The 30 Days to Pain-Free Challenge:

Day 1 – Adopt a Life-Affirming Mindset

If you’re not feeling up to your full health potential at this stage of your life, I’d like to give you some advice on how to turn this around. After all, life is precious, and finite. We want to be able to make each of our remaining days the best they can possibly be, which can be difficult if you’re in pain, have low energy and/or have some degree of movement restriction in your body.

After three decades of treating thousands of ill patients and analyzing their histories, I’ve identified the seven (7), fundamental things that are essential to a healthy existence; physically and mentally. I call them The Seven Pillars of Health. A pillar is a structure that supports, or props something up. Take away one of the pillars, and the support is now compromised– it’s opening a door for illness to enter your life. Take away two or three of these pillars, and now you are setting yourself up for health problems that will start to grow and cause big problems for you in the near future.

They Seven Pillars of Health are:

1. Adopt a life-affirming mindset
2. Embrace the value of movement
3. Make most of what you eat nutrient-dense
4. Be mindful of and avoid pathogens
5. Be mindful of and avoid toxins
6. Make time for rest & recreation
7. Actively seek and maintain social connections

The most important pillar by far is the first one:  adopt a life-affirming mindset.  This is the one that will determine if you will be successful in the other five pillars of health.  It means valuing your life and therefore avoiding activities that take away from your life.  It includes being true and honest with yourself; being able to distinguish right from wrong; and basically having control over your actions; i.e. having accountability and discipline.

Your task today:  Take inventory of your mindset and identify all thoughts and behaviors that have a negative impact on your health.

Everything starts with your mindset. If you’re over 40, you are making subconscious choices that you’ve learned throughout your life experience to date and have been repeating for decades. In other words, it is essentially the programming in your brain, much like how software runs a computer. This entrenched mindset runs you; it makes you do what you do, all the good and all the bad.  In fact, you can infer someone’s mindset just by observing them because mindset drives behavior, and a person’s years of behavior manifests physically.

For example, I can tell from a distance if someone is a chronic smoker just by observing their skin and hearing their voice, as cigarette smoke contains many types of harmful toxins that damage cells.  I know this person does not prioritize his or her health, and is turning to tobacco to deal with some life stresses.

Perhaps there are some things you are doing that are not in the best interests to your long-term health.  This is your sub-conscious driving your conscious mind.  You’ve got to put a spotlight on your subconscious thinking and address it.

Such adverse habits may include:

• Smoking
• Alcohol indulgence
• Being physically inactive; finding excuses to not exercise
• Spending excessive time on social media
• Staying up late/ not getting enough sleep
• Eating highly-processed fast food more than once a week
• Negative/ destructive thoughts; having regrets and holding grudges
• Addictions of any kind: sugar, pornography, texting, social media, etc.
• Social isolation; spiritual emptiness

Your first task is to identify any of these health-sapping behaviors and come up with a plan to ease out of them. Don’t try to stop cold-turkey because remember, these behaviors were learned over many years and you’ve grown accustomed to these routines and they’ve made it into your comfort zone. Instead, give yourself a goal of gradually reducing this behavior over a month.  Put it on paper, and use any creative means you can think of that works for you, to assist yourself in achieving your goals.

Here are some suggestions:

• use pop-up reminders on your devices (there are many options)
• place Post-it notes throughout your home for visual cues
• hang up motivational posters in your line of sight
• find a new calling or purpose in life and throw yourself into it
• find other fulfilling activities that take you away from the screen, such as joining a MeetUp group.

Most of all, find an activity that keeps your brain engaged deeply in the activity so you are not tempted to engage in the bad activity.  It helps to involve another person in this activity and make a commitment involving both of you so you can’t back out and get sucked back into the vicious circle again.

See if you can recruit someone to be your accountability partner; preferably a friend who does not engage in the behavior you are trying to change, and who cares about you. This person will check in with you every other day; ask you how you did, and give you encouragement.

Every adult has a list of things they wish to improve in their lives.   If you’re serious about making big change in your life, it is worth looking into a life coach like Brendan Burchard and Dr. Benjamin Hardy.  Their skill is to understand what everyday people go through in life– the challenges, pressures and self-defeating thoughts, and they have developed their own systems to help those who desire to improve themselves.  Watching their free videos may be enough to benefit you.  It’s not mandatory in order to succeed in my opinion, but may be a good choice for some individuals.

That’s it for today – spend the next couple of days taking inventory of your life and lifestyle. Your conscious mind should know what needs to change. Listen to it, and take action. If you are engaging in some of these behaviors, it has the potential to keep you from reaching your true health potential, no matter what else you do so your first priority is to shore up your mindset so that it drives health-promoting behaviors.

You Can Do It,