There is more to right thinking than just thinking right. And thoughts about your “best you” cannot initially be seen as achievable when your mind has been conditioned otherwise. The majority of the actions and thoughts you experience every day are influenced from your past experiences, and the stories you have incorporated into your mind. Even reading these words is mostly a subconscious activity. Your brain is too efficient to require a conscious decoding of each letter and defining each word. It happens automatically, without conscious thought.

Becoming More Aware of Yourself

Take a look at how you react to events in your life – most of your reactions are automatic or subconscious. Yes, you can exercise your willpower and override subconscious thoughts that interfere with your health. But willpower works best when you are already rested, content, and stress-free. Otherwise, you won’t feel like forcing your will on certain aspects of your life, so you’ll simply follow your automatic procedures.

Has there ever been a time when you decided to limit a particular food? For a while, everything goes smoothly. But eventually, challenges and temptations mount, and your mind convinces you that you deserve, need, or might as well give up on your plans to do without. These types of failure points happen because you are constantly imagining yourself consuming the forbidden food. This can lead your subconscious mind to create and guide you into a situation that puts that forbidden food within arm’s reach more often.

Low Self-Esteem

Self-esteem issues manifest when our self-image is out of balance, creating false feedback on how well we are reaching our goals each day.. We either cannot see ourselves as healthy, or we cannot see ourselves enjoying healthy things. Our survivor brain can leave us in a constant state of self-criticism, even without being conscious of it. And self-imposed limitations may be put in place from a poor mental image of what we can accomplish, and just how healthy we can be. 

Our self-image is usually the result of years of bad habits being normalized and creating a limit beyond which we cannot advance. This behavior often starts as a developing child start receiving feedback from their parents, siblings, or other relatives combined with the possible expectations of themselves based on their past experiences. But none of these self-fulfilling thought processes have to ever be true; we are the masters of our own universe.