How Can You Turn Self Sabotage Into Success?

You know what you could or should do to improve health markers, see better gym performance, recover better, &/or change your body composition. Right?!

You know you should

• Manage your stress

• Get more sleep

• Exercise regularly

• Prioritize protein

• Eat lots of fruits & veggies

• Stay hydrated

• Reduce your alcohol intake

• AKA: Build your Wellness Portfolio

You just don’t do those things, though. Right?!

Some might call this “self-sabotage.” But that sounds very limiting/fixed mindset…like a bit of a dead end. Kind of like saying, “I suck at this. I’ll never be able to do this.”

What if we flip the script, and look at things like this:

Not focusing on the above things you should do once served a purpose; maybe providing a reward &/or alleviating some suffering. Plus, the connection between the behaviors became strongly ingrained over time.

These are truths, or reasons. And, we can practice compassion with ourselves, understanding where we’ve come from, and why we’ve made the choices we’ve made. This allows us to move forward.

But, they can also be excuses, if we let them. And, excuses hold us back.

What to do? In order to ensure that these reasons don’t hold us back from building our Wellness Portfolio, we need to;

• Create habits & behaviors that are helpful and enjoyable

• Break free from strongly grooved brain pathways

• Learn to lean into and tolerate the discomfort of facing reality and creating new pathways

• Identify the skills you’re currently lacking that need to be in place to support the actions for change you want.

Specifically:

Reduce and manage stress.

Stress can reduce the size of an area of the brain associated with learning and memory. Although we need a little bit of stress, we don’t want too much — certainly nothing that starts to affect our daily functioning (sleep, energy, memory, decision making).

Set goals.

To change how our brain functions, we must train the brain to have a different perspective of the environment. Goal-setting is a fundamental way to achieve this.

Practice and repeat.

Just as reps in the gym benefit the body, reps in the “brain gym” strengthen the mind. Practicing and repeating what you have learned ensures that the neural pathways remain strong.

While this might sound scary and hard, it might also be reassuring to know that the more we change - especially in ways that support brain health & function - the more we CAN change.