Your internal voice will always present both sides of the argument, so if you are struggling with something and you stop and think, the chances are you will think something you have thought before. In terms of making choices that affect your health, if you love pizza and think often how good it tastes, then when trying to lose weight and make a different choice you stop and think about it before you decide, the thought you are most likely to have, is how delicious it is! That’s clearly not going to help. Instead of stopping to think… just stop! If you feel the thought coming into your mind literally say “Stop” to yourself.
Do you make your food choices based on what your body looks like now? Or what you would like your body to look like? How would you like to be able to just stop before you put something in your mouth that makes you fat or lethargic, and either make a different food or drink choice, or if you’re eating or drinking when you’re neither hungry or thirsty, do something else instead? If you’re in a car driving forward and you need to change direction and go backwards, you first have to stop, and then change gear.
Before changing direction physically or emotionally, you have to first STOP doing what you are doing or thinking now, and do something else instead. It’s that pause that allows the change. Just Stop.
If you want to do something you haven’t done before, then you have to create the mind space to allow new pathways to open up. You can’t process 2 things at one time, you can switch very quickly from one to the other, but have you ever felt happy and sad at exactly the same moment? It’s neurologically impossible.
Every emotion has a unique chemical makeup or prescription. The neurotransmitters that generate a feeling of strength and control are very different from the ones that make us feel anxious and crave certain things. Because you cannot produce the prescribed chemical messengers for 2 opposing feelings (e.g. cravings and self-control) simultaneously, you need to stop producing one, in order to start to produce the other.
Although it might seem like certain feelings last for hours, we only produce enough chemistry to sustain them for around 90 seconds. So, if you feel anxious for longer than that, it’s because you are repeating the thought (or a similar one) that made you feel anxious in the first place over and over again. To stop feeling anxious, you have to just stop the thought.