An attitude conducive to health is key for leading a fulfilling lifestyle. Your mental outlook can make or break your efforts at losing weight or engaging more actively – depending on whether you’re trying to achieve weight loss or increase physical activity.
Your mindsets form the core of your beliefs, so if yours has become fixed over time it may be hard to alter them. Discover how to cultivate a healthier outlook to bring about lasting changes in your life.
The Power of Your Mind
Your mindset can either propel or derail you toward reaching your health goals. A healthy mindset encompasses beliefs that allow you to see the world as full of possibilities, supporting resilience in the face of difficulties and supporting resilience when challenges arise.
Mindsets are the underlying assumptions you use to interpret complex worldviews and establish expectations. Your mindset also dictates your actions and reactions to life events; for example, believing you’re chronically sick or lacking ability will shape how you interpret and react to life events; even physiological effects could be affected; one study revealed that having a negative attitude about physical activity correlated to reduced motivation to participate and increased levels of satiety – two key signs that your mindset could be changing the way you behave in response.
A healthy mindset prioritizes learning and self-improvement. It enables you to view setbacks as temporary obstacles that you can find ways to overcome through strategies.
Your mindsets are formed at birth, often by your family and culture; but they can change at any time. Mindsets include beliefs, attitudes, and values which ultimately shape how we behave as well as define who we are as individuals. Understanding them is vital in order to successfully alter behavior as well as perceive ourselves accurately.
Carol Dweck conducted extensive research on mindsets and has found that rewarding children for their intelligence or talents rather than their efforts creates a fixed mindset that makes learning new things less desirable and increases the risk of giving up on dreams or goals.
To maximize life experiences, changing your mindset and thoughts requires work and practice. A great place to begin is learning to recognize primary thoughts that pop into your head and confronting them directly – this way you’re taking control of your mindset to enhance life experiences, reach health goals more easily, and become resilient against setbacks.
The Power of Your Thoughts
Mindsets are self-perceptions or beliefs about oneself that shape behavior, outlook and mental attitudes. If you hold fixed perceptions about yourself – for instance that you’re either “intelligent” or “unintelligent”, for instance – these will determine your behavior, outlook and mental attitude. While creating and altering mindsets is easy enough, changing them requires much work; new experiences often prove helpful in changing them over time. Research into psychoneuroimmunology shows us that our thoughts do actually affect brain and bodies physically as well.
Stanford University professor Carol Dweck has conducted extensive research on how one’s mindset impacts success and well-being. Her findings reveal two basic mindsets, known as “fixed” and “growth.” In a fixed mindset, you believe your most fundamental qualities – like intelligence or talent – are simply part of you and born from birth; therefore making you unwilling to take risks or persevere when faced with challenges.
An individual with a growth mindset believes their basic qualities can be improved through effort and persistence, rather than praise for natural talent or labeling as “smart”. According to Dweck’s research, encouraging children’s efforts instead promotes growth mindset rather than praise for natural talents or labeling as smart.
Your mindset can have a major effect on both your behaviors and how your body reacts to stressful situations. A study of runners revealed that their physiological response to exercise – like a racing heart and racing mind – corresponded with their perception of workout intensity.
Change your mindset for immediate health benefits. According to researchers, eating vegetables or milkshake with an intention that it will satisfy is proven to lead to less eating overall.
Positive mindsets can help you navigate life’s ups and downs more easily while creating healthy habits that support your well-being. To gain more knowledge on this subject, join us this fall for two Healthy Living courses on this subject – Flip the Script on Stress: Enhance Your Well-Being With a Growth Mindset on October 7 from 12:00 noon – 1:00 p.m and The Improviser’s Mindset which takes place from September 29 to October 20 from 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm respectively.
The Power of Your Beliefs
An integral component of having a healthy mindset is having beliefs that support your wellbeing. Your day-to-day actions may depend heavily on these beliefs; such as eating an adequate amount of veggies or exercising regularly – all can depend upon them!
A healthy mindset refers to having the ability to make informed choices about how you want to live your life and deal with stressful situations in a productive manner. Achieve goals more efficiently; find peace in stressful times. Michael Jordan was an exemplar of someone with such an outlook on life who used it successfully throughout their life journey.
Your beliefs might seem immovable; however, studies show that mindsets can change over time if held long enough. Though change might come gradually and with patience, it is still achievable.
Example: Let’s say you have an attitude of thinking “carrots taste gross”. While that might initially be true, your perception can shift if they are presented differently and revisited later on in your life. Brain pathways continue to form throughout life so it is never too late to alter an outlook on something!
Studies also demonstrate the effect of your beliefs on the type and amount of physical activity you engage in. Studies have demonstrated that people who don’t consider the activities they undertake to be exercise are less likely to meet physical activity guidelines; conversely, counting all their daily tasks and chores as exercise increases physical activity levels substantially.
BeWell is offering two classes this fall that address mindsets relevant to health: Flip the Script on Stress and The Improviser’s Mindset. Visit their class calendar to register for a session that best fits into your schedule.
The Power of Your Choices
Your mindset plays a critical role in how you make decisions and respond to situations, shaping both the way you approach life’s challenges and how well you cope with stressors and difficulties. A positive or flexible perspective helps develop personally while rigid, negative thought patterns limit potential growth and put unnecessary constraints on personal growth and personal development.
According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, your mindset consists of your beliefs about yourself and the world; these affect both your success and happiness in life.
Dweck discovered that people’s mindsets are formed largely during early childhood. She found that how adults praise kids plays an integral part in shaping these views. For instance, praise that highlights natural talents tends to foster a fixed mindset while praise that promotes effort and growth fosters growth mindsets.
Mindsets are formed through experiences, education and culture. Your brain processes this data to form thoughts which become beliefs and attitudes which then evolve over time, altering your mindset – whether positive or negative it will always change with you.
Your choices can help foster a healthier mindset, leading to an overall healthier lifestyle. For example, having a growth mindset could motivate you to exercise more often – a good way to shed unwanted weight while simultaneously improving health – while having a fixed mindset might not lead you to do the same amount of physical activity.
A healthy mindset can also help you overcome adversity and keep a positive outlook in times of struggle. A research study discovered that those who adopt an optimistic outlook are more resilient against mental health problems; those with negative attitudes are often upset by failure and less willing to try again.
Your mindset can have an immense impact on the decisions and actions that shape your life. It can act as either a shield that protects and allows your spirit to flourish or as an intruder who tears into it – either way it is something that needs to be managed closely and changed even though most often unconscious changes take place in it. Luckily though, changing it doesn’t happen overnight and changes should happen gradually over time.
