“How do my thoughts influence my life?”
“How do my negative thoughts turn into limiting beliefs?”
“And how can I consciously reframe my thoughts every day so they empower me, rather than take me down?”
These are the questions that we’ll delve into, so you can learn how to feel empowered by your thoughts, choose to accept yourself as you are now and eventually learn to love yourself by choosing what’s best for you every time.
When was the last time you noticed your inner critic say things like:
“You're dumb.”
“You can’t do things right.”
“There's something wrong with you.”
Most of us have a variation of these thoughts on a daily or weekly basis. Did you know that the average person has 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day? Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% are negative and 95% are the same thoughts as the day before. This means that if you don’t consciously choose to change or reframe your thoughts, then you will think the same way about yourself every day.
Let’s go back one step and understand where we get our thoughts from. We get them from people we hang out with, from music and podcasts we listen to, from movies, series, videos we watch, and from books, articles and social media posts we read. If you consume the same information every day, then you will eventually adopt the thoughts and beliefs of the people who create the content you’re consuming.
This is why your thoughts have a huge influence in your daily life:
Thoughts create → feelings influence → actions create → outcomes
This is how this plays out in real life:
Thought: “I am not skinny enough.”
Feeling: You feel unattractive and unmotivated.
Action: You skip your workout and instead scroll on your phone comparing yourself to skinny women.
Outcome: You don’t progress in your health goals and this pattern repeats itself because of an underlying limiting belief.
Your thoughts become beliefs when you prove to yourself again and again that your belief is right. You look for evidence that reinforces your belief and ignore anything that contradicts your belief. This process happens in the Reticular Activating System (RAS) in your brainstem. It filters out unnecessary information so the important things get through to your conscious mind.
The good news is that you can use your RAS to your advantage. You can choose what person you want to be. You can choose which goals you want to achieve. You can choose to accept and love yourself. Once you’re clear on who you want to be and what you want to achieve, then your RAS will show you the people, information and opportunities that will help you achieve your goals.
Start today by making the choice to accept yourself as you are. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like what you see or if you feel like you haven’t reached what you wanted to achieve by this stage of your life. Choosing to accept yourself is the first step in learning to love yourself. When you do, you will feel like you just removed a heavy backpack off of your shoulders and like you can finally breathe and be yourself. It’s so liberating!
Next, you need to take a look at your priorities in life. Most people prioritise their families, work and their friends first and then themselves. In order to become the person you want to be and achieve your goals, you need to be number 1 in your priority list. If learning to love yourself and feel proud of yourself is an important goal for you, you need to choose yourself and put yourself first every time.
Self-love is a practice. It’s made up of daily choices. It’s about choosing things, people, and situations that are good for you. Up to this point in your life, you may have chosen to do what was best for others, even if it negatively affected you. These choices became second nature to you and maybe it became part of your identity. People think of you as a kind, caring and helpful person and you do too. It will feel different to choose what’s best for you. You might feel selfish or like that you are disappointing people, however, it’s just part of the process of learning to love yourself.
Do you want to go through this journey of accepting and loving yourself and choosing to put your health and your happiness first every day? If you do, then join us at the next Serotonin Series on Visualisations & Affirmations to Accept & Love Yourself on Thursday, the 5th of August, 2021. You are not alone in this. Join our community of people who are on the same journey learning to live a healthy and happy life.