5 Mindset Shifts to Change Your Health

Change starts with your thinking and your thinking is a choice. In this post, you’ll learn the 5 mindset shifts to change your health for life. 

“Your actions are affected by the thoughts you have, and the things you tell yourself.  So, if you want to transform yourself, you’ve got to deal with your thoughts, your excuses, your beliefs and your self-sabotaging paradigms. That’s your mindset. If you change your thinking, your body will follow.”

For years I’ve been the fitness and nutrition expert telling people what to eat and how to move. While it’s a piece of the pie, I’ve definitely struggled with which piece was missing from the pie.

In nearly everyone I trained and worked with there was a missing component. Something wasn’t quite right. There never seemed to be much drive or desire as I had hoped and in a different breath, there was a ton of emotion.

After sitting with clients all day, I remember telling my husband that I should have gotten a psychology degree rather than a nutrition degree because 95% of problems were more to do with emotions rather than with knowledge about nutrition.

Come to find out years later and I’d be digging into the psychology of eating, behavior change and creating health that lasts.

Because I’ve learned that missing component I couldn’t quite put my finger on is exactly this, the health of your body is only as good as the health of your mindset and soul. Which I’d argue is over half the equation to health, if not nearly the entire picture.

So the question becomes, can we get healthy {and to lose weight if you have weight to lose} with nothing more than changing your mind?

We’re diving into that over the next few podcasts and it starts today with the power of choice and how changing your mindset could be the critical component in changing your health.

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the power of your mind

Our mind is an incredible and mysterious thing. Science is really just beginning to tap into the power of the brain and while we’ll never know all of the intricacies of it, we do know it holds a lot of power.

A study published in the scientific journal of Health Psychology demonstrates one amazing power our minds can hold.

In this study, researchers looked at surveys from over 60,000 U.S. Adults and asked about their physical activity, health, personal background, and other measures. One of the main questions they looked at was;

“Would you say that you are physically more active, less active, or about as active as other persons your age?”

After collecting the results, the researchers then followed up on this study 21 years later by looking at death records of participants.

What they discovered was that individuals who reported that they were “less active” were 71% more likely to die within that follow-up period than those who reported they were “more active,” even after controlling for physical activity, age, body mass index, chronic illness, and other factors.

To put it more simply, individuals that believed they were “less physically active,” even when they did the same amount of physical activity, reported higher rates of mortality.

inside our mind

There are three components to the mind; the conscious mind, subconscious mind and unconscious mind. All three serve important purposes which we talk more in-depth in the podcast.

In this post, we’re going to dive more into the specifics of creating behavior through understanding our mind. To do this we have to understand a few critical components:

1. Whether you know it or not, your current behavior is serving you for a reason – for better or worse.
2. Your behavior is serving certain emotional needs.
3. All behavior and action stem from our emotions.

The big takeaway is this; change stems from emotion.

how to change

This thought, of change stemming from emotions, is different than simply slapping a goal or a number you’d like to achieve and working for that.

Unfortunately, those kind of goals are not very motivating. But our unconscious and subconscious mind, the place where our default systems and behaviors are directed from are based on emotions and thoughts, not goals.

You get wired to certain patterns and systems of behaviors sometimes called routines, habits or presets and your brain gets stuck on them. They become the concentrated system of your subconscious mind.

In order to change, you have to put an emotion to the action. Of course like anything this can take concentrated, focused, conscious and consistent effort on behalf of your conscious mind.

The good news is that change is possible. We know this anecdotally, but recent research around the neuro-plasticity of the brain proves this.

It’s simple, change starts with your thinking.

quick example

A quick example is the act of overeating. Say you have a goal to lost 20 pounds but you’re go-to when you’re tired, stressed or emotional is to overeat.

You can’t seem to stop yourself from overeating and therefore live frustrated that you never see results.

There are a few things to point out in this scenario.

1. The only emotion you’re probably feeling in this situation is short-term comfort followed by long-term failure and defeat.
2. Remember, overeating is serving an emotional need.

What I mean by that is there is an emotion driving you to overeat. This emotion happens to be stronger than the emotion you have or yet to have surrounding your goal to lose weight.

So you overeat to nurture yourself in times of stress, sadness or boredom.

So the question you have to ask yourself to experience true change and overcome overeating, is there another way you could nurture yourself and fulfill that emotion in a positive way?

Maybe you learn that walking with a friend does the trick, or picking up a good book.

Once you’re able to distinguish the bad routine, preset or habit and uncover the emotion you can work through ways to serve that emotion in positive ways.

This is how change is created.

Through the emotion and the choice to honor that emotion in a positive way.

5 mindset shifts

Change doesn’t happen in our conscious mind and it’s not a matter of willpower. Lasting change stems from emotions. Here are five mindset shifts to help you change your emotion and begin the journey of experiencing true and lasting health.

1. Uncover the emotional needs you need to be met.

Awareness, this is the most pivotal thing you could do. To become fully aware of who you are, what emotions you’re needing met and uncovering your standard habits.

For most of us, we know where we want to go but we don’t know why we ended up where we did. We must take some time to get to know ourselves, our driving emotions and how we can incorporate them in a positive way.

I’ve created a free download that will help you develop awareness and change your emotions for better health. Click below to get it. 

2. End the self-sabotage.

Remember what we think directly influences our emotions. That includes negative self-talk or self-sabotage. When we start down this path we directly walk ourselves into self-protection. Which means conserve and store. Or maybe better words are decrease energy and increase fat stores.

Two things most people are working to reverse.

These thoughts and words of the negative self-talk are impacting your subconscious which is believing them to be true even if they’re quite absurd. Practice awareness and then replace those with positive self-talk to help your body experience self-freedom.

3. Uncover previous trauma.

It could be big, like really big trauma such as a death of a loved one or it could be as small as your third-grade teacher forcing you to eat your peas. The truth is we all have trauma but as long as we suppress it rather than deal with it, our body will constantly be pulling that out of our unconscious filing cabinet and we’ll be acting on it regardless of if we’re thinking about it.

That’s the power of the unconscious mind. To change this and allow your body the freedom to act in love and positivity, we have to deal with our old trauma and let it go creating room for something better. Of course, easier said than done and something we’ll be talking more about in the coming weeks.

4. Understand the power of choice.

There isn’t much in life we can control but our thoughts are one thing. How we relate, view and act the situations in life affect our outcome.

Live aware and focus in on your thoughts choosing to replace the negative with the positive and live in mindset freedom.

Choose in any situation to find the good.

5. Reprogram your mind with awareness, focus, and repetition.

The take-home point is change happens from our emotions and most of our emotions are driven by our unconscious mind. The deep filing cabinet of our mind and body that can be somewhat difficult to get to.

In order to create this shift and reprogram your mind, you must be willing to go deep, dig up past trauma, deal with it and then learn to use your emotions to your advantage.

The three things you need to create this paradigm shift include:

1. Awareness – of your previous routines and presets and the emotions that accompany them.
2. Focus – staying in the present and living the moment to allow yourself space to really feel and live.
3. Repetition – constantly repeating the positive and allowing yourself to feel that making it the natural default pattern of your mind.

get started

Overall, your mindset matters a lot when it comes to every area of your life, including your physical health. Don’t underestimate the importance of getting your mind right and cultivating a healthy attitude and perspective.

To get started, download my free guide that will help walk you through your presets and routines. Then keep repeating the positive, the good and really experience this to allow your body to create new presets.

Stay tuned as we take a deeper dive in the upcoming podcasts.

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