If you’re like me (‘heaven forbid”, I think I heard a few people cry out), then you often have trouble sticking to hard schedules especially ones that involve resolutions, and particularly, of course, resolutions about improving your health.

I mean, I cannot begin to count the many times I’ve vowed to eat less of some of the things I eat too much of such as salami and pickles and a list of others too long to mention in a brief blog post.

I invariably resolve to eat less of these foods just after I pigged out on them late on December 31 – I celebrate the new year by eating stuff I know I shouldn’t eat – and I can usually manage to stick to my resolve until the next time I see these items again when I re-open the fridge early on January 1.

OK, so that’s a slight exaggeration – some years I manage to hold out till January 2 – but you know what I mean: lifestyle resolutions are exceedingly hard to stick to.

For example, some studies have estimated that the average smoker makes 8 or so attempts to quit before he’s finally able to succeed at not smoking.

And the reason they call it yo-yo dieting is that the vast majority of people who want to lose weight go on and off diets regularly because diets are so very hard to stick to.

So my advice at this late point in January is this: if you resolved to do something on that artificial deadline of January 1 and like the vast majority of us, you did not succeed to hold out this long, please don’t be hard on yourself: that’s just how tough lifestyle change can be.

And even more important, don’t take any failure to be a signal to give up: remember those average smokers I mentioned earlier – even though they fail most times they try to quit, a great proportion of them, perhaps as many as half, do eventually succeed.

Bottom line: it’s never too late to make a positive health change even if you’re well into your senior years.

And there’s no reason not to pick another totally artificial deadline date – say February 1, or February 3, or whatever – to try to make that change.

Check out the London Drugs Health & Wellness Library for more information on health conditions, natural health products and healthy living.

I’m a person who is always trying to find the bright side of things so most days, I try to think of something that can “up” my mood, such as the thought that there are now four years left until the next American election turmoil.

In other words, I would describe myself as an optimist and that’s a good thing because optimism has been linked in several studies to better health outcomes.

But what about the flip side?

What if you’re a pessimist, someone who feels the glass is never full enough?

Does that harm your health?

Well, according to an 11-year-long Finnish study of nearly 3,000 people, people who were judged to be pessimists based on psychological testing at the start of the study had a 2-3 times higher risk of dying from heart disease over the course of the study than did the rest of the study participants.

On the other hand, though, and frustratingly for me, optimists did not have a lower risk of dying during the study although I am optimistic that this latter finding is actually a mistake and to that end, another recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology did find that those study participants judged to be optimists when the study was launched did in fact live longer than those not as hopeful (the only caveat is that this was a study on only women, but hey, I’m very optimistic that the same thing holds true for men, too.

Anyway, the big question is can you change your personality and pass from the darker side to the lighter side?

This is very hard to answer from currently published studies – and if you’re a pessimist, I suppose you will say it can’t be done – but I believe you can work on your temperament and if not totally eliminate pessimistic feelings, at least temper them.

For some of us, it takes work for sure, but I am very hopeful that it can be done.

Happy holidays.

For reasons that are too strange for me to understand, the flu vaccine is surrounded by more myths than Donald Trump has come up for why Hilary Clinton is more popular than him.

So if you’re hesitant to get a flu vaccine this year because you’re someone who has bought into one of those myths, especially the myth that the flu vaccine can give you the flu – it simply cannot. Period – let me try to change your mind by offering you a couple of simple but I think compelling reasons to get a flu vaccine this year.

First, getting vaccinated against the flu lowers your risk of getting a nasty bout of that very common winter-time infection, an illness that not only lasts for 7-14 days but which also produces pretty unwelcome symptoms.

How effective is the flu vaccine?

Well, the effectiveness varies year-to-year depending on how accurately the experts were when they decided which strains of flu virus to include in that year’s vaccine.

Sometimes they miss badly, of course, but last year, they did quite well so that last year’s flu vaccine was about 60% effective at preventing the flu, and hey, 60% effectiveness is nothing to sneeze at, I think you’d all agree.

But just as important as its overall preventive ability is that the flu vaccine is also quite effective at reducing the potential complications that can accompany the flu, such as pneumonia, which can, of course, be a life-threatening infection.

But for me, the overall main reason to get you all to get a flu shot every year is that widespread use of flu vaccination reduces the number of people who get sick with the flu, which in turn also reduces – obviously – the number of people who can pass the flu on, especially to people who are very vulnerable to flu complications, such as seniors – me! – and infants – my new grandson, who is still too young to get a flu shot.

So hey, do everyone around you a favour and get yourself a flu shot this year.

All the little ones and the old ones you come in contact with will be grateful to you for your effort.

To learn more about getting the flu shot at London Drugs or about booking an appointment, visit: http://www.londondrugs.com/flu.