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!

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.

EMDR Therapy Demystified

EMDR is an extremely powerful and effective integrative therapy that uses a specific protocol to reduce emotional and physical distress. The distress may be related to memories, adverse life experiences or traumas that have occurred at any time throughout your life. EMDR allows the opportunity for healing at the deepest roots and helps to increase self-awareness while offering a renewed perspective on the present moment.

Since I began integrating EMDR into my clinical practice, it has transformed my work. I have been especially inspired by the power of EMDR when a person feels a deeper sense of emotional freedom and increased self-acceptance both internally and externally. This authentic self-acceptance and awareness creates a deeper connection to the core of their being as well as a sense of balance and peace within. The process allows you to not only heal, but to grow, change and feel better than imagined.

I can personally attest to the power of EMDR from both sides of the couch. After completing my first EMDR intensive training, I searched for an EMDR therapist as I was amazed by the process. Prior to EMDR therapy, I had debilitating performance anxiety. I realized through the training that I was operating out of old, stuck, negative cognitions and feedback loops in my brain that were related to my past, and were literally holding me back in my life.

I am now able to give presentations without physically shaking, a racing heart, a red face, nausea, intense fear and a near panic attack. It really has been life changing. For those I have had the privilege to support through the EMDR therapy process, I have been able to witness healing over and over again, which is truly inspiring.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR was developed by Francine Shapiro in 1987 and is administered through an eight-phase process. Here is where it can get technical, making it a little tricky to explain, but I wanted to help to clarify some elements of EMDR therapy as so many people ask me what it’s like during certain parts of the process.

The eye movements create bilateral stimulation of the brain. You work with a specific distressing memory, body sensations and emotions that the memory brings up for you and how the memory makes you feel about yourself. These experiences from the memories may have made you feel, for example, not good enough, like you had to be perfect, or as though you are not in control. These are all examples of negative cognitions which essentially get stuck and create negative feedback loops internally, making it difficult to move forward.

The bilateral stimulation that occurs with the eye movements begins to reprocess those memories in order to desensitize to them. This essentially frees the emotional and physical distress related to the memory. After working through the distressing memories, a positive cognition is installed, creating a healthier outlook on your experience.

I will try to explain this using an example of when I reprocessed a memory related to my performance anxiety. While I was thinking of a distressing memory, I tuned into the uncomfortable emotions it brought up (embarrassed, worried, frustrated) and the uncomfortable body sensations (feeling hot, my heart racing, nausea). I simultaneously brought up how this made me feel about myself, or my negative cognition, which was: I am inadequate. The therapist asked me how distressing this felt on a 0-10 scale.

While sitting with all of that discomfort, I watched the therapist’s fingers go back and forth for about 30 seconds. She asked me to just notice whatever comes up during that time. She would stop, and I would tell her what came up. Then she instructed me to “go with that,” meaning now focus on whatever it was that came up for me. For example, I remembered my hands shaking, my mind going blank and the look on the people’s faces at the very beginning of this particular presentation. While sitting with that experience, she administered the eye movements again. This was repeated several times.

Amazingly, after about ten sets of intense discomfort, I started to feel less discomfort. I even had some positive thoughts come up and felt more at ease. When I would focus on the positive thoughts, more positive thoughts and feelings arose. While my distress did not completely go away in one experience, it did reduce enough to notice an immediate impact.

After several memories that reinforced my negative cognition were worked through, I was able to create a new template for how I view myself. This has increased my self-compassion. Now when I give a presentation, my old baggage from those memories does not show up! It really has been life changing.

This is one example of just a part of the EMDR therapy process. I wanted to offer this glimpse into the process as it can be difficult to understand, but know that there is so much more. If you would like to learn more about the technicality, the science, research and more specifically about the eight phases of EMDR, I invite you visit the website: www.EMDRIA.org.

EMDR therapy has improved the lives of so many who have struggled with memories and experiences far more intense and challenging to cope with than my example. For those who have PTSD, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, eating disorders or anyone who feels as though they are operating out of old, stuck negative beliefs about themselves, EMDR may be a useful and valuable therapeutic technique.

If you are considering EMDR therapy and have any further questions at all, or if you are in the New York City area and would like to schedule a session, feel free to contact me today.