Thought That Facilitates Healthful Change

Homo sapiens: that's us.  We are wise persons.  Aristotle's called us "rational animals."  And it certainly is true that thinking has enabled our relatively slow and puny species to dominate the globe. On the other hand, the rational animal can be irrational.  We have slaughtered each other on a massive scale since antiquity.  And we slowly, incrementally slaughter ourselves every day that we pursue an unhealthful lifestyle.

What's true for the species is true for you.  What you think determines both what you do and how you feel.  The more you understand and control your thinking, the more physically and mentally healthy you will be.

You could awaken in the morning, look in the mirror, and tell yourself, "Well, I’m one day closer to death" because that surely is true.  Or, you could tell yourself, "Alright, one more day to make the most of life," because that is equally true.  Two objective realities but the one that you choose—your subjective reality—instigates what you do and how you feel after you walk away from the mirror.

So, you need to attend carefully to what you explicitly and implicitly say to yourself.  And you need to target your self-talk to make it as health-enhancing as possible.  Self-talk will persuade you about the value of the health essentials that you choose for change, how you proceed, and whether you persevere.  If you have honestly introspected about the history and conduct of your current lifestyle, you will choose appropriate goals.

Listening to your explicit remarks is manageable and obvious, given sufficient motivation and attention.  It is access to and understanding of implicit thought that separates those who succeed with their lifestyle changes from those who fail.

Sensitize yourself to your implicit thoughts by looking for consistencies and inconsistencies among thinking, feeling, and behaving.  If you tell yourself (thoughts) that you want to lose weight, you will be less frustrated (feelings) when you drive past your favorite bakery (behavior).  Your thoughts are mediators of your behavior.  If you do stop for the cream puff, your behavior has revealed that your true implicit thought is that cream puffs take precedence over weight loss.  And if the joy (feeling) associated with consuming the pastry is stronger than the guilt associated with its consumption, you know that you must modify your thinking if you ever hope to master your weight problem.

Your thought control then is more than just maximizing optimism and minimizing pessimism.  You must modulate your thoughts to be reasonably optimistic to enable you to pursue behavioral goals that are consistent not only with your objective capabilities but also with your subjective/emotional attitudes.   For instance, it would be better first to set a healthful lifestyle change goal that is lower but less threatening than the more ambitious one that you desire and could achieve theoretically.  You always slowly can increase the demandingness of your goal when your emotional confidence matches your thoughts and objective capabilities.  For instance, better to begin with a 5 pound weight loss goal that is less intimidating to you than a 15 pound goal that seriously stresses you.

   In short, a wise person rationally controls his/her animal instincts by adaptive synergistic use of coordinated thought, emotion, and behavior.

Emotion That Facilitates Healthful Change

I’d like to be more fit, but I really hate to sweat.  Besides, I don’t care that I’m not built; nobody in my family is built.

Those who really dislike or don’t care, don’t do.  Most often, our emotions profoundly influence the focus of our attention and efforts.  Imagine a smoker who truly does not care about the health risks associated with smoking. Chances are strong that he doesn’t care because he doesn’t “believe” that he will be deleterious affected by his smoking.

Once again we see with this smoker that emotion and thought comingle.  But we also realize that sometimes emotion has the upper hand and sometimes thought does.  In our contemporary culture, the smoker at least occasionally must think about the fact that smoking is a profound health risk, but his emotions insulate him from personalizing the risk.  This is a guy who needs an internal mediator and health-supportive strategies to counteract interfering emotion that enable health-irrational behaviors.

We all have one or more health essential areas or sub-areas wherein emotion—explicit or implicit—is the single greatest obstacle to healthful lifestyle change.  Even when we temporarily are able to surmount the blocking influence of interfering emotion, if the interfering emotion is strong, it will hover in the background, waiting to sabotage our efforts to “do the right thing.”

The health-supportive mediator and strategies to combat interfering emotion are person-specific.  What works for one, does not work necessarily for another.  That is why you carefully must introspect about your ego strength derived from your history, temperament, personality, and environments to identify how you and only you can personalize your method for achieving each desired health goal.

For years, Bill’s mother repeatedly has told him that he needs to “get out of the house and be with people.”  After resisting for decades, he finally decided to follow his mother’s advice.  He introspected about his history of isolation and the few instances wherein he managed some minimal sociability.  He thought about his temperament, for instance, how readily he blushes in interpersonal situations.  Bill finally admitted that he has an introverted personality and that he has chosen environments populated by as few people as possible.     

Bill’s goal-supportive mediators will be to rationally think through his people-relevant strengths and weaknesses.  His strategies will be ones that permit a very slow and very safe exposure to one or two of the least threatening persons that he can find.  He must plan to increment his efforts very gradually, only after his successes are solidly established.

More than anything else, Bill needs to control his emotions to allow him to think clearly and to develop the confidence and determination to persist with his healthful lifestyle change.  For Bill, emotional control is first and foremost.    

Goals to Live By

Choosing a healthful lifestyle change goal is a very big deal.  A chosen goal sets the tone and the agenda for everything that follows.  So you must proceed accordingly.

Bruce Martin, Jeffrey McNally, and Simon Taggar (2015) underscore the critically of goals.  They show that goal performance is promoted by self-evaluation and that the mere pursuit of goal-relevant self-knowledge is goal-motivating in and of itself.  The trio specifically asserts that knowing one’s self and validating that knowledge also facilitates actual goal outcomes.  This study clearly is a call to introspect and to use the introspected knowledge to determine what to pursue health-wise.

Knowing oneself is easier said than done.  We all have a host of self-protective psychological defense mechanisms that insulate us against any negative self-introspection.  You cannot be mindless about who you are and about what you presently are doing.  You must be actively engaged.

I suggest that you consider four aspects of who you are:  your history, your temperament, your personality, and your current environments.  That obviously is a very tall order and one with which I will be helping you throughout the entire course of my current and future blog postings. 

For today, let’s focus on your history.  Choose one of the health essentials—cognitive-emotional status, interpersonal relationships, physical conditioning, diet-nutrition, work, or relaxation-recreation.  Pick the essential with the greatest likelihood of success.  You need the success to reinforce your efforts and to inform your current and future change strategies.

Introspect as honestly as possible about how your present lifestyle came to be and about your lifestyle-relevant strengths and weaknesses.  Look critically at yourself and enlist comments from trusted others.  Be specific.  After identifying the one most achievable feature of your healthful lifestyle essentials change goal, identify some reasons that describe any past success, no matter how small or fleeting, and any failures in the chosen specific healthful area.  Broaden your focus to include all of your strengths.  Find those positives that can compensate for your present unsatisfactory status and for your past failures.  Work, work, work to set a very concrete, fully achievable healthful lifestyle goal.  If you stumble, pick yourself up and continue.

Remember that Bruce Martin and his associates have the data to support the value of expending your time and energy to self-evaluate, self-validate, and to persevere regarding salutary physical and mental health goals.

Reference:  Martin, B., McNally, J., & Taggar, S. (2015).  Determining the importance of self-evaluation on the goal-performance effect in goal setting: primary findings.  Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science / Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, Oct 12.  No Pagination Specified.  Retrieved from doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cbs0000025.  

An Introduction to Healthful Activity for Life

Just do it; Talk is cheap; Walk the walk, don’t talk the talk; You are what you do; and a score of other slogans reinforce the ancient aphorism that actions truly do speak louder than words.  More important: Research certifies that truth. 

Healthful Activity for Life will advocate activity above all else.  More precisely: rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived healthful activity will be our enduring focus.  We shall discuss and apply evidence-based medical and psychological insights to promote thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that produce salutary physical and mental outcomes.

Ours is a self-help approach to healthful lifestyle improvement that focuses on the process of change more than on the content of any particular change.  Six health essentials are emphasized: cognitive-emotional status, interpersonal relationships, physical conditioning, diet-nutrition, work, and relaxation-recreation.  You will be guided toward understanding how your unique history, temperament, personality, and environments contribute to your current lifestyle and to potential health-enhancing alterations. 

Healthful Activity for Life integrates physical and mental health activities such that improvement in one enhances the others.  The health essentials are best approached holistically, since one’s standing on each affects the rest.  We all know, for instance, that a healthy weight, theoretically, can be achieved purely by strictly limiting calories.  But we also understand that diet-nutrition works best when combined with sensible physical conditioning.  Similarly, our cognition, emotion, interpersonal relationships, work, and relaxation-recreation activities all can influence our diet-nutrition by predisposing us to certain eating practices rather than others. 

The interconnectedness of essentials is such that healthful change is most effective and efficient when we overlap activities into salubrious activity networks.  Continuing with the healthy weight example, we might combine healthful diet-nutrition activities with healthful interpersonal relationship activities by enrolling in a healthy eating program with a spouse or friend.

Connection is key for creating and implementing healthful lifestyle change.  Like the health essentials, body and mind are inextricably interconnected; so too is the person and their environments.  Moreover, each of the four factors—history, temperament, personality, and environments—continuously interacts with the others.  The whole truly is much more than the sum of its parts.  Healthful Activity for Life elucidates and facilitates the processes required to identify the connections, and to use them effectively and efficiently to promote integrated physical and mental health.