Hellur!!
Last year when I was learning how to set goals and finding ways to stick to new habits, I learned a couple of things the are quite crucial in determining success. Lemme give you an example using my day job as a physical therapist.
🔬Research shows that the BEST treatment method for chronic low back pain is using this thing called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) 🧠
Here’s what it looks like 👇🏾
This cycle is incredibly simple but SO powerful when it comes to creating our reality.
When looking at our problems it’s super important to also identify the dysfunctional and automatic thoughts that come with them. Here are some real life examples of dysfunctional thoughts that often come with having chronic low back pain:
“I’ll probably never get better."
"I know it’s because I have really bad posture.”
“Low back pain runs in my family so I’m stuck with it.”
“My doctor said I’ll never be able to lift again.”
Honestly this list could go on for an eternity 📜 but I can’t bear to type anymore examples because it sucks to hear people say these types of things because they believed them for decades of their lives.
Clearly there is a problem: having low back pain. But the REAL problem are the limiting beliefs and negative thoughts that end up becoming our identity 👺 Because their pain and thoughts are chronic (lasting more than 6 months), at least two things have to happen here in order for these types of patients to start ✨feeling✨better.
☝🏾They need to identify the beliefs that aren’t objectively true.
✌🏾They need to replace these beliefs with a completely new narrative.
Here’s some example replacements:
“I might not get better overnight, but there are definitely things I can do that make me feel better so that I can enjoy hanging out with friends more.”
“Posture is just one of the 250+ things that could be contributing to my back pain… So I think I’ll work on managing my stress better because I feel worse when I’m tense.”
“Hmmm nobody in my family before me took care of their bodies well. If I make a few lifestyle changes I’m sure I’ll get different results.”
“I know my doctor said I’ll never be able to lift again, but I was actually pretty weak when I injured myself. I’m sure I can gradually workup the strength to lift things without wrecking my back again.”
If I want to make my job a whole lot easier, I try to leave a little bread crumb trail 🥖🥨🥯 towards positive narratives and hope🤞🏾that the patient sees it, and gobbles it right up. The awesome thing is, you can do this for yourself. I’ve also learned that whenever I had negative, unproven, limiting thoughts about something, I tended to say stuff like this:
“I NEED to make more money so I can pay these dang student loans.”
“I NEED to exercise more often because I’m a physical therapist and that’s what I should be doing.”
“I NEED to upload a video because the YouTube algorithm likes consistency.”
Not so fun fact: these thoughts were all the thoughts I had when I was seeing unmeaningful(?) progress in any of these areas. It was frustrating, defeating, and just spewed gasoline all over a fire that was burning my dreams to a crisp🔥 What’s crazy is that I was constantly incepting lovely adaptive thoughts into my patients, but not doing it for myself. Yeeesh 🤦🏾♀️ Once I started to change the narrative around areas around my own problems, I experienced a huge shift in how I was feeling, which then changed my behavior. (CBT babyyyyyy ✨🧠✨)
The thought💭 of pursuing something I “WANTED” rather than “NEEDED” was such a powerful mindf*ck because my behavior naturally followed up. So let’s get to incepting your own brain so that you can create a new reality.
The Journaling Prompt:
Identify and write out the negative beliefs that you have surrounding the biggest problems you’re currently experiencing.
CHALLENGE THEM 👊🏾💥 Prove this belief wrong by writing out an adaptive thought that you can both think and say whenever the problem presents itself. They might not come to you off the top of your head, so feel free to do some googling/chatGPTing to give you some ideas. Don't just copy and paste because this works better if you can come up with your own.
Use these phrases in regular conversation or think them/ say them out loud when you’re feeling down about yourself. Ever since I started replacing my bad thoughts, my entire vocabulary is largely filled with positive language and the impact has been 🌙 night n day☀️ Like don’t even get me started on phrases that start with, “I can’t…” 💢ARGHhhhGHADFHFSGHRUHGUV 💢
But remember, this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint - and this is how we’re getting in shape. Keep up with replacing your limiting beliefs and before you know it, you’ll look back at all of the distance you’ve covered and be like, “damn. I DID that.” 💪🏾
Until next time!