Is your mind working against you?

In my effort over the last few years to improve my physical and mental health after a couple of middle-age warning signs, I have tried a lot of techniques and services. If you listen to the promotions, it’s easy to think that you just need to find the right one to suddenly unlock the key to being happy and thin.

I’ve also observed in myself the mind’s penchant for sabotaging such efforts as it does what it does best, being good at things we do regularly, and finding patterns in sparse data and short term trends. Start the latest fad diet and lose a few pounds (which always seems to happen at first, supposedly from water weight)? This diet is great! Then lose 1/2 a pound in the next few days (a healthy rate of weight loss)? Eh, this has slowed way down, and that pizza looks delicious. Start a New Year’s resolution to go to the gym? A couple of weeks later, I don’t look any more jacked, and next thing I miss a day, then a week, then it’s New Year’s yet again.

But this doesn’t only happen with straightforward things like exercising and diet. It also applies to ways of thinking that we don’t like. I can want to stop thinking anxious thoughts that I logically don’t think make sense. I can wish to be more assertive and kinder. I can even catch myself obsessing over something for no good reason and in doing so, dismiss it for the moment. I can start a conversation with someone intent on being assertive and hold it up for that conversation. But often these habitual ways of thinking just come back later (sometimes moments later).