How Your Thoughts Affect Your Health and Wellness Outcomes

Your thoughts can have a profound effect on your health and wellness outcomes. Perhaps you’ve been really focused on your fitness and nutrition efforts but have never stopped to think about how your thoughts are an important part of the equation? The good news is that you can become aware of your thoughts and use them to make better progress with your fitness and nutrition efforts!

How your thoughts can be related to the lifestyle you lead

• Your THOUGHTS become your ACTIONS. If you let yourself think ‘I’m too tired to go to the gym today’ or ‘I had a piece of chocolate cake today so now I’ve ruined my healthy eating plan for the week’, then your actions will probably reflect those thoughts. You’re likely to skip the gym or give up with your healthy eating focus for the rest of the week.

• Your ACTIONS become your BEHAVIORS. Behaviors are actions that are repeated over and over again. If you let yourself have negative or unhealthy thoughts on a regular basis it will be harder to develop healthy behaviors that support your goals. An action is something that you do once. Because your behaviors are things you do again and again they could also be called your ‘habits’. Are you starting to understand how important it is to consider the way you think?

• Your BEHAVIORS become your LIFESTYLE. If you repeat your behaviors often enough, they start to define your lifestyle. So if you repeatedly decide to skip the gym and watch TV instead, you create a ‘couch potato’ type lifestyle. On the other hand, if you choose to complete your workouts week after week, month after month, you create an ‘active lifestyle’.

The lifestyle you lead will play a huge role in your health and wellness outcomes, from your risk profile for disease, to how energetic and healthy you feel on a day to day basis. Isn’t it exciting to know that something as simple as your thoughts can have such a positive knock-on effect to help you achieve your goals?

Take the next steps towards better health and wellness.

If you think you could benefit from some improvements to the way you think, start with these simple tips:

• The first step is awareness. Notice when thoughts related to your health and fitness come into your mind. Note them down if you need to, and consider whether they’re likely to lead to a positive outcome for you

• Next work on reframing your negative thoughts. If you have a thought such as ‘I’m too tired to go to the gym’, actively change that thought to something like ‘I’m really tired but I can still start

• A gentle workout and see how I feel once I’ve started. This thought still recognizes how you feel, but it brings up a positive solution.

Changing your thought processes will be an effort, to begin with, but over time it will become less of a conscious process. You’ll become more naturally wired towards thinking in a way that will generate the actions you need to support a healthy lifestyle.