Now let’s talk a little bit about your mind and the mind/brain connection, and how to maintain optimal health and wellness in both your mind and brain.
Think about this for a minute: where are you letting your mind go throughout the day? Are you letting your mind go to a dark and negative place or are you trying to control your thoughts and guide them to being more positive more of the time?
Even if you have a lot of negative thoughts going through your mind throughout the day, if you are able to stop and re-direct even half of them, you will notice a significant improvement in your overall mood.
Also, just because you have a thought does not mean that it is true. Many of my patients have told me that they believe that if they had the thought, it must be true. Many people believe that it is there a subconscious telling them something.
However, it could be based off of something you saw on the news or something you heard from a friend complaining about something in their life or it could have come to you because you heard a coworker complaining about something.
We tend to live in a negative-based world where people like to complain more so than talk about what they are grateful for. Therefore, taking in all of this negative talk and complaining around you can sink into your subconscious and cause you to have sporadic negative or doom filled thoughts throughout the day.
It doesn’t have to be exactly what you heard from a friend or on the news but the negative, fear-based, complaining talk can stimulate something within you that might be your biggest fear or something that you really don’t want to happen, it can’t even trigger feelings of guilt or shame for something you’ve done in the past.
The thought will change itself to resonate with you even though you could be hearing negative things from around you, the thought will be specific to something that you fear happening in your life. This is just a triggered response and in no way makes the thought true and it doesn’t mean that something bad is going to happen just because you had that thought.
It simply means that your mind has been trained to take the negative that you hear around you and flip it to fearful thing that you are afraid might happen. The more thoughts that you are able to stop and redirect, the better you will feel and the more you will trust yourself and the process.
Now ask yourself if the thoughts that you are having are good for your mind or if they are bad for your mind and body.
Here is a little suggestion for a habit to try to get into that will help you to reflect on your thought and whether or not it’s good for your mind and also how to redirect to your thought: when you are sad, mad, frustrated, or feeling off write down what you’re thinking and then ask yourself if it is true.
This is an easy way to reflect on your thoughts without analyzing your thoughts. Reflecting is a helpful tool to learn about yourself but analyzing leads to a feeling of dread and being overwhelmed and can leave us feeling pain physically, for example causing headaches, stomach pain, or muscle tension.
So lightly reflect on your thoughts and ask yourself if it is true. For example, if I thought comes through your mind that said that you shouldn’t have said what you did to a friend and that your friend might be hurt or upset with you because of what you said. Write down that thought and then ask yourself if it’s true.
Has your friend talk to you since then? Could you possibly call your friend or text your friend and ask them if what you said upset them? In most cases if you are having a stressful, anxious, or sad thought it is not true but rather anxiety or depression trying to trick your mind into believing that you did something wrong or that something bad is going to happen.
To add clarity to this process of reflecting on your thoughts and redirecting them, I suggest that you try the one-page miracle. On one page think about what do you want out of life?
What kind of a relationship do you want with your work, what kind of relationship do you want with your spouse, what kind of relationship do you want with your kids, what kind of relationship do you want with money, what kind of relationship do you want with yourself?
Then for the second part of the one-page miracle consider if your behavior is going to get you what you want. Is your current behavior with your spouse going to get you your desired relationship that you want with your spouse?
Is your current behavior at work going to get you the kind of relationship that you want with work? Is your current behavior with your kids going to get you the kind of relationship that you want with your kids?
Is your current behavior with money going to get you the kind of relationship that you want to have with money? Is your current behavior towards yourself going to get you the kind of relationship that you want with yourself?
Therefore, how is your talk towards yourself? How is your diet treating you mentally and physically? How is your self-care impacting you, do you practice and focus on self-care every day or is that an area of your life that you need to add to?
This one-page miracle exercise will bring clarity to several aspects of your life currently as well as what kind of relationship with those different aspects that you would like to have, therefore making it possible for you to make a little changes to achieve the kind of relationship with these different aspects that you would like to have. So consider, does it all fit to get you what you really want?
Again, do not over analyze any of this. This exercise is merely for reflection and self-awareness. If you start to feel heavy or negative then you have crossed the line from your fasting to over analyzing and you are not learning about yourself in this state of mind but rather you are causing harm to yourself by making yourself feel guilty or a shame.