Change your Thoughts, Change your World
Create mindset magic with mindful practices!
“Once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it.”
Steve Mirabelli
I truly believe that mindset = magic.
Why? Because we can always change our thoughts and by changing our thoughts, everything changes in our world.
Your mindset is a set of beliefs that forms how you make sense of the world and what’s happening around you. It influences your thoughts, feelings, behaviours and actions.
In other words, your mindset creates your life.
Based on the cognitive behaviour therapy model, our circumstances, thoughts, emotions and behaviours all interact in a continuous loop to create how we experience the world. My mentor, Martha Beck, refers to this interaction as the four categories of human experience.
Let’s talk about how these four categories of human experience all affect each other. Circumstances are the objective details about a situation. In other words, they are the facts. For example, if you weigh yourself and look at the scale, you will see a number. That number is what you weigh and a fact. It is neutral and doesn’t mean anything until you assign meaning to it. If you’re like a lot of women I know, your thoughts about the number may include “I’m too fat” amongst others. Those thoughts will in turn create feelings, and then your behaviour will be based on those thoughts and feelings.
So what’s our relationship between thoughts and emotions/feelings?
Circumstances are outside our control, but our thoughts and emotions are completely within our control. They have a back and forth relationship. We feel an emotion in relation to a thought we’re having, and our emotions create a feeling in our body and continue to influence our thoughts.
Researchers differ on how many thoughts we have a day - I’ve seen some reports that say 6,000 and some that say over 70,000, but the most interesting part is that most of those thoughts are the same ones we had yesterday and 70-80% are negative. Wow!
Here’s where mindful practices come in as they help you make sense of your thoughts and feelings.
Any activity we engage in with mindful awareness is a mindful practice. If we think of mindfulness as bringing present moment awareness to our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and environment with gentleness and without judgment, then we can start bringing that awareness to activities throughout our day and specifically to our mindful practices.
The easiest way to start is by incorporating an awareness of your breath in all you do.
What are some benefits of mindful practices?
- Mindful practices can directly impact your mindset.
Mindful practices improve interoception, which is our ability to feel and sense what’s going on in our body. Since how we feel influences our thoughts and our behaviours, interoceptive awareness is key to mindset change. It’s hard in our fast-paced society to spend time in interoception, and our mindful practices provide that opportunity.
- Mindful practices promote neuroplasticity.
So what does “promote neuroplasticity” mean? According to one of my teachers, Kristine Weber, It means that by engaging in mindful practices, such as slow mindful yoga, you gain a greater capacity to self-regulate your nervous system when you’re in a stressful situation. You’ll have more empathy for yourself and others, you’ll feel more connected to others, and all this leads to a more positive attitude.
- Mindful practices help to reduce inflammation.
Psychological stress is well-known in the scientific community as a trigger of inflammation and research shows that reducing stress through mindfulness and mindful practices may make your body more resilient to inflammation. Inflammation is associated with many diseases including autoimmune diseases, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and chronic pain amongst others.
Mindful practices turn on the relaxation response which can help reduce inflammation. Then there’s a domino effect because turning on the relaxation response may help you sleep better, experience less pain, improve mental health and generally feel better.
5 Minute Morning Mindful Practice
Starting a simple morning mindful practice routine is the easiest way to begin. Here’s a simple 5 minute routine that anyone, regardless of ability, can do.
When you wake up in the morning, either stay lying down, sit on the side of your bed, or stand up and stretch your arms up over your head, inhaling as you stretch. Exhale your arms back down to your sides. You may want to do that one more time.
Side bend to the right and to the left while paying attention to your inhales and exhales. Do this 2 or 3 times on each side.
While you’re seated or lying down, close your eyes or lower your gaze and say “I am grateful for ___________” three times.
Get out your journal or a piece of paper and write down your intention for the day: “Today I will ___________”. Say it out loud as well.
Take 3 deep breaths and carry on with your day.
I recommend doing this every morning if you can. Over time, it will become a daily habit, just like brushing your teeth. You may even find that you eventually want to add more to it, and from there the possibilities are endless. :)
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I’d love to hear from you so please send any comments or questions to me at sharon@sharonashtonmindfulyoga.com. Feel free to share this email with anyone else who may be interested.
Please check out The Journey Within podcast at:
What is stopping you from living your best life? Get out your journal and a pen and take the new quiz on my website to find out:
Are you interested in learning more about life change & mindset coaching from a mind/body perspective? Please email me at sharon@sharonashtonmindfulyoga.com for more information or to schedule a free introductory consultation to see if coaching is right for you. You can also visit my website coaching page.
"I felt at complete ease with Sharon from our first conversation. She has a wonderful, gentle but firm way that made me focus on my thoughts / feelings so I could remove / change to move forward with a completely different feeling to what felt like obstacles. It was great having regular coaching that gently kept me accountable to actioning and moving towards my goals. Sharon has vast experience in so many areas, I felt that makes her an amazing coach.”
— Michelle Carney, East Galway, Ireland
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