Women Personality and Mental Health

STEP FIVE: A Life-Affirming Belief System
By searching inside yourself until you touch that sacred spark that knows you are connected to everything else in this universe, you gain access to the greatest motivator you will ever find: the knowledge that you belong in this world, and that the love that suffuses the world is pushing you to be active, healthy and happy. If you believe there is something sacred about the stars, about the sky, about Niagara Falls, then you must accept that there is something sacred about you, too. Don’t try to reason this out. That’s not your job. Just feel it and live it. Be it. That’s your job.

STEP SIX: Avoid Temptation
The solution is simple: Make your house your sanctuary. Whatever your bad habit, get everything related to it as far from your life as possible. If your goal is to be fit and eat less junk, the best favor you can do yourself is to clear your house of junk food. First thing tomorrow, throw out all sweets of any kind. I don’t just mean your kitchen cupboards, either. Hit your bedroom and the bowl of candy in the living room. Don’t forget the glove compartment in your car and your office drawers. The goal is to remove temptation from all facets of your life. If you drive past a bakery with extraordinary cinnamon rolls on your way to work, change your route. Tell your friends not to bring sweets or snacks into the house. If it isn’t there, you can’t eat it.

Don’t trick yourself into focusing solely on desserts. Muffins are just cake in disguise. Sodas, sugary break-fast cereals, and chips are all as bad. Remove all these temptations from your life. You’ll miss them at first, but after a few weeks you’ll wonder what you ever saw in them in the first place.

But, you’re thinking, I live in America. I can’t remove fast-food restaurants from my roads. True. Environment makes a huge difference in your actions, but ultimately it is still up to you. You can’t create an environment where you are unable to give in to temptation. But bottled water, ready-to-go-salads, and bags of pretzels are just as accessible as junk food. Simple changes in external cues do make the difference for most people, and I’m willing to bet you’re one of those people.

STEP SEVEN: Avoid Brainwashing
That step is an extension of the temptation step. There is direct temptation – the box of doughnuts beckoning to you from the top of the fridge – and then there is the constant whispering in your ear from TV, billboards, and magazines, telling you that you need to drink what’s cool, and look a certain way. TV commercials pound brand names of sodas and names of sodas and chips into our heads, so that when we enter a supermarket, we shuffle toward the chip display like zombies, arms outstretched. Equally destructive is the media emphasis on being glitzy, whip-thin, and twenty-five years old for life.

Read the list:
How to Get And Stay Motivated (Part 1)
How to Get And Stay Motivated (Part 3)