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HEALTH STARTS IN THE MIND AND FLOWS TO THE BODY
I am indebted to Jennifer Nicole Lee for the above title of this post. Jennifer wrote a post entitled “Health Starts in the Mind and Flows to the Body-Retain Your Mind and Clean Out Your Mental House“.
Jennifer had seven very strategies for developing the right mental attitude for achieving success and improving the quality of your life.
The strategies are:
- “Have a crystal-clear vision of what you want to achieve”.
- “Clean out your mental house”!
- “Treat yourself with respect”!
- “Be creative”!
- “Put fitness first: well not exactly first, but make it a top priority”.
- “Set yourself up for success”.
- “Compel and coerce through pain”.
Jennifer has identified seven important changes in attitude that are necessary for successfully improving the quality of our lives. She presented the seven strategies for helping people lose weight. The strategies would also work for solving any problem or reaching any goal. She has some very practical ways for keeping motivation.
These seven strategies indicate how difficult it is to maintain a good mindset for improvement. Self-analysis and remembering to change one’s thinking is very difficult and that is why I developed a mental fitness program.
A mental fitness program provides exercises to retrain and organize one’s brain for success.
With a mental fitness program exercises replace self-analysis. With a mental fitness program, repetition of exercises negates the necessity for tedious self-analysis. With a mental fitness program, your mind becomes strong and capable of improving your life without having to run through a mental checklist of things to remember.
It is important to retrain your mind and clean out your mental house! How do you want to do it?
Please CONTACT ME if you want more information on mental fitness programming. If you would like more information on The North Star Mental Fitness Program, please CLICK HERE.
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If You Can’t Be Honest, You Can’t Change!
There are many ways that people “mess up” their lives. Unfortunately, ” when many people try to stop “messing up”, they ”mess up”?
One of the biggest ways people “mess up” is by not being honest!
If we are “messing up” in some part of our lives, it is not an accident. We are either consciously or unconsciously choosing to “mess up” or failing to make choices to stop “messing up”.
People who fail to stop “messing up” are oftentimes in denial. They are focusing on what they feel they need to do to solve their problem, rather than being aware and honest with themselves regarding their problem.
Let me provide you with an example. Some people “mess up” by over-eating or eating the wrong foods. Overweight people frequently talk about wanting to diet. Let us be honest, do overweight people really want to diet or do they really want to overeat? In order to lose weight, a person must be consciously aware of wanting to over-eat. If a person remembers that he or she wants to over-eat, they can make conscious choices to over-eat or eat less. Conscious choices will be more successful, when we don’t deny or overlook how we “mess up”.
If you are a smoker, then you must be honest and consciously remember that you want to smoke.
If you are failing in achieving a goal, then you must remember that you consciously or unconsciously want to fail.
If you are violent in your relationships, then you must be honest and remember that you want to be violent.
If you can’t be honest about how you are messing up and why, then you can’t change! Honestly isn’t the total solution for stopping ”messing up”. However, honestly is the first step and a very important step if you want to stop “messing up”.
The bottom line will be: If You Can’t Be Honest, You Can’t Change!
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The Mental Fitness Solution For Emotional Overeating
Healthabits had a very insightful post “Emotional Eating: When Diets Don’t Work“.
When you stop and think about it, emotional overeating can prevent any diet from working successfully.
If emotional overeating was not a factor, do you think that any or all diets could work for you?
Is it likely that all diets will fail for you, if your emotional overeating is not controlled or neutralized?
Your success determining question then becomes, how can you control emotional overeating!
When we fail to lose weight, shouldn’t our goal be to reduce emotional overeating rather than trying to find the latest fad diet?
From a mental fitness perspective there are numerous ways to neutralize, prevent and stop emotional overeating. In this post I will only deal with one important insight.
The goal is to change emotions that lead to emotional overeating. It does not matter what the emotion is that leads to emotional overeating. If an emotion is associated with emotional overeating it must be changed!
How do you change emotions? How do you change emotions that operate outside of your conscious awareness, but you know are leading to emotional overeating?
It might be a lot easier to change these emotions than you might imagine. Here’s how to do it. First of all it is important to remember that emotions are created by thoughts. Thinking creates feelings. Thinking about our lives and food creates our feelings and emotional overeating.
If you want to change your feelings and reduce emotional overeating, then change your thoughts. Consciously think in a way to create feelings that will result in emotional satisfaction. Then think the new thought repetitively. Repetitive thinking of the new thought not only will change our feelings, but also will program our brain.
The goal is to repetitively think in a way that provide emotional satisfaction of our wants and needs rather than deprivation.
Emotional overeating is the product of deprivation thinking. We are think and feel deprived of love, happiness or something in our lives, so we indulge in eating and gain weight.
Emotional overeating is often the product of rewards thinking. We think and feel successful, so we reward ourselves by overeating or eating whatever we deserve. Over-eating to reward ourselves is a delusional reward. In reality, gaining weight is not a reward; it is a punishment and burden.
The bottom line is to think to change our feelings. The goal is to repetitively change your thinking in order to change your feelings and achieve your desirable weight.
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Mental Fitness and Maintaining Weight Loss
Do you know what the four reasons are for failure to maintain weight loss? Yahoo Health had an article from The Capessa Blog: Sharing the Wisdom of Women entitled Four Reasons We Regain Weight.
The National Weight Registry reported information on 7000 successful people, who maintained a weight loss of 30 pounds or more for over a year. The successful maintainers of weight loss do the following:
- Daily participate in an aerobic exercise for an hour or longer
- Focused on watching calories
- Keep food logs
- Chose healthy and low-fat foods
I recommend that you read the Yahoo article regarding a far too common mindset that results in weight gain following significant loss of weight. We fail to continue the successful behaviors that resulted in weight loss once our goal is obtained. We rationalize and before long our mindset and behavior returns to our “heavy mindset” and we gain and maintain unwanted weight.
The philosophy behind physical and mental fitness is important to remember, if you want to maintain weight loss. In order to maintain physical or mental fitness, it is necessary to continue exercising once that goal is obtained or that gain is lost.
From a mental fitness perspective, it is important to motivate oneself to take care of oneself by maintaining activities that are necessary for achieving permanent weight loss. Think about setting a goal to maintain a healthy lifestyle supporting one’s desirable weight instead of a goal of just losing weight.
From a mental fitness perspective, it is important to prepare oneself for success as well as for defeat. It takes strong mental fitness to maintain goal directed activity, urgency and commitment once a goal has been achieved. Without mental fitness and a commitment to continue successful endeavors once we have reached the goal we never can become champions.
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When the One You Love Won’t Get Help
I had a heart wrenching response to my post, Too Many Problems . A woman was very concerned about her mother who is struggling with emotional problems. Her mother has been unresponsive to her requests and concerns. Her mother has refused to get help and she sees her mother slipping away into depression.
I believe many of us have faced or will face similar situations. Some of these situations will be big and some will be small. Sometimes we want our significant others to keep a doctor’s appointment or see a dentist. Our requests fall on deafened Ears. Sometimes our concerns are extremely painful as our significant others fail to seek medical treatment for symptoms of major medical illnesses.
This is what I told the woman who was concerned about her mother.
I believe that is necessary to empower your mother. I recommend that you communicate to her that you have confidence in her ability to assess her situation and determine when and if she might need assistance. Putting responsibility for her health into her care will empower her.
I would let your mother know that you love her and are willing to accept whatever decisions she makes regarding her life. I also would make sure your mother knows that you feel loved and accepted by her even though you always don’t agree on issues.
It is important for you to remain strong and determined to take care of you and your family. Communicate to your mother that you are confident in taking care of yourself and your family. Also communicate to your mother that you have confidence in her regarding taking care of herself.
In conclusion, we must recognize our limitations even though it is painful and difficult. We can only make decisions to take care of ourselves. We cannot make decisions to take care of adults who are resisting. We must realize that people like this woman’s mother cannot be made to make decisions we feel are better for them until they are ready, if ever. Sometimes when we stop pushing people to make decisions for themselves, they begin to realize the need for making such decisions for themselves and will seek help.
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Counseling or Mental Fitness Training?
I am often asked what is the difference between counseling and mental fitness training. This is a very important question. The differences are significant. For some people counseling is a better match. For other people mental fitness training is preferable.
It is very difficult to reduce all forms of therapy into a brief synopsis. Therapies usually emphasize the individual’s discovery and understanding of the nature of their problems in order to overcome the problems. Different therapies may analyze family history, interpersonal dynamics, irrational thought patterns, unconscious dynamics, and feelings as the road to recovery. Therapies are based on self-analysis, usually of one’s past.
Mental fitness training is not based on self-analysis. Mental fitness training is learning new strategies for making decisions and becoming psychologically stronger. Remember, the strategies in the North Star Mental Fitness Program are the empowering strategies for change learned from successful clients in therapy.
If you do not want to enter therapy and discover your own successful and empowering strategies, then you can learn from others. You can learn 15 different ways to solve problems and to make yourself stronger. You can become stronger than your problems. You can be strong enough to solve your problems by applying one or as many of the mental fitness strategies as you choose.
Mental fitness training takes many forms:
- You learn 15 or less strategies for solving problems or reaching your goals.
- You think about your life, problems and goals from the perspective of these 15 strategies.
- You can apply these solutions for any problem in your life or when you want to make new changes in your life.
- You can keep your focus with these 15 solutions, when you are working on changing lifelong patterns or reaching long-range goals
- You can use the mental fitness strategies for improving your self-concept, going beyond your comfort zone and for determining your emotions.
- You can repeat the mental fitness exercises much as you do physical exercises in order to make yourself mentally and psychologically stronger.
Both counseling and mental fitness training can empower you to make changes in your life. It is your choice to use either service, when you are dissatisfied with your life and what more for yourself.
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Too Many Problems?
In the next few blogs I am going to share with you how the origins of the mental fitness solution. When I first began working as a psychologist, it didn’t take her long to realize that most of my clients had more problems to address the more humanly possible in one session or groups of sessions.
It was frustrating for my clients, who had to put some of their problems “on hold”. It was also extremely upsetting to me as a therapist. I wanted to be able to help my clients by addressing all of their problems and was unable to do so.
Over time my thinking changed. I stopped focusing on finding solutions for one problem at a time. I was intrigued with finding solutions or procedures to follow to find solutions for all of my client’s problems. Before long I began to teach various strategies that could be applied to any or all of a person’s problems. We still would work on one or two problems in order to show how the strategies worked.
Over time, more and more strategies were discovered. Now there are 15 different strategies in the North Star Mental Fitness Program or in the explanatory book, I Live within the Environment Created by My Choices! With the strategies, a person has 15 different solve a problem or achieve a dream.
Life can become much more easier and simple when you have strategies for living your life! I have become convinced that There is a Mental Fitness Solution for Every Problem! To make it even better, the process of finding a solution for one problem will work on all of your problems!
If you are interested in the mental fitness program, mental fitness training or coaching, please e-mail me at drhalss@yahoo.com or drhal@northstarmentalfitness.com. If you have any comments or questions, please e-mail me.
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I Don’t Care!
Consciously, most of us probably have sometimes been motivated by a “I don’t care” attitude. Sometimes out of anger, disappointment, fear or anxiety, we say or act-out the “I don’t care” attitude.
Sometimes people are unconsciously motivated by the “I don’t care” attitude. We see this attitude in people when they are indifferent to their health and engage in activities that are very destructive for good health. The “I don’t care” attitude operates out of our conscious awareness. We are in denial that we don’t care about ourselves and our health.
We may not want to admit to ourselves that we have a “I don’t care” attitude regarding our health. However, if you have manifestations of this attitude in your lifestyle and health, then it is pretty hard to deny the underlying motive “I don’t care”.
We can make conscious choices to take care of ourselves and our health. Today we have the opportunity to make choices and tomorrow we’ll have opportunity to make choices to take care of ourselves or to express the devastating motivation of “I don’t care”.
Do you want to care for yourself and your health?
Remember, You Will Live within the Body Created by Your Choices!
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Changing Expectations Following Brain Surgery
This woman has made a remarkable recovery from surgery brain surgery. She basically has had to relearn all that she had learned before the surgery. Still she has trouble with her balance, coordination of her eyes and walking. In spite of these difficulties she continues to exercise and work on regaining her life.
She has struggled with depression. In spite of her remarkable physical recoveries, she still experiences depression. Her depression is triggered by unrealistic expectations. Unconsciously, she still expects that she should be able to manage all of her life responsibilities as she did prior to her surgery. Not being able to cook, clean and entertain as she has before triggered her depression.
She has discovered that by consciously making her expectations compatible with her ability to achieve has significantly reduced her depression.
It important to remember that unrealistic expectations is a major cause of depression and anxiety. Especially for patients in recovery, it is important to reduce expectations and establish realistic expectations without guilt.
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Psychic Growth Following Trauma
How have you managed the traumatic stress in your life? Traumatic stressors could include disasters such as the fires in California or any of the floods that have hit the United States in the last few years.
Other sources of traumatic stress are the
- loss of a loved one
- chronic or acute ailments
- violent or abusive crime
- accident or injury
- financial hardship
- career or location change/move
- changes in family responsibility
- divorce
- retirement
- combat
- or others.
To assess your post traumatic growth, you can use the Post Traumatic Growth Inventory from the APA Health Center.
