The Mind-Body Connection
Explore The Power Of Your Mind
Just by changing how you think and what you believe you can improve your mood, your hormone balance, your metabolism, and essentially your entire physical and mental health.
It’s true. Our minds are THAT powerful. And the good news is this means that if we harness the power of our minds we can effectively experience the level of health we desire at the level of mind, body, and spirit.
Perhaps you have heard the adage “A Healthy Body Makes A Healthy Mind”. It is true. If we don’t nourish our physical body with things like healthy nutrition and adequate rest our mental health suffers. Yet the opposite is also true. If we don’t nourish our minds with healthy thoughts and healthy beliefs our bodies suffer.
It’s All About Your Mindset
Our mindset is the lens to which we experience and author our lives. It consists of our default thought patterns, emotions, attitudes, and internalized beliefs. Our mindset is shaped by the interpretations that were applied to our past experiences and is further refined by our present and future experiences. Whatever our current mindset is, it helps paint a picture of a future that we are anticipating and because our body is not discerning between what is happening in our conscious mind and our subconscious mind, our bodies will respond to an anticipated future as if it were happening in the present moment. Thus, if we have a mindset that perceives threat at every corner, our body will physiologically respond accordingly and remain in a chronic stress cycle leading to persistent inflammation and chronic disease. This is how powerful our minds are. Our thoughts alone can make our bodies sick. When it comes to health, we can really define our mindset in one of two categories: a health-promoting mindset or a dis-ease promoting mindset.
What Is A Dis-ease Promoting Mindset?
A dis-ease promoting mindset is one that anticipates harm and perceives experiences by default as potentially threatening to our survival. We identify more as a victim where life is happening to us where someone or something is the perpetrator of our own pain or suffering.
We perceive the challenging things that happen in our lives as things that are happening to us. We tend to see and experience the world from a glass half full perspective, with our attention focusing on that which we perceive we are not and that which we don’t have. And this drives us to run ourselves ragged trying to prove that we are enough and that we are doing enough. It’s a vicious cycle that leaves us more prone to experience depression, anxiety, and feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and despair.
When we have a dis-ease promoting mindset our bodies are instructed to operate in protective and survival mode. Our beliefs, thoughts, and emotions tell the nervous system that is a threat and so it stays in a fight-flight-freeze response where our bodies are flooded with stress hormones which shut down our brains' ability to think, our ability to digest, and our ability to balance our hormones appropriately. Our brain is essentially hijacked. We have limited access to rational thinking and perceive each choice to be a life or death situation. We don’t question whether we could be making different choices that might give us a different and better experience. We tend to justify our unhealthy habits and make excuses for why we can’t make the changes that we need to make: We have to keep working at a job that we hate. We don’t have enough time to eat healthy because of everything that we have to juggle in life. When we have a dis-eased mindset the “I Can’t story” is so loud and the obstacles that we perceive appear so big that we often don’t change our unhealthy habits and thus end up staying “stuck” with whatever our complaints may be.
What is A Health Promoting Mindset?
A health-promoting mindset on the other hand allows us to perceive the challenging things that happen in our lives as things that are happening for us – to help us grow, learn, and heal at a deep level. We have the ability to move through challenges experiencing fear, anxiety, and worry but don’t get stay stuck in them because we have a perspective that everything that we experience in life is here to support us and help us grow. And because we do not feel like a victim to the circumstances of our lives, when things aren’t going as planned, we are more aware of the fact that we can make different choices to have a different experience.
With this mindset we tend to focus more on what we CAN do rather than what we cannot do and we learn to let go of that which is out of our control. We tend to see life from a glass half full perspective and thus are able to hold ourselves and others with more compassion and experience gratitude for what we DO have. These emotions actually help us maintain a coherent state within the heart and the brain which allows our organ systems to be in sync. And because there are less stress hormones circulating in and around our bodies and less inflammation we age slower, digest better, think better, live better, and are more likely to make healthier choices.
How To Reset Your Mindset
The process of changing our beliefs and our mindset is not complicated but it can be complex. But this is because WE are complex beings. We are experiencing a multitude of things at every moment and everything from our temperament to our past experiences to our genetics has an influence on what we think and what we believe in this very moment. Yet despite our unique differences there is a thread of humanity within all of us which makes our behavioral tendencies predictable. So I took my knowledge and experience and developed what I call the MINDSET MAKEOVER, a 3-step transformation process that helps others unlock the power of their minds and release destructive habits and thought patterns so that they can heal at the level of mind, body, and spirit.
The first step of the process requires us to evaluate our current lens and acknowledge whether our thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and choices that have become habitually are health-promoting. It invites us to shift into seeing our so-called mistakes as part of our humanity and choose to learn from them with humility, compassion, and curiosity so that we can make healthier choices. It brings clarity about the habits we need to change.
The second step is about getting out of victim mentality and taking responsibility for the ways in which we are not helping ourselves have what we say we want. It invites us to recognize the impact that our unhealthy thought patterns and habits have had on our bodies, our relationships, our overall wellbeing. This is the most important step of the process yet perhaps the most difficult step for many because it requires us to get comfortable feeling those not so comfortable emotions that we tend to deny and suppress though our sabotaging habits. However, when we learn to forgive ourselves for the ways in which we have supported our own pain and suffering, we are able to authentically step into remorse and forgiveness which allow for the true seeds of change.
The third step of the process is about reinforcing our desire for change with empowered motivations and our commitment to taking action steps so that our new healthy habits become the default. Understanding that we need to release destructive habits is one thing and actually stopping the habit is a whole other thing. Old habits die hard and breaking a habit isn’t always easy and it often takes a lot of conscious intention. Because our beliefs are rooted in the subconscious, we are not always aware of them or the ways in which they are contributing to our suffering and limiting the level of happiness and health we desire. Receiving the support and guidance from someone like myself who has a more objective lens as well as the skills and tools needed to help create your roadmap can make all the difference.