Healthy Thinking Habits for the Rest of Your Life

This is the fifth and final post in my series about change. In the first four posts, I have talked about the process of choosing your change and starting to make it happen. I have covered how to clarify what you want to be, do, and have and discussed beginning the process of change. Last week, I talked about how to hang in there when the going gets tough. This week, I want to suggest ways to keep the commitment to living under the Decided Difference umbrella, which is committing to healthy thinking and healthy behavior for the rest of your life.

Healthy thinking drives and directs healthy behavior. Healthy behavior gives you good results. Getting good results helps you to feel in control of your self and your life. Feeling in control leads to a sense of mastery and to more satisfaction in your life, and these things in turn support feelings of happiness and joy.

You may notice that this progression is the opposite of the downward spiral of depression and anxiety. Poor thinking habits lead to behavior that is less than healthy. Poor behavior gives you poor results. Getting poor results makes you feel out of control of your self and your life. Feeling out of control leads to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, and these things in turn create feelings of depression and even despair.

Building Good Habits

If you have had poor habits of thinking, it's not too late to change them. I've said many times before that I'm living proof that change for the better is possible. I am healthier, more successful, and happier in every way imaginable than I was fifteen years ago. Change for the better can go on and on, if you decide to do things differently.

Your thoughts are largely responsible for creating your feelings, your behaviors, and your results. Thinking is a skill, which means it's learned and can be improved through conscious choice, effort, and practice.

You can choose which thinking patterns you will strengthen through conscious practice. You can choose which new habits you will build through repetition. You can decide how to conduct your thoughts and your behaviors, and thereby create your emotions. You can practice the methods of healthy thinking until they become automatic.

These are the three habits that I suggest you build into your daily life. One, discover what brings you joy and satisfaction, as well as pleasure and relaxation. Two, give yourself credit for the effort you make and compliment yourself on a regular basis, not just when you do something that seems extraordinary. And three, tell yourself better stories that cast you as the hero who is able to cope with whatever comes your way.

If you're not currently doing these three things, and you decide to do them, deliberately and consistently, the results you get a year from now will bear little resemblance to the results you are getting today. Doing these three things will make you happier, healthier, and more successful. Yes, I promise they will, if you do them consistently.

Believing You Can Change

There are many ways of putting these three habits into your life. There are many tactics that you can use to support these strategies. I've spoken about many methods over the years and there may be others that you will discover on your own that will work for your particular situation.

What matters most is developing the belief that you can make a difference in your own life and then learning the techniques that create and support that difference.

Begin with giving yourself permission to be happy, not just part of the time, not just when something big happens, but all the time. Happiness isn't something that just happens; it's something you build. You can build it regardless of your circumstances if you're deliberate about it. Yes, there are challenging circumstances in life, but even at a funeral, there are moments of happiness. Look for them, create them, savor them.

Decide that you will discover what brings you joy and satisfaction in life, and decide that you deserve to have those things, those experiences, those people around you. And then decide to focus on the happiness you have and the happiness you create. What you focus on becomes bigger and more prominent in your life. If you focus on your worries, you'll get better at worrying. If you focus on finding opportunities to experience happiness, you'll get better at creating happiness.

When you're going through the process of change, there will be tough times. If change were easy, everyone would do it. You are not everyone. You're a person who understands that a Decided Difference is possible, and you are just the person to make it happen. Give yourself credit for doing all that hard work, including all the thinking that goes into it.

Changing your thoughts requires attention and effort, the same way changing your fitness level requires attention and effort. It’s easy to cruise along in the same old mental ruts, year after year, wishing, complaining, and running on the mental hamster wheel of the same old thoughts that get you nowhere. When you give that stuff up and start doing the work to make your mind and your life better, you deserve credit. Make sure you get the compliments you deserve, even if you have to give them to yourself.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The best thing you can do to build a Decided Difference for yourself is to change your stories about you and your circumstances. Believe that you can change, and you will act on that belief, and your action will make the change happen. You can’t do that if you keep telling yourself the same old tired stories that have kept you stuck and sad.

I’m embarrassed to admit some of the stories I've told myself over and over and have believed for so much of my life. The beliefs I have repeated are things such as, "I’m lazy, I’m not smart enough, I’m ugly, I don’t deserve to feel good, I don’t deserve good things in my life, I should do better, I can’t stop procrastinating, I can’t stop holding myself back, I have to take care of everyone else before I take care of myself, I can’t ask to be paid for doing work I enjoy," and on and on and on!

These are stories. They are not the truth. Even though someone has said all of these things to me at some point in my life, I don't have to believe them. I don’t have to trust what others say about me if what they say is hurtful or keeps me from living the best life I can live.

It astonishes me that many of these things were said by people who cared about me and wanted me to succeed. They were trying to motivate me to be a better person, but beating someone up with negative statements doesn’t make them a better person. It makes them a beaten person. It’s bad enough if someone else is saying negative things to you, but many of us pick up the story where others left off.

We fill in the details and flesh the stories out until they become our reality. I’m a lazy person. It must be true. Just look at my desk. It’s covered with papers, unfinished tasks, unread magazines and books, unanswered notes, and things that need to be put away. This is actually true of my desk at the moment, by the way, but it doesn't translate into proving I'm a lazy person. The truth is that I've been working hard on other things that are more important to me. I can make myself feel bad for having a messy desk, or I can be proud of myself for having my priorities straight.

You can live the Decided Difference way. You can choose your joys, choose your thoughts, choose your actions, choose your beliefs, and choose the change you want.

Once you have done these things, for heaven’s sake, don’t look back! Whatever mistakes you think you have made in the past, they are in the past. You did what you did. Forgive yourself and move forward, because forward is the only direction we get. Thinking about what you would do if you could go back and do things differently is a waste. Learn from experience and keep on trucking.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Ever After, the Cinderella story retold. There is a moment in the movie when the main character, played by Drew Barrymore, says to her nemesis, her stepmother, “After this moment, I will forget you and never think of you again.” She then goes on to live happily, because she decided to and because she had developed the strength required to live happily. You can do that, too.

This is the end of the series on change, but I will be back next week to support you in living your life happily. Until then, remember, the world doesn’t change. You do.

Missed out on one of the previous posts in this series? Get caught up with the links below.

Part 1: Who You Decide to Be

Part 2: Where to Go From Here

Part 3: Beginning the Process of Change

Part 4: How to Hang In There When the Going Gets Tough