Happy New Year and welcome back to the Anxiety Slayer podcast. I'm Shan Vanderley, here with my good friend and co-host Ananga Sivir.

This week we're discussing New Year's resolutions and how they can cause

additional stress and anxiety and what we recommend that you do instead.

Happy New Year Ananga.

Hey, Sean. Happy New Year.

I missed you over the last couple of weeks.

And at the same time, it was good for us both to take a break and spend time with our families and relax.

Yeah, both.

I missed you too.

And it was nice to be with family.

And I spent a lot of time as we were just talking about what we started recording

this week's show, journaling and reflecting and it's been a good quiet couple of weeks.

And this is the time of year when we hear so much about what's next. What are your intentions? What are your resolutions? What are you

going to change? What's going to happen? I'm just saying it out loud makes me feel a little agitated.

As of January 1st, I'm going to no longer do X, Y, and Z, and I'm going to change everything.

And as we address this topic many times over the last 13 years, it's always important to bring it forward again, because in my opinion, and I know in your opinion, now isn't really the time for making big changes.

It's a perfect time to set some intentions for yourself, to do what you've done, Ananga,

and looking at your world and the way that it is and what you might like to see unfold

in a bigger picture way, but not in a way where we're jumping right in and holding ourselves to these really strict rules

that, let's face it, are often abandoned by February anyway.

Yeah, in the northern hemisphere, we're in the darkest and most

lethargic time of the year, although I'm happy to note outside my window as we're recording

...