10 UK Prepping New Year’s Resolutions That You’ll Actually Stick To

I am as guilty of New Year’s Resolution Overambition as anyone. Every year, I set myself what seem to be achievable, sensible resolutions that will help me get closer to the person I want to be, and in January, they all seem like certain wins. Easy stuff.

Then I look again at the end of the year, having accomplished none of them, and they suddenly all look like:

1. Get Batman physique
2. Invent new kind of indestructible bug-out bag
3. Save £10,000 emergency fund
4. Become immortal

And I begin to fear that, since I’ve actually gotten further away from all those noble goals in the past year, that I might be being too ambitious.

If you, like me, know the bitter sting of failure every year, you should do what I’m doing, and make limited, extremely easy resolutions that will still help you become more prepared, more resilient, happier, healthier, and better-looking, probably.

Here’s a list with a few suggestions on it, but you don’t need to do any of them if they don’t fit you – they’re just there to provide some food for thought and reframe the way you might be thinking about your goals for the year, or what counts as progress.

Some of them don’t even seem like preparedness things, but I promise, they all impact prepping and they’ll all make you more prepared for anything that might be coming down the pipe this year.

10 Prepper New Year’s Resolutions That Can’t Fail

1. Want To Get Fit? Start By Being Completely Honest With Yourself About Your Health, And Meet Your Body Where It Is

It took me a long, long time to get this one right, and becoming a dad was the thing that finally did it. There really is no escaping the dad bod. I’m stuck between two extremes: I can’t afford to get injured or sick, but I also barely have time to exercise.

So I decided to start by being completely honest with myself about my physical and mental health, and to meet my body where it was at. I went to the doctor for little things that had been bothering me for years, started a routine of stretching my terrible tight hamstrings, made a few dietary changes and got a few diagnoses for not-huge-problems-but-still-problems.

The point of all that is that knowing the actual underlying state of my body, from top to toe, means I can work with it. I can manage things that would otherwise occasionally spiral into big horrible problems. I know what my vulnerabilities are and can work to shore them up. I can work with the body I’ve got, instead of against it, and just based on that, I’ve already started to get back into a much more capable and resilient condition.

Anyway, the point I’m getting it is this: meet your body where it is, not where you wish it was. Work with what you’ve got, and you’ll find your health and fitness – and your resiliency – will be much, much easier to manage. Cross my heart (I recently learned where it is and what condition it’s in).

2. Can’t Make Huge Sweeping Changes right Now? Half-Do Something Instead Of Completely Not Doing It

This is a huge one for me, as I am terrible for making grand plans, workshopping them to perfection, and then not actually doing the thing.

It’s much, much more valuable to half-ass a thing than to not do it at all.

Don’t have time to train to run a 5k? Just run for however long you can.

Can’t commit to a vegetable garden? Some pots on the windowsill is still a step up from no plants at all.

Can’t stock a doomsday bunker? A shelf or a cupboard full of canned food is a serious step in the right direction.

This is a great way to tackle improvements in life, especially given how busy we all are and how hard it is to just tread water in the UK at the moment, but it’s even better when it comes to preparedness, because the first steps you take are much more likely to be useful than the later steps. You’re more likely to need to dip into a three day supply of food in the kitchen than a 20-year bunker supply of freeze-dried rations. You’re more likely to need a lighter in your pocket than a ferro-rod firestarting kit, and so on and so forth.

The little steps taken at the start are the most valuable, so take them, even though they’re little, and worry about making them bigger later.

3. Want To Train For Bugging Out? Try Travelling More To Visit Relatives Or Friends

You know what’s almost as stressful as packing the car up to evacuate your city? Packing your car up to take the kids to your parents’ house for Christmas.

I’m only half joking – my wife and I take the kids down South to her parents several times a year, and over to Ireland to visit my family a few times too, and with all that time on the road, we’ve gotten very good at packing the car for long stays away from home, with very little packing time.

Those trips are practice, and they’re real, on-the-ground experience of what is needed to keep a toddler happy and his parents sane while away from home, sleeping sometimes on inflatable mattresses on the floor or overnighting in a ferry cabin on the Irish Sea.

They’ve allowed us to work out what we don’t need to take with us, how best to divide the work of quickly packing the car up, and even how we both handle different conditions during an arduous drive. We’ve figured out through horrible experience how to handle a child being very sick in the car, how to drive through the night, how to drive through storms, and how to escape total car breakdown hundreds of miles from home. It isn’t directly about bugging out, but there are a lot of transferable skills and experiences there.

Plus, people like it when you come to visit. It’s literally something that people do for fun, even if they don’t think there’s ever going to be a total societal collapse. I know. Wild. All the same, the relationship-building alone will be a big boost to your preparedness and your general wellbeing.

If you don’t have a good relationship with your family, then you might want to arrange to visit old friends instead, or find an activity you really want to do and bundle your unfortunate family off with you. I can’t recommend it enough.

4. Want To Put Together A Survival Group? start With Seeing Your Friends More In The Real World

“Wait a minute, Dan” I hear you say.

“Is this article just you tricking me into spending time with people I care about?”

It’s not very prepper-y of me to say it, but looking after your mental and social health now is important, even if there’s never any big disaster (though there probably will be). It’s more prepper-y to look at it this way: your relationships and connections are just as important as your supplies and skills. Most emergencies aren’t solved by battening down the hatches all alone, they’re mostly solved by getting help. People don’t survive and thrive on their own, and if you woke up tomorrow and the power was out, and it never came back on? Your friends and family would probably be the people you’d want to link up with to help get through it.

So, you know, text one of them and ask if they want to hang out. Maybe Friday – not necessarily Friday, but if that works for you.

5. Want To get Organised? Make A Few To-Do Lists

I’m a fiend for lists. I love a list. Breaking down a task into bite-sized pieces makes it infinitely more achievable, and much easier to organise.

The act of making a to-do list helps you to work out what tasks or goals you actually want to accomplish, gives you a sense of what priority things should be done in, and lets you note down everything as you think of it, so nothing is forgotten.

You can then rework it to put things into the order you want to do them in, expand out larger, vague points into detailed, step-by-step task lists, and draw little hearts in the dots on the “i”s. The simple act of planning out how a big task can be broken down turns the effort of climbing a mountain into just a list of single steps, and a single step is easy, but when you’ve finished that list you’ll still look at it and realise those steps wound up climbing the mountain.

6. Want to Be More Resilient For Basically No Effort? Back Up Your Important Documents and Data Somewhere (Or Update your Backups If You Already Have them)

I don’t particularly like my phone or my computer, but I have to admit they are vital parts of being alive in modern society. If either of them was destroyed, I’d be in trouble without backups, but thankfully, backups aren’t hard to make.

I like to have two sets – one physical backup of my computer and phone photos/contacts, and one cloud-based solution.

My cloud solution for the computer is Microsoft Onedrive, but you can use Google Drive or any one of the dozens of other competitors. It’s important to secure this as tightly as possible, with 2-factor authentication, recovery email addresses and a strong password that you change every few months, since it’s a backup of your entire computer and probably shouldn’t be open for just anyone to click in and have a look around.

One advantage to this is that you’re able to access this cloud account even if you haven’t lost your device, but just need to temporarily use another one, like if you decide to do a bit of work while staying at a friend’s house, or something. Maybe you could work on your novel.

In addition to a cloud-based backup, though, I also like to have a physical backup on a hard drive. Making a physical backup like this is easy, and external storage is getting cheaper and more effective all the time. Just buy one, like this one, plug it in to your computer and start copying things over. It’ll take a while to transfer everything, but once it’s done you can put the drive in a safe and secure location and know that it’s always there if you need it.

If you have a fire safe, you should probably keep your backup hard drive in there – nothing like the peace of mind of knowing that your photos and documents can be recovered, even if all else is lost. Failing that, leaving them with a trusted friend or in a bank deposit box will also help guarantee your backups are, well, backed up.

7. Want To Learn A New Skill? Choose One Preparedness Skill And Give It A Try

It wouldn’t be a New Year’s Resolutions list without at least one “learn to play the guitar”-style goal on here, but to keep things on target I’m going to suggest something more preparedness-related. Anything preparedness-related, actually.

The beauty of this is that so many things feed into being prepared for disruption or crisis – growing vegetables, learning first aid, learning to operate a ham radio, taking a martial art, learning to sew or knit, jarring your own jam, doing a foraging course, learning woodworking or DIY, learning to cook, learning to drive if you can’t already, the list goes on and on and on.

Pick just one thing you’d love to learn and give it a try. There will be courses, clubs and meetups near you, and if there aren’t, there’s a huge wealth of information and instructional material online that you can start with. The important thing is giving it a try. By picking up a new skill, you become much more prepared for trouble, but you might also gain a new hobby, make new friends, or find something you have a real passion for and that makes your life richer.

It’s hard to see a downside to that.

8. Sick Of Being Helpless At Home? Start Learning How To Maintain Your Home (And Start Collecting Some Tools To Go With The Knowledge)

Do you have a toilet plunger?

Could you unblock a sink drain if it got blocked? Or replace a blown fuse in an appliance?

A few years ago I couldn’t have, either, but these things aren’t intimidating once you start doing them (provided you research everything properly, get the right tools or components and get advice from someone more experienced if in doubt. Please do not try to replace a fuse without looking at how that’s supposed to be done. It’s not as intimidating as it seems but it should still be a little bit intimidating for safety’s sake).

Little things like a sink plunger and the aforementioned toilet plunger can save your bacon time and again, and even if you live in a rented property that you can’t make any changes to, there are things like that, that don’t affect the property, but just keep its utilities running, that not even your landlord could complain about.

(Disclaimer: I am not telling you to break the terms of your lease agreement. Don’t do something that will cause you to lose your rental deposit. I’m serious, don’t.)

Start with the most common problems and work up from there. You’ll know what those problems are, since it’s your home and they will have been bothering you. Once you can deal with them on your own, the world is your metaphorical oyster, you DIY genius.

9. Small Changes Can Have Big Impacts – Switch Out Disposable For Reusable If You Can

If something is disposable or single-use, then you’ll need to stockpile it against shortages – and the more single-use things you have, the bigger that stockpile needs to be and the more vulnerable it is to disruption. By swapping disposable things for reusable ones, you’re making your necessary supplies smaller and becoming more resilient to supply-line disruptions.

For example, my wife and I use reusable cloth nappies for the baby. That change alone meant that our sanitation solution for the baby is much longer-lasting than any wardrobe full of packets of Pampers could ever be, and we need only stockpile the washing powder that keeps the nappies clean and safe – a box of washing powder is much easier to store than an equivalent number of disposable nappies.

You can apply the same logic to kitchen cloths in place of paper kitchen roll, and save not only a fortune but a lot of space in your stores.

10. Don’t Open A New Thing until The Current One Is Gone

Small changes are the easiest to stick at, which is why I try to put so many of them in these preparedness articles. One that made a huge impact on my household was this rule, lifted from the absolutely incredible preparedness book “Just In Case” by Kathy Harrison:

No opening a new container of anything until the current one is finished and the container is in the bin.

My fridge was once a chaotic nightmare of half-empty jars, a maelstrom of random tubes and packets that made it impossible to find anything, and, annoyingly, made it more likely that I’d give up looking for the mustard and assume it was gone, opening another one from the cupboard and adding to the chaos.

Now, it’s… well it’s not pristine but it’s not a nightmare any more.

More importantly, we’re now aware of how many of a given thing we really have – not just food either, but everything that can be stocked up on, from toothpaste tubes to washing powder and from spare boots to bandsaw blades. Don’t open a new one until the current one is gone and tidied away.

The cupboards are neater and more organised, the house is less cluttered, there’s less wastage, and overall we’re a slightly better-oiled machine than we were before.

Not bad for such a tiny new house rule. Not bad at all.

Happy new year, everyone – I hope nothing terrible happens, but if it does, I hope you’re ready.

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