Mind Power – Three Strategies to Improve Your Mental Diet
by Carol Woodliff & Karen Maleck-Whiteley
How’s Your Mental Diet? Just like your body needs nutritious food to function at its best, your mind functions at its best when you are conscious of the input you give it. Here are three strategies to improve your mental diet.
- Limit exposures to negative news stories, television shows etc. Violent crime rates have gone down over the last 10 years. Unfortunately due to media exposure, public perception is that we are less safe than ever before. Be aware of how much media input you receive and when you receive it. It is especially important to limit exposure to negative materials right before you go to bed as your subconscious mind will have all night to replay whatever you see right before you go to bed.
- Increase Positive Input. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to get drawn into a complaining session? One person starts with a complaint about something and then it becomes a game of “I can top that!” Surround yourself with positive people. Make an effort to read uplifting stories. Practice gratitude and affirmations.
- Monitor Your Self-Talk. We all have hundreds of thoughts each day. Unfortunately many of our thoughts are phrased in ways that ridicule our goals, decrease our confidence and limit our possibilities. We call these thoughts the committee. Those voices in your head that tell you aren’t good enough or shouldn’t take a risk are natural, but they often get in our way to tackling our goals.
So what should we do? Check your thoughts. Those thoughts are simply habits. If they aren’t accurate, useful and kind, tell the committee to take a break! Rephrase the thoughts until they point you in a positive direction. Repeat the new thoughts until they have more strength that the old negative thoughts.
Let’s say you’ve been working on a plan to lose weight and you arrive at your office and someone has brought in donuts and you eat two! Now your committee goes to work and says–”You ate two donuts! You are such a pig! You will never lose weight. You can’t control yourself!” Running this statement through our test.
Is it accurate? You ate two donuts. That is true. As for the rest of this committee member’s diatribe move on to the next questions.
Is it useful? Not if you want to motivate yourself to lose weight.
Is it kind? Hardly.
So what do you do now? Rephrase the statement to something that fits all the above criteria. I did eat those two donuts and I guess I will have to exercise more and eat lighter for lunch and dinner. Next time, I’ll have to get out of the way of temptation sooner.
Being conscious of your mental diet will help support you to more happiness and success!