Your Thoughts Become Your Reality

“Change your thoughts, change your world”, “Develop an attitude of gratitude”, “A negative mind will never give you a positive life”:
what do you think of when you hear these?

Are they empty platitudes, or is there some truth in these common phrases?

When we are feeling depressed it can be easy to disregard these as empty words that cannot possibly apply to you or change how you are currently feeling.  What we believe, is what we can become.  Philosophers, spiritual leaders, and neuroscientists all agree:  we hold infinite power to change our negative states.  When we are hard on ourselves, life will be hard.  Choosing to see the positive, will allow for us to reap rewards.

A fascinating study by Crum and Langer (2007) showed that those doing physical labour for a living achieve positive health benefits simply by redefining their working activities as “exercise”.  While no one may be surprised that exercise correlates to good health, improvements in health can occur if people merely think what they do in the normal course of a day is “exercise”.  Crum and Langer included 84 housekeepers in their study to examine the extent to which beliefs can affect health.  Housekeepers’ job duties are strenuous: climbing stairs, lugging vacuum cleaners, lifting mattresses, getting behind furniture, pushing a heavy cart, et cetera.  Yet most housekeepers do not think of their work as exercise.  They think of their work as WORK.  To alter that perception, the researchers assigned some of the housekeepers to an “informed” group and shared with them that the work they did far exceeded the Surgeon General’s 30 minute recommendations for daily exercise.  They were also given specific details about how many calories were burned doing their tasks (e.g:  15 minutes of vacuuming burns 50 calories).  The remaining housekeepers were not told anything about their work being considered healthful exercise.  Ove the course of a 4-week period, the women who adopted a belief around their job having health benefits showed significant decreases in weight, body mass index, body-fat percentage, waist-to-hip ratio, and systolic blood pressure (for ethical reasons, after the study was completed, the researchers arranged for the control group of housekeepers to be given the same helpful information that the housekeepers in the in the informed group were given).

Change your thoughts, change not just your inner world….but also your physical wellbeing!

~ Christine