Have you chosen to stop smoking?

If you have decided that now is a good time to stop the smoking habit, then you’ll be pleased to know that hundreds of thousands of people have already released themselves from the grip of nicotine and you can do it too.

You need to fulfill the commitment you have made with yourself and with those close to you. The first step is to alter your thinking and become and optimist.  You must change your habits, meaning any of the habits that lead you to smoke.

You need to think of all the good reasons to quit, but only those that make sense to you, personally, and think how much better your life would be if you quit smoking, but use specific reasons.  Write down the reasons you started smoking and the reasons you want to quit.  Again, these must be your own reasons!  Do not just use the reasons from anti-smoking ads you see on television or reasons others have used, they will not work unless they are reasons to which you are emotionally attached.  This will give you strength.

If you properly condition yourself mentally then you can certainly realize the commitment you have made to yourself. People are generally scared of the withdrawal effects without giving thought to the long term benefits of quitting. They never think that the pleasure, comfort and enjoyment that they are getting from smoking is short term. These feelings exist at a subconscious level. Studies say that we experience 60,000 thoughts a day, and unfortunately when you are scared of quitting smoking a high percentage of those thoughts can be negative.

So, remember, write it down.  Write down the reasons you want to quit smoking and use those reasons to start to motivate yourself. It’s not an easy task, but many have gone before you so you know it’s possible.

Contact me for a one to one tailored program or if you prefer to do some work yourself first there is a stop smoking pack on my website

https://www.kholistictherapy.com/holistic-health-shop.php#!/How-To-Quit-Smoking-help-pack/p/58254105/category=0

Triple First

Sabotaging Your Weight Loss

We have all done it. You start the day with a commitment to eat healthy all day, and by 5:00, you are munching on stale doughnuts on the drive home or sneaking snacks after everyone else is in bed. But somehow you convince yourself that these choices are okay.

That you “deserve” this treat or will “get back on track tomorrow.” These self-sabotaging behaviors are common and the number one reason that most people struggle to lose weight permanently.

Knowing you are sabotaging yourself is the first step to stopping this unhealthy behavior. Once you can recognize the habits and patterns of self-sabotage, then you can work toward reversing these, which will enable you to be more successful at changing your health and reducing your weight. Here are the most common ways you are sabotaging your weight loss efforts.

1. “I earned this treat.” If your goal is to lose weight and be healthier, then everything you do should be focused on that effort. When you reward your positive changes and hard work at eating healthy foods and exercising more by indulging in unhealthy options, then you are sabotaging your progress. Eating well all day does nothing if you blow eat with a “treat” every night. You can’t be healthy five days a week and unhealthy two days a week and expect to see real change.
3. Using exercise to “make up” for bad food choices. If you eat unhealthy food, then use exercise to “punish” yourself for this behavior, you are reinforcing several unhealthy ways of thinking about diet and exercise. Exercise is not something you should do to work off calories or burn off cheat meals. And just because you worked out does not mean you can eat more if you are trying to lose weight.

 

3. Blowing “treats” way out of proportion. It used to be that people at sugary treats very rarely. Like once a month. Same with fast food. Same with eating out. Now, we have someone convinced ourselves that these are things you should have much more often. A treat is just that. Something special, meant to signify a real reward, not making it until bedtime without blowing your diet. They should be things you enjoy in very small quantities at very special times.

 

4. Using fake food to make up for your lack of nutrition and calling it healthy. If you eat crappy food all day long, it does not matter how many supplements you take each day. You are not going to be healthy. The majority of the vitamins and minerals you need for optimal health should come from the nutrient-dense food you eat, not from supplements. You can use supplements to fill in minor gaps in your nutritional needs, but focus first on the right food, and you will not need to rely on these so much.

 

5. “I skipped breakfast, so I’ll eat more for lunch.” Unless you are a dedicated follower of intermittent fasting and understand how to break a fast effectively, more people who skip meals are much more likely to overeat later in the day, thus negating the “saved” calories from the missed meal. Eating small, well-balanced meals regularly is more likely to keep you on track and help you feel sated and quell food cravings than skipping meals.

 

6. Not understanding your limits. For some people, you can take a bite or two of an indulgent treat, feel satisfied, and be able to put the fork down and be done. Others will have three bites of that treat, which will trigger a midnight raid on the “emergency” ice cream in the freezer. Knowing your triggers and honoring your limits is key to staying on track.

 

Whether it is one of these or one of hundreds of other ways that you rationalize your poor nutritional or exercise choices to yourself, it is crucial that you recognize these, own up to them, and find new, healthier ways to stop engaging in these types of actions, if you genuinely want to be successful at losing weight.

5 Ways to Feel More Valuable to Yourself

Setting yourself as a top priority in your life is not only good for you, but it is also good for those who share your life. When you learn to take care of and value yourself, you are more emotionally healthy and available to take care of others. When you learn to appreciate and trust yourself, you can be more open and honest with those in your life, too.

Learning to value yourself is not selfish; it is necessary. Valuing yourself means you become a better person and make stronger choices for yourself. Here are five ways you can learn to start appreciating yourself more and ensuring you are the most critical person in your life.

 

1. Embrace Mistakes and Learn from Them.

 

Everyone makes mistakes. And while it’s normal to regret things you’ve messed up in the past, instead of dwelling on your mistakes and living with shame, there is a better choice. How you handle blunders and embarrassments tells a lot about how you value yourself. And when you learn to see mistakes as an opportunity to learn, not something to forget, you will value yourself for the imperfect, evolving human you are.

 

Instead of turning to negative self-talk and derogatory statements after a setback, ask yourself what you can learn. What will you do differently next time? Mistakes are opportunities to learn from new information and do better in the future. And when you embrace this way of thinking, you place more value on yourself as a growing person than on the mistake itself.

 

2. Always Do Your Best.

 

If you want to value yourself more, you have to live by your values and always strive to do your best to uphold your personal standards. When you try your best, even if your best that day was not perfect, you’ve don’t everything you could possibly do, so there’s no reason to be ashamed. When you can honestly tell yourself that you have tried your hardest, you can feel nothing but pride in yourself.

 

3. Stop Settling.

 

If you want to start valuing yourself more, you need to stop settling. Accepting less than what you deserve or want is devaluing your own needs and interests. Don’t settle for a job that doesn’t fulfill you, a partner that doesn’t treat you well, or a friendship that doesn’t lift you up. You deserve the things you want in life, and when you settle for less, you are not valuing yourself above others.

 

4. Let Go of the Comparisons

 

When you compare yourself to others, you are shifting attention away from yourself an onto people and lives that have nothing to do with you. Instead, focus on yourself and what you need. Make plans for how you want to reach your goals, because what other people are trying to do doesn’t have any impact on your life. When you stop comparing yourself to others and only worry about yourself, you truly value what is most important in your life.

 

5. Follow Your Passion

 

Do what makes you happiest in life. Follow your dreams, embrace your passions, and focus on living to your fill purpose, and you’ll finally know what it is to value yourself. When you pay attention to your own bliss and stop letting others distract you from that, you place importance and worth on what makes you happy in life.

 

Final Thoughts

 

Your relationship with yourself is the most important one you will ever have. Learn to listen to your needs, respond to your wants, and invest in your goals, if you want to learn to truly value the person you are.

 

Understanding The Link Between Healthy Emotions and a Strong Psychology

The mind-body relationship is becoming clearer thanks to the advent of modern science. Likewise, the link between our thoughts and our emotions are also becoming better known. Research has demonstrated an obvious correlation between good emotions and a strong psychology.

 

The Circle

Our thoughts and our emotions both form a circle reinforcing the other. Negative thoughts will generate emotions of a similar nature and these emotions will then result in more negative thoughts. This forms a vicious pattern that is most clearly observed in patients suffering from PTSD and other traumas. It is very difficult for these people to break free, and the events keep recurring in their minds.

 

Over time, such patients heal to an extent. The main way to heal is gradually, as these patients can focus their energies on things that they enjoy so that the memories fail to repeat themselves and lose some of their previous force.  Calming therapeutic modalities work over time to gently alleviate these traumas. However, modern society is anything but therapeutic.

 

On the other hand, healthy emotions are linked with successful and a powerful psychology. People who are happier have more success and better interpersonal relationships. They have better concentration, memory, and social skills. It is far easier to be successful when you have a positive emotional framework as a foundation than to be struggling internally.

 

How to Manage The Relationship

Everybody is in a situation where they need to better manage their thoughts and emotions. It takes some time, but there are proven ways to reinforce the strengths of our thoughts and emotions. These include:

 

1. Meditation
2. Mindfulness
3. Deep Communication
4. Creative Work

 

Meditation and mindfulness are practices where we simply observe what is happening in our minds. This is very beneficial in a world that is so externally orientated. We can observe how we feel and how these thoughts stimulate certain emotions. Over time, we can catch the negative thoughts before they gain too much momentum and ruin the whole day.

 

Deep communication is another technique where we work with a therapist or practitioner to document and analyze our own patterns for further insights.

 

Creative work is about self-expression. An intense dedication to creative work is an excellent way to remove any negative tendencies. What can happen is that we are so focused on artistic inventions that we are not focusing any of our energies on the things that make us weak. This works far more quickly than meditation and mindfulness if we can find something that we are truly passionate about.

Minerals and Brain Health

Choose Your Beliefs Wisely

A lot of people think that their beliefs are like clothes. They really don’t have much choice in the matter. They just walk up to their closet, pick out what’s there, wear it, and move on to the next set of clothes the next day.

If that’s your attitude, regarding your beliefs, it’s no surprise that you are not living your life to your fullest potential. Whether this means enjoying the best job, making the most money in your field, enjoying the best relationships, or looking physically fit, beliefs play a major role in your life. No matter how clueless you are about its role, beliefs will continue to remain important in your life.

Where Do Beliefs Draw Their Power?

Beliefs are like glasses. Depending on the grade of your glasses, the world may look crystal clear or it may look very fuzzy and you might even have a nasty headache when using glasses that have the wrong grade.

Beliefs work the same way. When you perceive reality, and I’m talking about the things that you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, they have to be filtered by something in your head. This is called your belief system.

When you filter this information, you give it meaning. You give it color. You give it a certain slant or angle. What do you think happens next? Your analysis of the things that you choose to perceive impacts the things you say, the things you do, and the things you feel about yourself and the rest of the world.

In other words, this is important stuff but the problem is a lot of people think that since they think a certain way that this is reality. They confuse objective reality, which everyone could agree with, with their own subjective take on the things that they perceive.

Also, other people excuse their own warped way of perceiving reality by saying that that’s just who they are or it’s part of their personality. How dare people question them!

Beliefs are chosen. Just as you can choose your clothes, you can choose your beliefs. I’m not saying that it’s easy. After all, beliefs do become habitual after a while. You don’t hang onto a belief system because it is just flat-out wrong and harms you. There’s something about the belief system that you have chosen that gives you enough benefits for it to be worth hanging onto.

It’s like wearing really raggedy shoes. You probably have really old shoes in your home. They look nasty and they could even smell like a rat died in them but, for whatever reason, you like wearing those shoes because they’re comfortable. You know that they don’t look the best; they don’t perform all that well but you prefer their comfort. They do well enough and serve you well enough so you keep them around and you use them day to day.

The same applies to your beliefs. There are many belief systems that have simply outlived their purpose or usefulness. It’s important for us to take a long, hard look at our beliefs and ask ourselves some hard questions. Otherwise, we will be living far below our potential. We would continue to look at reality with tools that really don’t serve us. That’s a tragedy.

For great resources visit http://www.kholistictherapy.com/shop

Your Beliefs Shape Your Life So You Better Choose Them Properly

A lot of people think that their beliefs are like clothes. They really don’t have much choice in the matter. They just walk up to their closet, pick out what’s there, wear it, and move on to the next set of clothes the next day.

If that’s your attitude, regarding your beliefs, it’s no surprise that you are not living your life to your fullest potential. Whether this means enjoying the best job, making the most money in your field, enjoying the best relationships, or looking physically fit, beliefs play a major role in your life. No matter how clueless you are about its role, beliefs will continue to remain important in your life.

Where Do Beliefs Draw Their Power?

Beliefs are like glasses. Depending on the grade of your glasses, the world may look crystal clear or it may look very fuzzy and you might even have a nasty headache when using glasses that have the wrong grade.

Beliefs work the same way. When you perceive reality, and I’m talking about the things that you can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, they have to be filtered by something in your head. This is called your belief system.

When you filter this information, you give it meaning. You give it color. You give it a certain slant or angle. What do you think happens next? Your analysis of the things that you choose to perceive impacts the things you say, the things you do, and the things you feel about yourself and the rest of the world.

In other words, this is important stuff but the problem is a lot of people think that since they think a certain way that this is reality. They confuse objective reality, which everyone could agree with, with their own subjective take on the things that they perceive.

Also, other people excuse their own warped way of perceiving reality by saying that that’s just who they are or it’s part of their personality. How dare people question them!

Beliefs are chosen. Just as you can choose your clothes, you can choose your beliefs. I’m not saying that it’s easy. After all, beliefs do become habitual after a while. You don’t hang onto a belief system because it is just flat-out wrong and harms you. There’s something about the belief system that you have chosen that gives you enough benefits for it to be worth hanging onto.

It’s like wearing really raggedy shoes. You probably have really old shoes in your home. They look nasty and they could even smell like a rat died in them but, for whatever reason, you like wearing those shoes because they’re comfortable. You know that they don’t look the best; they don’t perform all that well but you prefer their comfort. They do well enough and serve you well enough so you keep them around and you use them day to day.

The same applies to your beliefs. There are many belief systems that have simply outlived their purpose or usefulness. It’s important for us to take a long, hard look at our beliefs and ask ourselves some hard questions. Otherwise, we will be living far below our potential. We would continue to look at reality with tools that really don’t serve us. That’s a tragedy.

For great resources visit http://www.kholistictherapy.com/shop

Meditation or Antidepressants?

Are Antidepressants Killing You?

According to the most recent pharmaceutical sales figures in the United States and Western Europe, antidepressants and anti-anxiety pharmaceutical medications rank in the top ten of all prescribed drugs. These figures account for hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, of sales year after year.

On top of this, we’re not even considering the antidepressant of anti-anxiety or mood-altering uses of illegal drugs. We’re just talking about legal medication.

There is something fundamentally wrong with our modern society when our primary instinct when dealing with any kind of mood or behavioral issue is to medicate.

Now, don’t get this wrong. I’m not at all saying, nor dismissing the fact that some people do need to be medicated. That’s a fact. They need biochemical intervention.

However, it’s also indisputable that a significant percentage of people who take antidepressants or any other kind of medication don’t have to do it. There are other alternatives. Instead, for a variety of reasons, they feel that this is their only option.

I don’t want to be the one to tell you this, but you’re paying a big price if you feel that you’re stuck on medication. If you feel that this is your only option, you are actually giving up a lot.

Many Antidepressant Formulations have Unpleasant Side Effects

In addition to inducing erectile dysfunction or impotence, weight issues as well as other physical symptoms, antidepressants also numb you.

While they do a wonderful job of eliminating the low points of your moods, they also dampen the high points. Last time I checked, life is all about experiencing the highs and lows.

Now, I understand that the lows can really be soul crushing. They can really get you down. But unfortunately, antidepressants dampen your response to the rest of your emotional range.

Things that normally excite you, things that you normally anticipate and look forward to, no longer excite you. They no longer make you look forward. You no longer feel like you’re looking forward to some great times.

When something good happens to you, instead of feeling a tremendous amount of appreciation and an immense burst of happiness and joy, you feel numb. You know that something positive is happening, but it isn’t as intense as before.

This kills the soul. The soul feels. And it’s very easy to dwell on negative memories and emotions when your soul is hurting. It’s easy to dwell when you’re aching, longing and you feel that something is missing or incomplete.

But the soul also feels a sense of calm, a sense of joy when other people attain their dreams. You get this radiant sense of hope when things work out. And that’s what you give up when you feel that antidepressants are your only option.

The Good News

What if I told you that there is a 100% natural alternative to antidepressants? What if I told you that this alternative does not involve chemicals?

It doesn’t involve professionals monitoring your mental state. It doesn’t involve going to some psychiatrist’s office or spending some time on a counselor’s couch.

Instead, it’s something that you control yourself. Most importantly, it already operates deep within you to keep you sane. I am talking about meditation.

It can help you gain the benefits of antidepressants without the side effects, take up meditation.

Believe In You