If you’ve been reading this blog or following me on social media for a while you’ll know I’m big on the power of mindset for wellbeing! Today I wanted to explain in more detail why I believe that mindset is the single most powerful tool we have to be healthier and happier.

If you were a computer and your mindset was the operating system, and any kind of changes to how you eat, move and behave were software programmes, you’d eventually get to a place where the operating system needs to be upgraded before you can download and use any new programmes.

This is exactly what it’s like with mindset. It doesn’t matter what diet you try, if it’s more like intuitive eating, even self care – trying to make those changes a success without addressing your mindset first can backfire big time. Often this happens in the form of self sabotage – literally doing things that your logical conscious mind doesn’t want to do, like eating a pack of biscuits when you’re trying to lose weight, I know I’ve been there with that one!

Sometimes there are physiological reasons for that kind of behaviour too, however mindset is so dominant in so many areas of our lives it makes sense to figure out how to a) understand what your current mindset is and b) how to change the elements that aren’t currently serving you.

Diet Mentality

In my experience coaching women 1-2-1, it’s the diet mentality (you could think of it like a specific group of mindset thoughts – or a programme your brain computer keeps running) which are especially detrimental to being able to find a more balanced and healthy relationship with food. This is often seen as having good and bad labels on food, being ‘all or nothing’ and bingeing and restricting cycles.

The stories we tell ourselves

Another aspect of mindset for wellbeing is tied up in ‘the stories we tell ourselves’ or as I sometimes put it, the internal records we have playing. Those stories or records might be telling us we’ll never be slim, we’ll never be good enough, we can’t run because we aren’t ‘sporty’ enough etc. When we understand what our stories are and where they’ve come from, we can start telling ourselves new stories, or in my record player analogy, we can change the record to a much kinder tune.

Crutches and ‘numbing out’

Another aspect of mindset is in the avoidance of feeling certain emotions. When we aren’t used to allowing ourselves to really feel how we feel, we look for ways to numb out of that feeling, or we seek a crutch to help us through it. Food is often one of those crutches and ways of numbing out (as are a multitude of other things like shopping, drinking and watching TV).

Those are just three ways that mindset can have a profound impact on our lives and as this is such a massive area that I can totally geek out on I’d love to take you further on a journey of getting to know your mindset and starting to make some changes that will have a dramatic effect on your life.

Keep an eye on the blog and on my social media pages this month as I’ll be talking a lot more about mindset these next few weeks. Don’t forget to check out my Mindset Makeover Course and get on the waitlist ready for special offers when it opens again soon.

Also, if you find that you struggle with all or nothing (i.e. starting again every Monday or binge / restrict cycle) you’ll love my free guide to overcome all or nothing thinking, sign up for it here:

What are your thoughts on mindset? Do you think your current mindset serves you or hinders you?