If you find yourself getting frustrated because you keep doing things you know aren’t helpful – like eating loads of crisps when you’re trying to eat healthily – then keep reading!

Our mindset is one of the most overlooked elements of our wellbeing. When it comes to our health, changing how we eat and exercise more for example – I believe that our mindset around that is going to have a huge impact on how successful we are.

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 even, if it’s a non diet 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, or just practical barriers, 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.

Here’s 3 different areas for you to consider when it comes to improving your mindset so you can be healthier and happier!

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.

As a woman in today’s society most of us will be affected by the diet mentality – it links into our self worth and emotions in a big way. If we’re stuck in a diet mentality it can make it so hard not to allow one treat to become a ‘fuck it’ situation where you feel like you’ve messed up and just eat all the crap until starting again the next day, or the next Monday!’

So asking yourself where the diet mentality shows up in your life and seeing how you can let that go is something that will really help your mindset.

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).

The problem we have is that we’re just so used to the habit of numbing out and we aren’t able to face those uncomfortable feelings – now I’ve been working on this for a while I can notice when I’m starting to begin a behaviour that’s numbing out and instead of reaching for the ice cream I’m able to sit with it. I’ll be sharing more of my own journey around emotional eating in a blog post soon!

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.

To get started you can join my totally free 5 day mindset course below – I guarantee you won’t think about your brain and mindset in the same way again!

How do these elements of mindset impact you?