We all have them, those little beliefs about ourselves and our lives that interfere with us and the way we do things, the way we feel. They stop us from trying new things, breaking bad habits and forming new ones. Beliefs like “I can’t get through the day without Chocolate.” Sound healthy? I promise you, you can absolutely get through the day without chocolate. All you’ve done is create a psychological barrier that is causing you to change your behaviour when chocolate is unavailable. It’s unlikely that the chocolate itself is doing it, it’s that you’ve created a mental dependence on it so if you want to stop eating chocolate daily, you have to fix your ideas about chocolate.
by ~DarkAlaria69 on deviantArt
These silly little psychological barriers we create are everywhere, and they’re everywhere because they’re within our minds. We have trapped ourselves in our own ideas. Everyone has done it at some point in their life and I am absolutely included in that. For example, I’ve recently started going to the gym and I very much favour bikes over treadmills and cross trainers. Why? Because I have an “I don’t like running” belief. Why don’t I like running? Well, I found it boring in the past, so by continuing to use this silly belief I am hindering myself from working out a larger variety of muscles by sticking to the bike.
Similarly, I find myself feeling very lonely at home, but when I look at my life at university the social life wasn’t massively different. The difference between University and Home is that I perceive myself as having much more friends at university, so I feel less lonely, whereas at home I percieve myself as only having 2 friends – who both have jobs and busy lives – and therefore I feel a lot more lonely. But let me be clear – while I have a good number of friends at University, I don’t actually see them very often. I would see them in classes if we happened to enrol in the same, or pass them by on the street and say a quick “Hello”, but I’m quite introverted and don’t seek them out very often, I’m usually quite content to keep to myself. As you can see, I created a psychological barrier of “I have no friends at home” that is preventing me from being as happy as I can be.
So, how many of our thoughts are actually legitimate? How many of them are true? How often have we created lies that bring naught but our own misery? Far, far too often. We are limiting ourselves with foolish beliefs that really don’t hold much truth at all, what’s the point in that! We have to stop fooling ourselves, and when we do our lives will seem that much brighter – I’m sure of it.
For Love and Change 