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.