Achieving Sustainable New Year’s Resolutions for Police Officers: A Guide for Better Living and Working

New year’s resolutions are something we’ve all heard about since we were little. We either had a parent, relative, sibling or friend announce what they were going to change “starting January 1st!”

I never understood why, if you’re going to do something to improve yourself, you’d wait until a given date. I guess it makes sense if you plan to ignore the resolution(s) as part of your holiday celebrations, but otherwise, why wait?

I’m guessing that the two most popular resolutions are “I’m going to lose weight” and “I’m going to stop smoking.” Stopping smoking probably isn’t as big as it used to be decades ago when everyone and their brother smoked cigarettes, and you could do so everywhere. I imagine “I’m going to eat healthier” or “I’ll break x bad habit” are up on the list.

Unfortunately, many folks set unrealistic pie-in-the-sky goals and either fail to attain them or break their plans to reach for them by the end of January in any given year. It’s long been my belief that setting strong New Year’s Resolutions is more about modifying behavior in mild and sustainable ways rather than hard, cold changes that prove challenging to maintain. Building healthy habits is a marathon, not a sprint.

Depending on where you are in life, your goals, especially for law enforcement professionals, should focus on maintaining and increasing your quality of life. To do that, you have to take a holistic approach to your health and wellness.

Pay attention to your physical health

Health seems easy to wrap our heads around. Physical health can be measured with some basic metrics and honest self-evaluation. What is your height, weight, blood pressure, resting heart rate and blood oxygen level? All of those things can be taken and documented at home, and two of them are available on virtually any smartwatch. Other indicators can require blood work, but the successful healthy completion of your career depends on you maintaining yourself, so you should be getting an annual check-up to include blood work every year anyway, right?

Cardiac health is part of physical well-being

Now, we have a job that can go from “I’m almost falling asleep” to “Holy crap! What just happened!?” in half a second. We can be sedentary one moment and having to sprint all out in full gear the next. We can go from a pleasant community interaction to fighting for our life in a heartbeat. As a result, heart attacks are far too common in our profession, but they are avoidable with health and fitness maintenance.

Maintenance, moderation and good habits are the name of the game. Cardiovascular health is a simple combination of keeping yourself at a healthy weight and regularly exercising your cardio system. I don’t care if you run, swim, bike, row, or play a sport, but do something on a regular (planned) basis that gets your heart rate up and keeps it there for 20-plus minutes.

To figure out your target heart rate for training, subtract your age from 220 and then multiply that number by 60-65%. For a 30-year old person that would be (220-30)x.65=123.5. Do an exercise that gets your heart rate to roughly 125 and keep it there for 20 or more minutes. Interestingly, for the first 20 minutes of exercise you’re basically burning the sugar in your blood, so if you want to lose weight, do that exercise for 30 minutes or more. That would mean 10+ minutes of burning fat calories and gradually losing weight.

It's not all about your heart — muscles and joints matter, too

To minimize on the street injuries you can’t just focus on cardio though. You also need flexibility and strength. Body weight exercises are great for maintaining strength and can be mixed in with stretching exercises so you train flexibility at the same time.

Now let’s talk about the “wellness” part of “Health and Wellness.” We hear the term “mental health” all the time but rarely do we discuss how it’s maintained beyond a loosely used “stress management” program. Mental health should incorporate regular learning, regular relaxation and regular brain exercises. No, I don’t mean video games that mostly exercise your thumbs. Read, play strategy games, build puzzles, do crossword puzzles and more. Design a building project, write a memoir or create fiction stories for your kids (or grandkids). Work your brain and then relax your brain. A good sleep pattern helps with that as well.

How about emotional and spiritual health?

More often than not these require having someone to talk to about some of the uglier realities we see and deal with as part of our job. Some studies have shown that seeing the after-affects of trauma are almost as impactful as experiencing the trauma. The average person experiences two truly traumatic experiences in their life. The average cop will experience 600-800 in a normal career - and some of us work a lot longer than “normal.” There is no shame in having regular conversations with a counselor, therapist, priest, minister, whoever.

The goal is to die young as old as possible

I encourage you to make reasonable resolutions along with a plan to enact them and maintain them… for the entirety of your career and past that. To get the most out of life you have to live as long as possible after you survive your career.

What do you do to maintain your health and wellness? I’d love to read about it so if you’re willing to share, please email me at [email protected]. If I can share your methodologies, let me know — and I can do so anonymously with ease.