How Limiting Beliefs Sabotage Your Health
Limiting beliefs and paradigms are so damaging to your life, your success, your happiness, and your ability to move forward with goals.
Whenever we repeat things in our mind like:
“I can’t just make healthy choices. I’m either on a diet or off one”
“It always takes me a while to get things”
“I’ve always taken a longer time to focus on something”
“I’m not the person who can do this all at once”
Or anything remotely like that, recognize those are actually not TRUTHS. They are just beliefs about yourself you’ve accumulated over a lifetime, that you accept without questioning. But they hold no validity in reality — they will only continue to be “true” if you continue to reinforce them by saying them and buying into their premise.
The fact is that with each new minute you get to make choices about everything. You get to choose what you think about in the shower, on the toilet, before bed…you get to choose what to put in your mouth, what comes out of your mouth when you speak, you get to choose whether to exercise or whether to watch a video on the internet and eat a muffin, all of it is yours for the choosing.
Remember, thoughts are ENERGY, and energy MANIFESTS. The more you reinforce a negative thought, the more you visualize negative outcomes, the higher your chances of manifesting those outcomes. That is simply the law of energy.
But in PRACTICE it goes far beyond simply "thinking positive". Of course there are many ways to retrain the brain, but one very effective way is to start speaking truthfully with yourself, rather than simple reinforcing pre-existing limited beliefs.
Health is a great example. I have heard people say that they eat something like a frozen pizza, knowing it contains harmful preservatives and chemicals, and knowing it will not do anything healthy for them. But they feel like they "can't" avoid it. So instead of the can't, telling yourself you can't possibly skip it, or you can't possibly skip the cake, ice cream, or whatever it is...say this to yourself instead:
“I am choosing this frozen pizza, which I know is harmful to my health. I am not ignorant, I know it will harm both my body and my emotions. However, I am still going to choose it because I have free will. No one is forcing me to eat this pizza, and no one is forcing me not to. So, I am making this choice because in this moment, I would rather taste the pizza in my mouth for a few minutes, than look at the long term results of my daily choices. I know that 3 minutes after the pizza is gone, I will feel bad emotionally for having made a decision that is not in my best interest. I know this from experience. But, I am going to eat it anyway.”
This simple practice will also do something amazing for you. It will connect you with your present active mind. It will help you start to change old patterns and pathways in the brain that keep reinforcing old behaviors. **Keep in mind, a lot of the limiting beliefs we hold come from the inner child, and most people are making decisions 95% from the inner child/subconscious. So things like emotional eating and acting out in anger come from that place. So there is usually deeper work to be done. However, the ability of the brain to create new pathways and connections of thought is profound, and is a very effective and powerful way to begin to see real change in your life.