“You don’t need to be a disciplined person to be successful. In fact, you can become successful with less discipline than you think for one simple reason. Success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right. The trick to success is to choose the right habit and bring just enough discipline to establish it.”
Gary Keller
Author of The One Thing
With Awareness Comes Clarity
Congratulations if you made it to the second blogpost from MelloFit Labs. The first blogpost, Knowledge Vs Awareness, was intended to start an internal dialogue with yourself about the seeds of change. Change is hard. Changing habits, addictions, our physical appearance, our relationships, or whatever needs changing, requires a leap of faith at first. This leap of faith begins by simply observing the world around you and becoming aware of the possibilities. This belief that making a meaningful change in your life is possible, if it comes, comes from hitting rock bottom and seeing only one path forward. A less dangerous path may come from being inspired by someone who has experienced what you are going through and is in a better place now. Maybe an intervention from a loved one may be necessary to disrupt your destructive patterns. However way this happens, this new belief has the potential to force your reticular activating system, the part of your brain that highlights what you observe in your environment, to focus primarily on better options and solutions. I hope this blog post is effective in grabbing your attention to stimulate your curiosity in a way that makes you ask some uncomfortable questions. If I fail, please don’t give up. Keep looking for the right environment, or the right person online, or in person, that nurtures your awareness around the mind body connection. If you are unhappy with your life and turn to food, substances, or toxic relationships for “comfort”, over time your body will tell you truths about what your mind believes about you. Connecting these signals your body is broadcasting to you every moment with your impulsive thoughts will be the key to unlocking the mystery around your addictive habits. If this sounds complicated, it’s not. When your mind and body work together and stop fighting each other, good things happen.
Understanding the Mind Body Connection & Suffering
Make no mistake focusing on developing a strong body and mind is a worthwhile goal. Helping people look and feel better and addressing all the roadblocks along the way are central to the services offered here at MelloFit Labs. Appreciating the importance of a healthy body means that you appreciate one simple truth. Not optimizing sleep, nutrition, and exercise, will make life progressively more difficult. If you are depressed, it will make your depression worse. If you have a substance addiction, the substances will become more and more addictive and become your first choice to deal with your anxiety. Good sleep, a healthy diet and mindful movement have the opposite impact, making the addictions less attractive and anxiety less of an issue. We understand this intuitively, but knowledge is not power, awareness is power. Awareness of this reality is what will lead to action. Just knowing this as facts on paper or as well-meaning advice from someone, and not at a deeper level makes you vulnerable to the delusions most people tell themselves. The delusion that things will get better on their own, or on the flip side that nothing will get better, so let’s just get drunk and ignore it. For these people time is not your friend.
If that awareness is not there in this moment, take some time to observe the suffering of others around you. What is driving it? Just stop what you are doing right now, close your eyes and visualize yourself 10 years from today. Take a moment to imagine what you may look like given your current lifestyle choices. How do you move? Are you having the same anxious thoughts. Are you an insecure or confident person? If you commit to this exercise for even one minute, something interesting will start to happen. Making that connection between your mind and body and acknowledging the effort it will take to make changes, will naturally result in this feeling of being overwhelmed. It’s okay to live here for a moment. If you become aware of the physical sensations associated with your anxiety and recognize that your fears are taking over, this is the beginning of waking up. Understanding that this will impact your overall success and happiness in life. This is a level of awareness that very few people discover or discover when it’s too late.
If your body is not healthy and your mind is in a constant state of anxiety, your success in life will be compromised. You won’t reach the heights you may be capable of reaching or that success may be cut short. Any success that you do have, you won’t be able to fully appreciate.
This awareness will cause anxiety. It will likely amplify your impulse to revert into a cycle of taking unconscious actions that seek to numb your awareness through dopamine hits. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in the short run. These dopamine hits are coping mechanisms to deal with uncomfortable truths. Telling a smoker in the early stages of this process to quit smoking is not a wise first step. The benefits that the cigarette provides the smoker should not be undervalued and may be a stepping stone to overcoming other bad habits. Turning knowledge into awareness is a continuous process that proves successful only when you overcome the anxiety and the fears that hold you back.
The Elephant in the Room
My first question to you, if I had you in front of me, is what is causing you anxiety at this moment in time. Your ability to answer this one question will be very informative. Do you recognize how your anxiety may be interfering with your happiness and progress in life? Do you understand how this anxiety is possibly making you physically sick and aggravating any existing conditions. My experience tells me that most people have difficulty diving deep when responding to these questions. My goal is for you to ask this one question, what is the one thing I must do to make everything else in my life easier or effortless. It’s a big question so be patient with yourself. The better you can articulate your anxious feelings the easier you will move through this process. This is not a process that I invented, but rather one that I discovered in my own journey through some very severe periods of anxiety in my life. The universal principles that emerged into my own consciousness are not unique to me. This awareness has given me the ability to observe in others how untreated anxiety has the potential to ruin lives.
On the Road to “The One Thing”
Narrowing the list of options and knowing where to start will be difficult at first. It will become obvious with time, but only if you take this question seriously. Finding the one thing has the capacity to unlock a world that frees you from the debilitating emotions that stop you from taking the actions you know you need to take to improve your life.
We can all be affected by life’s hardships, not the least of which is aging. Even at a younger age we can observe our body starting to break down. This is not limited to our physical abilities but also cognitive function and pain tolerance. Therefore, it would make sense to do the things now that mitigate these effects of normal aging by being mindful of our sleep, nutrition, and exercise. The healthiest adults I know incorporated these habits in childhood. They had parents who walked the walk and demonstrated healthy choices. As adults these lessons are harder to learn but no less important. The reason we don’t all naturally connect the dots is because we underestimate the time we have, and our ability to overcome setbacks such as accidents, relationship breakdowns, and chronic health conditions. When we sacrifice our physical health, we sacrifice our mental health. When we sacrifice our mental health and let anxiety rule our lives, this dramatically increases the likelihood of getting into a serious accident, unhealthy relationships and developing chronic diseases.
This compromises our awareness to see the bigger picture because it impacts the ability of our reticular activating system (RAS), to notice the people and things around us that have the potential to improve our lives. The RAS will instead draw attention to the things that feed the impulsive parts of our brain, driven by pleasure, and repulsed by pain, especially the pain associated with improvement. So, if what we need is a healthy brain to manage our emotions, and we improve the health of our brains through proper sleep, nutrition, and exercise, we can begin to heal the anxiety we face that is often associated with so many other health concerns and addictions.
Deciding On “The One Thing”
Oprah Winfrey, iconic talk show host, has a short life philosophy about what she describes as “Listening to Life’s Whispers”. These are like warnings that you are on the wrong path in life. If you don’t listen to the whisper, the whisper gets louder. If you still don’t hear it, the next attempt to get your attention is a pebble on the head, which becomes a brick, and ultimately results in a collapse of the brick wall. Awareness is power and with it comes the opportunity to avoid disaster in your life.
We have gone through some good examples of where to focus your attention when deciding your one thing that if you do will make the rest of your life easier. If you are in a constant state of anxiety this needs to be addressed, maybe with outside help. Dealing with your fears will be important to address. Beginning that dialogue with yourself and/or someone you trust will be a pivotal step because not everything is intuitive.
Getting organized to remove some of the tensions in your life may be your one thing. This can serve to relieve the decision fatigue most of face when deciding a thousand different things everyday, from what we eat, to what we will wear, and with who we should talk. Most of these decisions can be made in advance to free up our mental bandwidth to take on more productive activities that will make us stronger rather than making us weaker.
Of course, with true awareness, you must gain control over your sleep, nutrition, and exercise. Each one of these can be your one thing (at a time) when you understand the intimate connection it has for your overall mental health. One of the biggest draw backs with most therapy is that it ignores or downplays these 3 health essentials. A physically healthy brain helps us process new information and build a new perspective about the problems that plague us, which ironically is what therapy seeks to do. A good therapist will emphasize both. What you decide will become your one thing will be a highly personal decision and will feel right when it comes to you.
Final Thoughts
If my time in the Emergency Room has taught me anything, it’s that life is unpredictable. Especially for those who just let life happen to them, and don’t take responsibility for the many things that are under their control.
The path you take will be different than what other people take. Don’t be shy to have that conversation to define your one thing. You’ll be surprised how easy it may become to give up the habits and emotional baggage that have been holding you a prisoner for so long.
This is not a journey that everyone will take, or even feel comfortable talking about. They understand that they will face resistance to change which will induce moderate to severe anxiety. They will opt for the quick fixes that deal with their immediate symptoms rather than the root cause. However, for those who understand the importance of identifying that one thing preventing you from moving forward in life, and start to build a foundation to address it, to you, I say, profound peace and joy await you. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
