How Do You Feel About Your Health?
How you feel about your health is very important in how healthy you actually are.
Your feelings impact your health and influence how you act. Your actions result in your health.
I want you to have good health and one of the ways to do that is to use your mind for your good health instead of against it. How can we do that? First, let’s look at feelings.
We Get Feelings from Emotions
Emotions are lower-level responses in the subcortical regions of the brain such as the amygdala and the neocortex dealing with conscious thoughts, reasoning, and decision making. Emotions are triggered by a stimulus and are a bodily reaction activated by hormones and neurotransmitters.
Feelings are the conscious experience of the emotional reaction. Feelings are triggered by emotion and personal experiences, beliefs, memories, and thoughts commonly occurring during that emotion. A Feeling assigns a specific meaning to an emotion.
What is a Feeling?
Feelings are defined in many different ways. We generally think of feelings as the defined emotional state or reaction. At a higher level, feelings are the undifferentiated background of one’s awareness considered apart from any identifiable sensation, perception, or thought. The quality of one’s awareness. We feel feelings and they are abstract in nature.
Emotions produce a feeling inside you that can be expressed without censoring but there is also a way to control the expression of the emotion through the feeling. You have the ability to go into your thinking brain and give a feeling a meaning.
We try to suppress our true feelings because the emotion we are having is different from the one we believe is socially acceptable. Instead of expressing our emotion, we will change it to an emotion that we think is socially acceptable and express that emotion instead.
For some people that go to feeling is fear or anger or overwhelm or tired. The underlying emotion is not expressed because the person thinks it is unacceptable to express their fear and may make a joke to make people laugh. Or a person may hug someone who is angry in hopes to decrease the tension. Another person may yell and get angry in hopes to get a person to change because they fear that person’s behavior will lead to something bad for them.
How Do We Get the Feelings We Have?
We define the feelings we have by the experiences we have and from hearing others talk about their experiences. As a baby, a loud noise may startle us creating a shaking reaction in the body, we cry, and our parent asks if we were scared. Our body goes through a similar reaction to other instances in life and our brain assigns our outward reaction as crying from fear. Your brain assigns the meaning of fear to that reaction of emotion in your body.
That is a normal part of growth and learning but the problem is that we start to react with that feeling whenever a circumstance brings about a similar reaction in the body without trying to process or assign a meaning. Your brain wants it easy and it keeps you safe so it sticks with the original meaning from before you could think about the meaning.
Why do I bring up Feelings with Health?
Many times it is our thoughts about our circumstances and about how we interpret what the world thinks is healthy that create the health we currently have. From those thoughts, we have a reaction in our body with a feeling that has a meaning and reaction assigned in youth. Your feelings impact your health.
Let’s look back to our examples in my post about How Your Health is Determined by Your Thoughts.
If we think we are in poor health because we don’t meet the world’s definition of good health, we will have a feeling about that thought that we are in poor health. From that feeling, we have a reaction generally created in youth based on the meaning we assigned to that feeling. Often that reaction is the actions that continue in behaviors that keep you in poor health.
If the world says we are obese and that is bad for health, then our feelings will create actions that continue to prove and result in bad health. Your feelings impact your health.
What Can You Do?
You can decide to think about your thoughts and feelings.
Your decision-making brain is not mature until around age 24. That doesn’t mean to not use it until then. The more your use it the better your decisions making ability will become.
You are capable of making decisions about your thoughts and feelings. Step one is to wonder why you are having a specific thought or feeling when a circumstance occurs and decide to allow yourself to react the way it always has or change your action.
You can change your action by giving a new meaning to the feeling caused by the circumstance. Once you have that new meaning, you can choose new actions that bring you towards your goals.
How Do You Do That?
For example, you step on the scale and have gained a pound. Typically, you feel frustrated or sad, give up on being healthy and eat a bunch of unhealthy snacks for the next three days. You created this reaction in your youth when you were overweight and your friends made fun of you.
You can choose at the point when you step on the scale to assign another meaning to that 1 pound gain. Maybe since you have been lifting weights, you gained muscle.
You have evidence that your pants feel loose to support that you may have lost fat and gained muscle. Therefore you can conclude that what you are doing for your health is working and you should keep doing it.
Your action is to be proud of your muscle gain and keep doing the things that are helping you become healthier.
Main Takeaway
For those who skimmed this whole thing and just want the conclusion.
Choose to use your decision-making brain.
Think about your thoughts and feelings and decide what they mean to you now as an adult.
Understand you do not have to believe everything your brain is telling you.
Take control of your thoughts.
Have the day and health you want to have instead of the day your habits created in youth give you.
If you want to have better health, then get on a clarity call with me to uncover your health goals, determine if we are a good fit for helping you meet those goals, and get all your questions answered about what I can do for you and your health.
