Holding on to past traumas or emotional stress can be the limiting factor when it comes to successfully overhauling your life and setting the stage for long-lasting change. Without doing so, you will be sabotaging your progress. Freeing yourself from negative thoughts is just as important to sustaining weightloss or reversing disease as improving your nutritional habits or removing toxic chemicals from your body. This is because the body and mind are connected. You literally need to detox emotional negativity from your mind in order to bring about the physical change you seek.

Unfortunately, overcoming the negative thoughts that hold us back is an overlooked aspect of the process of implementing healthy lifestyle change. Perhaps, it’s because the hardest thing to do is look in the mirror and confront ourselves, but without doing so it’s easy to fall back on our old ways and hinder our progress. Confronting your demons, and letting go of the past frees your mind from the stress of emotional baggage allowing for physical manifestations of health to occur. Without this alleviation, emotional stress — whether past, present, or future — has the ability to affect the body the same way that physical or environmental stressors can. 

All forms of stress affect our body the same. Negative thoughts stimulate stress hormones (like cortisol) that impact our detoxification pathways, digestion and nutrient uptake, the bodies capacity to heal efficiently or defend against viruses (like the RONA), our sleep habits and patterns, our relationships with others, energy production, and just about everything else you can think of. The stress you’re causing yourself, by continually replaying things you cannot change over-and-over in your mind, slows or shuts down many biochemical processes in an effort to deal with the stressful situation your body thinks is going through. And those are just the the physical manifestations.

Negative emotions can also affect your mindset. If you’re unable to “get over” what is bothering you, it will result in self-limiting beliefs such as anxiety, hypochondria, worthlessness, failure, pessimism, and depression. All of which can undermine your most earnest attempts at improving your life and health because they can turn on the stress response. It’s really a vicious cycle that is worth the pain of confronting, so that you can lead a better life. 

So what can you do about it? It is easier said, than done, but… 

Acknowledge that it happened. Accept that it cannot be changed. Forgive those involved. Move on and be Grateful for what it made you. 

How you do it is up to you. You can talk to someone, or even yourself. As part of my coaching, I help people construct a new narrative to live by on their way to a healthy lifestyle. But for me, it’s writing. Which I recommend for everyone to at least try because it’s a way to get negative thoughts out of my head, and put them somewhere else so they aren’t able to get to me anymore. It’s a cathartic experience, where the process of doing it is far more important than the product. It doesn’t matter what you write down, so much as that you do, and when you do, you feel a sense of relief that it isn’t running around in your head anymore.