Work smart, not hard, for health
In a continuing effort to help all of us more easily manage our efforts toward better health, I am ever watching for strategies and philosophies that can accomplish meaningful improvement with less time and effort. Understandably, you may be thinking this an unreasonable notion: that one can get 鈥渟omething for nothing.鈥�
However, the idea is not so much that as it is about putting our limited time and energy toward more meaningful returns on our investment.
Wouldn鈥檛 it be great if we had a little elf inside tirelessly working on our behalf in regard to our eating and related health choices?
Well, it turns out we can! And this elf actually lives inside each and every one of us: he is called The Subconscious Mind. Even better is that this particular elf is basically your personal servant; it will do whatever you program it to do, including making you eat better!
So how do we program/re-program this tireless little helper? It turns out that the answer is surprisingly close to asking yourself how to get rich. One of the most celebrated books of all time is 鈥淭hink And Grow Rich鈥� by Napoleon Hill. In his world-famous book, he explains that being 鈥渞ich鈥� is not always about money: he specifically states that health and friendship are at the very core of true wealth. Many people primarily think of money as wealth, but Mr. Hill astutely points out that money without health and friendship is pretty useless. I agree.
The subconscious mind is basically a programmed robot that runs things when 鈥測ou鈥� aren鈥檛 making deliberate decisions. It can do things like drive your car when you are daydreaming, adjust temperature in your shower as soon as you feel it needs it, push your lawn mower in such a way that you don鈥檛 run yourself over, fold your laundry, and any number of other tasks that become 鈥渟econd nature鈥� after you repeat them enough. How did they become automatic? We first learned them consciously, and then after so many repetitions, the sub-conscious elf saw them enough times that he learned to do them on his own with no coaching from the conscious mind.
This is precisely how we learned to eat, and how we formed our relationship with physical fitness. Deliberately or not, we taught our elf what to eat, how much and how often. Turns out it is both simple and not-so-simple to teach the old elf new tricks! It is conceptually very simple: repeat, repeat, repeat. The more we consciously speak, think and act in the ways we want to be, the sooner our little elf will become these new and improved versions of us.
In the eloquent way Napoleon Hill put it, 鈥淵ou may VOLUNTARILY plant in your subconscious mind any plan, thought, or purpose you desire to translate into its physical or monetary equivalent. The subconscious acts first on the dominating desires that are mixed with emotional feelings, such as faith.
Through an unknown method, the subconscious mind draws upon the forces of Infinite Intelligence for the power to voluntarily transmute your desires into their physical equivalent.鈥�
This translates to the notion that we need to see and feel ourselves as the reality of what we desire, and then choose to have faith in the inevitability that we will become what we most strongly think, speak, and feel most often. To that end, Mr. Hill advocates writing down our vision, and then speaking it to ourselves every morning and night: first and last thing each day.
So specifically for health and fitness, see yourself as lean, strong, healthy, drug free, and happy. Write down exactly how you wish to look and feel, and then put a time-line on when you will achieve these changes for the better. Mr. Hill sites numerous famous examples of people who applied those principles, and achieved resounding success.
Once you repeat these images enough days, or weeks in a row, the elf inside will accept the new vision of you (the new program), and will begin automatically making choices for you to move toward those goals, without you making any further conscious effort: that is where we begin to work much smarter, and way easier. Just as we formed bad automatic habits, we can deliberately re-program good ones in their place. Once the elf is working for you, the task is unbelievably easier.
I will leave you this week with one more quotation from this brilliant author:
鈥淭here is plenty of evidence to support the belief that the subconscious mind is the connecting link between your finite mind and Infinite Intelligence. It is the intermediary through which you can draw upon the forces of Infinite Intelligence at will. It, alone, contains the secret process where your mental impulses are modified and changed into their spiritual equivalent.鈥�
If you have not done so, you may find Napoleon Hill蘑菇视频 book a major life changer on all levels; there is a reason it has withstood the test of time. Health is indeed鈥ealth.