day, read 20 pages a day, cook a new recipe a week and save money.
And a third social media user aims to give up alcohol, walk 10,000 steps a day, sleep six to eight hours a night and remove toxic people from her life.
“I get there’s this huge dopamine hit that we get when we set a ton of goals for ourselves and we’re imagining this new and improved version of ourselves that’s just gonna wake up overnight and do, like, all the right things,” Van Groningen said.
“It takes a lot of self-control to say, ‘I’m actually not going to do that, let me just focus on this one thing, or two things, or maybe three small things,’” she continued. “That would be the challenge that I submit to you, because as much as I love an opportunity for positive behavior change, keep it small.”