Motivation & Mindset
How to Use Positive Thinking to Boost Your Health and Fitness
Apr
There is real power in positive thinking. In fact, learning how to shift your thoughts towards the positive end of the spectrum can results in a big boost to your health and fitness progress. Here’s how to harness the power of positive thinking in your own life and workouts.
Well-being is more than just happiness. Where happiness is an emotion that changes and fluctuates many times over the course of a day, well-being is a more general state of overall contentment, satisfaction and positivity. Happiness is often a reaction. Well-being is a state of mind.
Increasing your awareness of your own well-being in conjunction with an openness to positive thinking and taking action can truly help you to break through fitness plateaus and improve your health.
The Power of Positive Thinking
Harnessing the power of positive thinking can go a long way in improving your sense of well-being, self-worth, self-confidence and self-worth. In cultivating your ability to think positively about yourself, situations in your life – both happy and not so happy, and the path you are on, you make it easier to stay motivated, think clearly and take action. There is forward momentum and energy to positive thinking.
That’s not to say that there is no validity or place for negative emotions. Negative emotions like fear, sadness and anger give us information and opportunity about what’s happening around us and how it is affecting our selves. But lingering there is de-motivating. Negativity tends to falsely inflate challenges and obstacles while simultaneously decreasing your confidence in your ability to handle them.
Your thoughts determine your words. This affects how you talk to others and it also affects how you talk to yourself. Everyday we tell ourselves a story about who we are, what we’re capable of and what we deserve. When that story comes from a place of positivity you’re much more likely to put an upbeat spin on both the short and long term narrative. When you tell yourself you can do something, that you are strong enough/capable enough/worth it, the truer that becomes.
What you say and believe you can do affects you actually, physically do. What you tell yourself you can, you’re much more likely to try. Those actions, every attempt whether it be successful or not, become your daily routine. And really it’s these routines – the actions you take day in and day out -that determine the outcome.
Using Positive Thinking to Boost Your Fitness and Health
“I have to lose more weight, this is not enough”.
“I’ve never been an athlete. I can’t finish a 5k, why would I even try?”
“I have to fix ________ before I go to the gym”.
How many times have you thought these thoughts or said these words? We all have. It’s okay (and completely normal) to have doubts. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to let them stop you from trying something that might really benefit your life and happiness.
Here’s how to implement the power of positive thinking inside and outside of the gym. These strategies touch on practices you can use to increase positive thinking throughout the day, as well as to bookend your day with thankfulness and positivity.
#1: Practice Positivity
If you aren’t used to paying attention to how you talk to yourself, or it feels unnatural to you to be nice to yourself, practice. Women especially are conditioned to notice what’s “wrong” with them and focus on correcting. Try to counteract that by pre-emptively practicing positivity.
If and when you catch yourself using negative self talk, check yourself. Pause, acknowledge those feelings, take a deep breath and think about how you could place a positive spin on the situation. You could use your workout sessions to start practicing.
Catch yourself dreading a workout? Spin it…
I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to focus on myself for the next 60 minutes.
Unsure that you can keep up in a group fitness class?
I am strong, I am powerful, I can do this my way.
Miss a week of workouts and feel guilty about it?
I’m thankful for this week because it’s made me aware of just how important movement is in my life!
#2: Start Your Day with a Gratitude Journal
When I think gratitude I often think of thankfulness. But gratitude is deeper than saying thank you to someone who’s been kind or helpful. Gratitude is a deeper, longer lasting sense of appreciation. It’s an understanding that something is good and valuable, has brought joy or meaning in some way that benefits you long term.
“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gratitude, positivity and improved well-being are intricately linked. Feeling grateful improves your health psychologically and physically. So it stands to reason that by consciously acknowledging what you are grateful for increase positivity and can help you reach your fitness goals.
Start a daily practice of gratitude.
Every morning, before your day gets started, spend 5 minutes quietly writing down what you are thankful for. Some days you might be deeply thankful for the bigger things you have – safety, love, community. Other days you might simply be thankful for coffee. There’s no wrong way to be grateful.
#3: Finish Your Day by Remembering Daily Unexpected Positive Experiences
Daily unexpected positive experiences. These are the little things in life that cause pleasure – from a small smile, to a sense of appreciation, to a belly laugh.
Think about it. How lucky are we to have multiple moments of external positivity directed towards us? When someone holds the door for you when your hands are full (or not). Or a loved one texts you to “just say hi”. When your run takes you down a new street and the cutest dog comes running out to greet you.
These are all unexpected positive experiences that we often take a kernel of joy from that lasts longer than our memory of the reason why. Reflecting on these little moments of happiness at the end of your day is a great way to boost your powers of positive thinking.
Either in your gratitude journal or a different notebook, spend 5 minutes at night jotting down some of experiences you had during the day. This is an amazing way to pull yourself out of a funk and improve your mood and energy.
As an added challenge, think about moments of the day that weren’t so great. Try to spin them and recognize unexpected positives that you got anyways.
Maybe you got stuck in traffic and were late to work.
I finally had the time to call __________, and it was so good to hear about what’s going on in her life! I’ve been meaning to call her for weeks.
Or maybe the gym was packed and you didn’t get to complete your workout the way your trainer wrote it down.
I had to rearrange my workout and I realized that I could do that all by myself. Two months ago I wouldn’t have known where to start, and I probably would have left!
You have a hidden power to change the trajectory of your actions, your day and ultimately your life. It’s the power of positivity – acknowledging it, cultivating it, harnessing it. Learn to frame your thoughts in a positive light and your actions, habits and outcomes will follow suit.
