3 Steps To Boosting Your Mood And Reaching Your Potential
One of the best things you can do to get control of yourself is to understand the connection between body, mind & environment...It may be the most foundational building block of success.
If you can’t control your body you’ll be unable to manage emotions & become disciplined, you simply won’t reach your potential if you’re disconnected. Look at what happens when you're fatigued or ill. Your temperament & perspective changes.
With that said, anyone is capable of becoming more connected & disciplined.
To do it, follow these basic steps:
3 Steps To Living A More Disciplined And Successful Life
1. Understand the brain.
The brain is essentially three brains layered on top of each other. There’s the lizard brain, the mammalian brain and the neocortex.
Each one came from a different stage of our evolution. When you realize that these brains have different agendas, you’ll start to realize you can get leverage on yourself to engage in more long-term behaviors (mainly from the neocortex) instead of short-term behaviors (which are generally motivated by the lizard and mammalian brains).
The better you get at delaying gratification (HUGE) the better you will get at just about everything else that’s worthwhile. It all starts with understanding how your brain works.
2. Engineer behaviour loops into your life.
Understand that no matter how good you get at delaying gratification you will always come up against emotional impulses.
Whether it's to eat junk food, goof off when you should work, or getting overly emotional, you can train yourself to use those impulses to your advantage by turning them into habit loop triggers.
For example, if you’re in a romantic relationship, anytime you have the impulse to criticize, use that as a behaviour loop trigger to pay the person a sincere compliment. Use this to turn your emotional impulses into long-term beneficial behaviors.
It applies to just about every negative impulse or emotion you can imagine. You just have to do the work of identifying the emotion & getting really good at flipping it into a trigger as fast as possible.
It won't be easy at first, but it will pay off massively once you've mastered it.
3. Use your body to leverage your mind.
Remember: your body & mind exist in a feedback loop associated with your environment. For example; If you're sad, the body will take that posture & that’s all you’ll identify within your environment. Can you see how it compounds the issue..?
Alternatively, if you want to feel happy, you can force yourself to laugh out loud, or go for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Something as simple as being alone for a length of time, can still dramatically improve your neurochemistry & you will start to feel sensations of happiness that can realign your neurochemistry, biochemistry & environmental perspective.
With these tools you can snap out of even the worst mood very, very quickly, modifying your reactions to situations we have no sway over.
There are many ways to get control of your mind & boost your discipline & potential, but these three are a powerful start.
inSight Nutrition & Lifestyle, Fredericton, New Brunswick
Get in touch: neil@insightnl.ca or Contact Us here
Providing nutrition and lifestyle advice for clients in Fredericton, NB and across the world, Neil Burchill brings a wealth of knowledge and insight from his real life experiences struggling with sustainable nutrition, lifestyle and fitness challenges.
