Habit Change Archives - Page 4 of 7

Did you ever consider that what you think is as important as what you eat?

December 20, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

The first time I heard the notion that we have an internal dialogue I was surprised. I think that is because I had taken it for granted. My internal dialogue was part of my automatic way of thinking. I never stopped to look at and examine what I was saying to myself, and how my thoughts affected me. Years of meditation have given me a different perspective on this. The first thing you do when you meditate is to look at your internal dialogue. It is like a stream of consciousness and unless you are made aware of it, it just flows on and on. That is why it is called the ‘monkey’ mind or the ‘yenta’ in the mind.

One of the first things I have my clients do is to pay attention to what they may be thinking that brings on or precedes an action they are trying to change. This is obviously not limited to just changing the habit of eating. Let’s say you are trying to start a habit of daily exercise in the morning. You wake up and immediately the conditioned part of your mind is telling you that you don’t feel like it. That is where ‘You’ take over, and start changing the dialogue. If you don’t I guarantee you won’t feel like exercising. Even if you think about something enjoyable like the shower you take after you exercise, that is how simple it is.

Getting in touch with your internal dialogue which can be very automatic and even unconscious to an extent, is your first step to making meaningful change. You cannot change what you do not understand or see. This is another way of saying start becoming aware of the automatic reactions. The point is to have a choice. Some automatic reacting is useful. You don’t have to think about how you drive a car; you can leave that to autopilot. If you want to break or change a habit, whether it is to eat healthier, stop procrastinating or cut back on TV, it’s about creating a balance between autopilot and focus. That is what I think we are looking for.

Diet Myths You Need to Let Go Of

December 14, 2011 by admin 1 Comment

One of the common themes I have seen in my practice is the notion that when you lose weight your problems go away and your dreams get fulfilled. I wonder if that is part of the reason people regain the weight they lose. What they thought would happen by losing weight does not happen so they lose the motivation to delay immediate gratification, the pleasure they get from certain foods and the discipline it takes to eat right and exercise daily.

To lose weight successfully means you keep it off involves the ability to be able to weight short term actions, against longer term goals. Although the current thinking is that 85 to 95% of people who lose weight regain it, The National Weight Control Registry has been keeping track of people who do keep it off. Their site has some interesting findings.

The bottom line is simple: you have to change the way you eat, exercise daily and make this your lifestyle because you place more importance on your health than eating the treat.

Here are some other things people who lose weight and keep it off do:

78% eat breakfast every day.
75% weigh themselves at least once a week.
62% watch less than 10 hours of TV per week.
90% exercise, on average, about 1 hour per day.

So what about those other dreams you have that you think losing weight will achieve? You don’t give up when it does not happen that way. You get focused on how to change another aspect of your life just like you did with your weight. If you think by losing weight you will find the love relationship that has eluded you, that is false thinking. There is something else going on that keeps you from finding that love.

The best way to really lose weight is to make the actions you took to lose the weight permanent. This requires the creation of an awareness practice which can then be used for any change you then want to make, such as attracting a better relationship. I developed what I call the Pausing Technique to help to build the habit of awareness. I suggest you start with that. Then I recommend you strengthen it with a meditation practice which builds the mental muscles of focus. Everything you want to achieve in life begins with a dream, actions and the ability to stay focused and never give up. Let losing weight successfully be your first dream come true. You can also order the Nirvana Diet™ Home Study Program to get you started.

Keys to Successfully Changing a Habit

December 13, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Do you feel you are constantly repeating unwanted unhealthy patterns you can’t seem to break? No matter how hard you try, you never get anywhere except more unhappy. This makes you feel like you are lost, stuck in a rut, a negative loop going nowhere. Or maybe you have accomplished what you thought would make you happy and instead of feeling happy you feel empty. I have built my practice around helping people get unstuck, re-create themselves and find true fulfillment and joy in their lives… from that place I help them go places to they ever thought they could go.

I know how you feel because I have been there and have done it. I recreated my life and spent over ten years helping people do that too. I have successfully developed a unique approach that helps you take charge of your mind which is the gateway to your willpower so you can change any habit or pattern, and create a more satisfying or healthy one.

Most people who come to me say they either they know what they are supposed to do only to lose focus and not do it, or they don’t know what to do anymore because nothing really works or sticks. This emptiness and sense of disillusionment is what leads to all of our subtle addictions in life. Overeating and numbing out is one of the biggest ones. The reason most people don’t just “do it” is because they are using a limited amount of their willpower. Because change has to come from within, and it is only when you understand how your mind really works and how to make it work for you that you can make meaningful change become a reality. Change requires effort and determination. People are unfortunately looking for a magic bullet or a pill. There are things you can learn to do.

Here are some of the keys to successfully to changing a habit:

Knowing how to eliminate the automatic pilot way many of us live our lives.
Create and build a vision that is consistent with your true joy and happiness
Take action small steps towards it everyday
Be unrelenting, persistent and yes never give up.
Learn how to master fear.

The problem is that the human personality is naturally resistant to change without the necessity of need, nothing changes. The truth is that change and the having the qualities that lead to success takes will power. Willpower is in your head. So there is really no way around it –you have to learn how to take charge of it and undo the conditioned aspects of you mind that keeps you locked in a stuck position in a feed back loop repeating what you do not want. It is a mind set.

How do I help my clients change their mindset? By changing the way they approach life. People who are successful are not smarter, they just look at things differently. By successful I also mean, happy and fulfilled. This way of looking at things includes the ability to use your imagination, the creative part of your brain, to visualize, see the bigger picture, and not give up or go to the negative when things are not going the way you thought or intended.

If you were not born like that you can develop them. There are proven techniques I teach that can show you how to change the way you look at things and from that place guess what…everything changes. Its magical. I know because I used to be a negative person, glass half empty, and always thinking if things were good it never lasts. This process is based on the powerful mind training techniques of yoga and meditation and taking it into your daily life…it is like yoga for the mind.

This meditation and refocusing practice I created… how to be Sexy, Smart and Sane changed my life. It makes meditation easy and gives you the ability to recreate your life by gaining control of the power that is within you that is lying dormant. Order the Home study program I developed How to Make Mediation Easy and start taking charge of your life now. I am also available for private coaching, to teach this to groups and for public speaking engagements or workshops.

Why you should start meditating and stop thinking?

December 9, 2011 by admin 2 Comments

If you were a vibration of energy wouldn’t you want to vibrate at a high frequency, just like beautiful music, perfectly coherent? That is what meditation does, it raises your vibration and helps to undo the old patterns of the brain that keep you locked in a less desirable frequency. If you want to take charge of your health, lose weight, and get off auto-pilot learn how to meditate.

Meditating daily is like putting money in the bank. You are able to deal more effectively with stressful situations as they come up without having them be harmful to your health. People are attracted to you because we all respond to wave frequencies without even being aware of it. The higher the frequency the more attractive you become. It was once said to me by someone very wise, I don’t care how much Botox you use to clear the frowns on your forehead, if it doesn’t get rid of your anger, it won’t work.

I tried for many years to learn how to meditate. I am very appreciative of the training I did with Jon Kabat Zinn who created MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) Meditation. I am also grateful for the work of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz who developed an awareness practice very similar to what Jon means by mindfulness that is taught at UCLA. This practice helps people to overcome anxiety and OCD without the use of medication. This process is also helpful for anyone who is stuck in a negative pattern or mind state which is everybody at some point in their lives.

Mindfulness along with meditation is of course two of the steps in the Eight Fold Path as written by Buddha. The Eight Limbs of Yoga written by the so-called father of Yoga, Patanjali, also includes breath work and mediation to assist in the journey towards more enlightenment.

I also studied with Sherrie Wade creator of Transformation Meditation. But, it was my “initiation” experience with Brijendra, who resides with Sherrie at an Ashram in the Himalaya in an area called the Valley of the Gods that helped me to turn the corner and make meditation a way of life. Part of the gift he gave me was his personal breathing practice and how he gets into meditation. He told me I was free to share it with who ever wanted it. So I decided to create my own version of this and it is now available for on my website.

Any diet or health approach you follow will be made easier if you meditate because meditation is a mind training exercise. You will also find it easier to do follow a healthy lifestyle because you will begin to vibrate at a higher frequency. Our thoughts feelings and emotions have a vibrational frequency. This has been proven by Dr. Hawkins’s ground breaking work which you can read more about in the book Power vs. Force.

The program I developed for home study also includes the mindfulness practice I developed based on the all of the above is called the Pausing Technique. This is how you start to train the brain, so that when you find yourself in a stressful situation, you are able to drop into what in meditation we call “the space.” By doing that, you strengthen your ability to act consciously and not automatically. This is how we find our power, live consciously as opposed to being on auto-pilot. The following quote by Viktor Frankyl explains this beautifully:

“Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. In between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response in our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Through the practice of mediation and observing your thoughts, you develop the power to be more conscious and decide what you want to think, feel and do and thereby gain control over the automatic reactions of the brain. This is the beginning of how you cultivate mind power. This is the real secret, you have to be able to have a high vibration to your thoughts and feelings. Put another way you get what you think, but it is not easy to change your thoughts if you don’t like what its getting you.

As with anything it requires that you do it for at least six months to build a habit. To read more about how change or create a new habit read this.

Myth Buster: 21 Days to Make a Habit Change? Think again

November 29, 2011 by admin 4 Comments

We all know how difficult it can be to break a habit and create a new one. If you do a Google search on how long it takes to create a new habit you will get somewhere between 21 and 28 days. No one has really proven that to be the case. The ‘21 day myth’ may well come from a book published in 1960 by a plastic surgeon. Dr. Maxwell Maltz, who wrote a classic book called Psychocybernetics. He noticed that amputees took, on average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb and he theorized that people take 21 days to adjust to any major life changes. The problem is that it really is not relevant to building a new habit.

Psychological research on how habits are formed was recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology by Phillippa Lally and his colleagues from University College London. The question was asked after how long did it take for running 15 minutes a day to become automatic? The answer was, after about sixty six days, it seemed to become a habit. So it seems as if the 21 day rule of thumb is unrealistic and we need to think more in terms of 3 months with repetition being the key. I would add to that it is best not attempting something too big so that you do not set yourself up to fail.

The research also suggested that:

Missing a one day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit.
Some people took much longer than the others to form their habits, perhaps suggesting some people are ‘habit-resistant’.
Other types of habits may well take much longer…like those that involve addictive substances.

So how do you get less ‘habit resistant’? It comes down to willpower. Something you should know about willpower is, research that conducted by two professors at Stanford including, Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, is the author of “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”confirmed that your willpower is limited by what you think about it. When you succeed and resist temptation, you feel strong, if you feel or think you are weak, you will be that way too. Their conclusion and I might add my experience has been that “willpower is in your head.” You are what you think and believe.

I have found the key to changing how you think is a mindfulness practice I developed I call the pausing technique. In between the action and your thought to act is a space. Your willpower lies in what you do with that space. To learn more read the blog I wrote on this. This why I use hypnosis as well, it helps to increase your will to change. Check out the home study program downloads in the shop area for one that matches what you want to change.