How to Reset Your Mindset in 5 Days

Remember those plans you had to improve your health? Remember the desire to exercise more, eat more vegetables and drink more water? Remember how you were going to get more sleep, spend more time doing something creative or practice more self-care? The difficult thing with creating a new goal is sticking with it. This is where mindset is vitally important. When you have something well prepared in your mindset, you are far more likely to make it happen than if you don’t. Are you ready to reset your mindset but you aren’t sure as to where to begin? Here’s a plan to create a healthy mindset reset in just five days.

Mindset is focusing on what you want with determination and making each and every choice based on what you want. You decide to choose your desired outcome. This is a commitment to yourself and your future goal. To begin, get your calendar out and mark in it right now where you will devote 15-20 minutes to this practice for five days to reset your mindset.

Now that you have decided, planned and prepared for the reset, commit to following this plan for the next five days.

Day 1: What Do You Want?

What is the health-related goal that you have been meaning to do, you have been putting off or fantasizing about but have not yet made it happen? Ask yourself if there is a reason for this? Now, set a timer for 5 minutes and bring to mind what you want. Visualize it and stay with the imagery for the full 5 minutes. When the timer goes off, use this affirmation: “Today, I will focus my mindset on what I want.” Spend a few minutes reflectively journaling about your experience.

Day 2: Strengthening Your Desire

Day 2 day is about expanding and internalizing and strengthening your desire. Begin by visualizing what you want and while it is becoming stronger in your mindset, allow it to sink into your heart. Ask yourself: why do I want this? Allow yourself to tune into your inner desire and allow it to rest in your heart. Set a timer for 5 minutes and focus on how it feels to hold what you want in your heart center. Breathe and stay as focused as possible on your heart. Once the timer goes off, use this affirmation: “My mindset is becoming stronger with the strength of my desire in my heart.” Spend a few minutes reflectively journaling about your experience.

Day 3: Make it Happen!

Now that you have established what you want, you have felt the desire for what you want, now believe that you have the ability to make it happen. For the meditation, visualize yourself actively doing or achieving your goals. Set a timer for 5 minutes and hold this belief within yourself that you will maintain action towards your goals. You will make this commitment to yourself and believe in your ability to follow through. Once the timer goes off, use the affirmation: “I believe in my ability to achieve my goals.” Spend a few minutes reflectively journaling about your experience.

Day 4: Take Consistent Action

Action is the difference between wanting and creating. Action can cure any fears you have surrounding achieving your goals. Today, choose to take decisive action towards you goal. What you have in your mindset is focusing on action and the mindful meditation will be reflecting on the action you did take today. As you are ready for the meditation, reflect on the action you did take towards your goals. How does this reflection on your action make you feel emotionally, physically, energetically? Set your timer for 5 minutes and reflect on how it felt to take decisive action. Once the timer goes off, use the affirmation: “I create what I want through taking consistent, decisive action.” Spend time reflectively journaling about your experience.

Day 5: Maintaining a Focused Mindset

When you focus more on what you have accomplished and less on what you haven’t, you are more likely to feel accomplished and motivated. When you only focus on what you haven’t accomplished, it depletes your energy and will cause your mindset to waiver. Stay focused on what you want! Any time your mindset begins to waiver, check in with yourself. Remind yourself of what you want, reflect on your commitment to yourself daily. Set a timer for 5 minutes and visualize yourself pushing through any obstacle or challenge to achieving what you want. Notice how it feels to remain focused and to maintain this mindset of determination and overcoming obstacles. Once the timer goes off, use the affirmation, “I am committed to myself and what I want.” Spend time reflectively journaling about your experience.  

Shifting your mindset is difficult. Often, we get stuck in old patterns and habits and can be hard to change. When you create a daily practice with devoted time to reflect and search inward, you will bring what you want into focus. When you are focused, you are more likely to maintain the positive yet challenging journey to continue the hard work. Showing up for yourself, showing up for your life, your experiences and choosing to keep your focus on what you want will help you maintain the ability to consistently make the decision to choose what you want. Set your mindset daily, take decisive action and you will find that what you want it on its way.

Want a guided support to reset your mindset? I created a 7-day guided mindset reset practice to help do just that, you can find it HERE!

The 5 Stages of Awareness: A Mindful Approach to Heal Emotional Eating

Emotional awareness adds tremendous value to life as it creates a rich experience of the totality of being alive. Understanding the inner workings of your mind, your heart, and your spirit requires an ability to feel and understand the depth and breadth of your emotions: all of your emotions. However, many people spend a lot of time unconsciously avoiding their emotions. Why is this? Because as human beings we tend to seek comfort and avoid discomfort.

Emotions are an incredibly valuable element of being a human, of being alive. They are a response to our experiences, environments, relationships, and our lives as a whole. If you have been avoiding experiencing your emotions for some time, or using food as an escape from your emotions, this may seem like a daunting task: to learn to be present with and feel your emotions. Working with the five stages of awareness allows you to experience your emotions and grow in your emotional awareness and well-being. Over time, you will create a sense of being more grounded, comfortable with, and grateful for the wholeness of your being.

When you embark on this process, you will stop trying to escape your emotions. Many people use food to avoid emotions and find only temporary comfort from the discomfort of their emotions. This leads to mindless eating, over eating, poor body image, and disordered eating.

When you numb yourself with food to avoid an uncomfortable emotion, you are setting yourself up for more discomfort internally. The emotions don’t just go away.  When food is the temporary solution to your problems, food then becomes a problem, leaving you stuck in a vicious, dangerous cycle. Use these five stages of awareness to break the cycle and begin experiencing your emotions. Allow yourself to begin the journey into some of the darker places within, in order to experience the fullness of your light. As Dr. Kelly Brogan says, “You have to walk through the wound.”

The foundation for the five stages of awareness is mindfulness. It is about experiencing your life, your emotions, and really being present for whatever is true right now. Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with a nonjudgmental awareness. That means you are present with whatever arises in the moment. When you are present, you don’t run from whatever arises, you don’t resist it, you don’t numb it out. This numbing may protect you temporarily from discomfort, but it limits your experience of your deep internal world and can end up numbing out all emotions, the pleasant and more desirable ones as well. Here are the five stages of awareness:

1.    Mindful moment

By giving yourself a mindful moment each and every day you will connect with what is true in this moment. The mind may try to run from it, resist it and search for distractions. However, with practice, this process becomes more and more comfortable and leads to acceptance and peace. This is a moment of quiet reflection where you can just be.

2.    Recognize and name your emotion

Notice an emotion as it arises in the present moment and how it impacts your thoughts. Name it, not to judge it, but to understand it and to connect with it. Practice being aware, notice what is present without getting on the roller coaster of your thoughts and feelings. Notice the impact of the emotion on your physical body. This experience may be pleasant (happiness often comes with a feeling of warmth internally) and some may be unpleasant (anxiety often comes with increased heartbeat, muscular tension and shallow breathing). Notice your tendency to want to avoid or grasp onto the emotion and try to stay present with it.

3.    Create a non-judgmental awareness through observing the emotion

Here, you practice simply noticing and observing the emotion as if you are a witness to it. You are observing the emotions and working to release any judgment of your response to it. Judgements such as, happy (good) and anxiety (bad), are not useful in the process of witnessing and accepting emotions. Rather, you are now simply noticing the emotion and then sitting with it from the witness/silent observer perspective. Remain in the witness perspective for about 1-5 minutes. Set a timer, notice the mind’s desire to avoid, distract and move away from the emotion. Try not to judge that experience knowing that this process is challenging and takes time, effort, determination, and focus.

4.    Gather the information the emotion is providing you

In this stage you are tuning into the information the emotion is providing you. Understanding the emotion is useful wisdom regarding your internal experience. Allowing yourself to understand why you had the emotion in the first place will create an opportunity to choose how to respond to the emotion. Emotions are information about our experience of the present moment. For example, if I am happy, why? If I am anxious, why? This is extremely valuable information about our experiences. Understanding the why behind your emotions offers the opportunity to make a decision about how to respond. If I am anxious because I am worrying about something I cannot control, that is not useful. If it is something I may be able to control, how could I cope in more effective way or take action? When you understand what the emotion is trying to communicate to you, you become more self-aware. This creates freedom to be more comfortable with your emotions, the depths of your being, with your true self.

5.    Witness it and let it go

The final stage of emotional awareness is to let it go. Release the emotion. Often what is feared is that an emotion will bring you down, will take over, or will be unbearable. However, emotional awareness brings just the opposite, it lifts you up to know that it can be released. As you learn to let it go, you will feel more grounded in your being. As you understand, manage and cope with your emotions, you will become more comfortable feeling them, to let them go and move forward.

Begin integrating these stages of emotional awareness into your daily routine and notice the impact. When you allow yourself the freedom to experience your emotions you no longer seek out the comfort of escaping with food. When food becomes a facet of life that is pleasurable, nourishing and life enhancing rather than a battle internally, you will make peace with food through the process of making peace with your emotions and yourself.

How to Manage Emotional Food Cravings Along Your Path to Making Peace with Food

We all have food cravings. You know, that feeling where you just want something sweet, or salty or crunchy, or maybe all three in one! But why do we have these cravings and what can we do about them? Occasional food cravings are normal, however if you struggle with emotional eating, the cravings may be emotionally driven. It is vital to become emotionally aware in order to differentiate what type of craving your are experiencing. This will allow you to make a conscious choice in the moment of a craving. 

A general food craving is a message from your body. It may be trying to send you the message that you are dehydrated, that you have a nutritional deficiency, or that your energy dip may be related to a blood sugar imbalance. These are all really useful messages that are important to notice. When you truly listen to your body, you receive and understand these messages with clarity. A general food craving may also indicate that your daily diet is boring, uninspired, dull in flavor and lacking in a wide range of nutrients. The good news is, you can do something about all of this!

An emotional craving is different. An emotional craving is due to experiencing an emotion and not wanting to be present with it. There is a big difference. If you are experiencing a general food craving, you might be satisfied by having a small amount of what you are craving or a healthier version of what you are craving. With an emotional craving, this is often not the case as the food serves to numb the emotion only temporarily.

An emotional craving is far more difficult to manage and can lead to mindless overeating, weight gain and negative feelings about yourself and your body. The challenge is to begin to allow yourself to experience your emotions and have an alternative behavior aside from eating in order to manage your emotions.

When emotional eating has become deeply engrained as a behavior and your primary go-to coping skill to manage your emotions, it can take a long time to effectively manage and change it. If emotional cravings that lead to emotional eating do not become managed, it can lead to eating disorders, depression, anxiety and a low self-esteem.

Here are some examples of common emotional cravings:

• When you are feeling lonely, food will be your friend and keep you company.

• When you are feeling anxious, food helps to calm you down and temporarily occupy your mind.

• When you are feeling sad, food becomes your comfort.

• When you are feeling bored, food gives you something to do with your time.

• When you are feeling down, food becomes your pleasure.

One strategy to begin to understand what may be driving your food cravings is keeping an emotional cravings journal. This is a place to write down, acknowledge and process your emotions in order to more deeply understand the why underneath and at the root of your craving. Another strategy is having a supportive person to talk to. This may be someone you trust, or someone such as a therapist or health coach to provide support as you work through your emotional cravings. Learning to manage, accept and experience your emotions will help you heal your relationship with food.

As a Wholistic Food Therapist, my focus is working with women who struggle with emotional eating. I have put together a 3-Step Emotional Cravings Protocol that helps to stop the cycle of deeply rooted emotional eating patterns. If you would like a FREE copy, sign up for my newsletter on my website so you can begin managing your emotional food cravings today.

Making peace with food is possible. If you find you would like more support along your path to healing, contact me as I have a number of ways to help support you along your journey to a healthy relationship with food as well as with yourself.