Change Your Mind to Improve Your Health
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I know what I need to do … I just can’t do it …
I’ve written about how shifting your thinking can reduce your anxiety, and how it can make you happier. And last month, I was even so bold as to say engaging in this strategy consistently is the one thing you must do to change your life.
Let’s build upon that idea, and apply this logic concretely to how the power of your thinking can improve your physical health.
I expect you know someone (maybe it’s you!) who finds themselves at an unhealthy weight, or has been informed by their physician that they are pre-diabetic. Or, maybe this person has known they were pre-diabetic for some time and has now crossed the threshold to be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Or, maybe they’ve even survived a very scary cardiac event.
And despite these circumstances, and despite knowing full well that their health is in jeopardy, they have not changed their behavior.
They know they should exercise.
They know they should eat less junk food and eat more lean protein, whole grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables.
They’re intelligent people. They know what they need to do … but they struggle to do it, or if they do make changes, they struggle to stick with them.
Why?
Two crucial facts to understanding how we change behavior
There are two extremely important factors to consider when trying to understand this problem:
Your mindset - your thoughts, the way you think - is one of the most important tools in your toolbox to improve your health.
Yes, exercise and movement is important.
Yes, your food choices matter.
But … I’ll argue … your thinking is, by far, a more important piece.
Why?
Because if you’re not thinking correctly, you won’t work out, and you won’t eat well.
You’ll continue to think they way you’ve always thought … leading to you making the same choices you’ve always made … leading to no change.
If you change your mind, you become capable of making different choices. When you are able to choose differently, your behavior changes … and so then does the outcome: your health improves.
And, long-term change only happens by making small changes consistently over time.
I love to think about this concept as “slow magic” and find it to be just as powerful, and necessary, as your mindset to facilitate behavior change.
How to change your mind to improve your health
The following strategies are ways to begin shifting your mindset, changing your mind.
It’s first helpful to just start noticing how you’re thinking right now, before you start trying to make changes. Perhaps start by simply reflecting on the ideas outlined below.
Then, start to notice how you’re thinking when you’re making decisions that relate to your health. What thoughts arise in the moments when you make choices about, for example, exercise and food? What are you thinking when you’re deciding whether to work out or not? What is your mind saying to you when you have ingredients to make a healthy dinner, but are considering ordering pizza instead?
Begin to notice how you’re thinking impacts the decisions you make, and then play around with the following strategies to shift your thinking to be more in line with the decisions you’d rather make, that are more in line with the life you’d like to live.
First, understand and appreciate that change is really hard. Not impossible … but hard.
We’ve trained our brains, repetitively over time, to support us in doing what we do now. If we want to change what we do, we need to do the new thing repetitively over time too, and way more times than you think you need to, to make it stick.
Therefore, we need to set realistic expectations, and expect change to be slow and steady.
With health-related behaviors, we’ve been taught to make sweeping changes altogether overnight … often on New Year’s Day or on a Monday. We plan to start eating very differently than we were just yesterday … and then wonder why it doesn’t stick.
And, in the actual moment of making choices, remember why you want to do something different.
It is critically important to have a meaningful reason why you want to make a different choice. And, the reason needs to be anchored to something positive rather than negative; for example, “I want to be an active mom” rather than “I don’t want to get diabetes.”
And, you have a way to remember that reason when you’re in the process of making the decision. How can you remember that you really do want to work out? That you really do want to make the dinner you planned rather than order pizza? Turn your reason into a short, powerful mantra you can easily access at the decision point.
Challenge polarized, or black and white, thinking.
This way of thinking is rampant in diet culture and in how we think about making changes that affect our health and our bodies.
The mantra “Progress not perfection” is the antithesis to black and white thinking.
Black and white thinking is all or nothing thinking. It’s epitomized by good or bad, perfection or failure. And it’s unrealistic, and not how the world actually works.
And it completely undermines your efforts to change your behavior.
Expect that you’re not going to do it perfectly. It’s impossible. So don’t try.
Shoot to get it 80% right, so that when you do skip a workout (because you will), or you do order the pizza instead of making the dinner you planned (because pizza is sometimes irresistible), the very next choice you make is more in line with your ‘why.’
And, practice self-compassion.
Give yourself grace. Speak to yourself as you would to someone you love who’s trying really hard and needs some encouragement.
Self-criticism, contrary to popular belief, is not correlated with creating the life you want. You don’t actually need a “good kick in the ass” to get to the gym. And you don’t need to “get your shit together.”
What will get you where you want to go, however, is telling yourself - and believing - that you’re doing your best, and that your best is good enough.
If this message resonates, let me know! I’d love to hear from you! I read and respond to every message (yes, really!).
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