A reflection on the impact of unhealthy mental habits, the importance of mental strength, and practical steps to overcome destructive beliefs for a better life.
Speech:
So I have a Facebook friend whose life seems perfect. She lives in a gorgeous house and has a really rewarding career. She and her family go on all these exciting adventures together on the weekends, and I swear they must take a professional photographer along with them because no matter where they go or what they do, the whole family just looks beautiful. She’s always posting about how blessed she is and how grateful she is for the life that she has. I get the feeling she’s not just saying those things for the sake of Facebook, but she truly means it. How many of you have a friend kind of like that? And how many of you kind of don’t like that person sometimes?
We all do this, right? It’s hard not to. But that way of thinking costs us something, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today: what our bad habits cost us. Maybe you scroll through your Facebook feed and think, “What if I roll my eyes? It’s just five seconds of my time. How could it be hurting me?” Well, researchers have found that envying your friends on Facebook actually leads to depression. That’s just one of the traps that our minds can set for us.
Have you ever complained about your boss or looked at your friends’ lives and thought, “Why do they have all the luck?” We can’t help thinking that way, right? That way of thinking seems small in the moment. In fact, it might even make you feel better in the moment, but that way of thinking is eating away at your mental strength. There are three kinds of destructive beliefs that make us less effective and rob us of our mental strength.
The first one is unhealthy beliefs about ourselves. We tend to feel sorry for ourselves. While it’s okay to be sad when something bad happens, self-pity goes beyond that. It’s when you start to magnify your misfortune, thinking, “Why do these things always have to happen to me? I shouldn’t have to deal with this.” That way of thinking keeps you stuck, keeps you focused on the problem, and keeps you from finding a solution. Even when you can’t create a solution, you can always take steps to make your life or somebody else’s life better. But you can’t do that when you’re busy hosting your own pity party.
The second type of destructive belief that holds us back is unhealthy beliefs about others. We think that other people can control us, and we give away our power. As adults who live in a free country, there are very few things in life that you have to do. When you say, “I have to work late,” you give away your power. Yes, there may be consequences if you don’t work late, but it’s still a choice. Or when you say, “My mother-in-law drives me crazy,” you give away your power. Maybe she’s not the nicest person on earth, but it’s up to you how you respond to her because you’re in control.
The third type of unhealthy belief that holds us back is unhealthy beliefs about the world. We tend to think that the world owes us something. We think, “If I put in enough hard work, then I deserve success.” But expecting success to fall into your lap like some sort of cosmic reward will only lead to disappointment. I know it’s hard to give up our bad mental habits. It’s hard to get rid of those unhealthy beliefs that we’ve carried around with us for so long. But you can’t afford not to give them up, because sooner or later, you’re going to hit a time in your life where you need all the mental strength that you can muster.
When I was 23 years old, I thought I had life all figured out. I graduated from grad school, landed my first big job as a therapist, got married, and even bought a house. I thought, “This is going to be great. I’ve got this incredible jumpstart on success. What could go wrong?” That all changed for me one day when I got a phone call from my sister. She said that our mother was found unresponsive and had been taken to the hospital. My husband Lincoln and I jumped in the car and rushed to the hospital. We couldn’t imagine what could be wrong. My mother was only 51 and didn’t have any history of health problems. When we got to the hospital, doctors explained she’d had a brain aneurysm, and within 24 hours, my mother, who used to wake up in the morning saying, “It’s a great day to be alive,” passed away.
That news was devastating to me. My mother and I had been very close. As a therapist, you know on an intellectual level how to go through grief, but knowing it and doing it can be two very different things. It took a long time before I felt like I was really healing. Then, on the three-year anniversary of my mother’s death, some friends called and invited Lincoln and me to a basketball game. Coincidentally, it was being played at the same auditorium where I’d last seen my mother the night before she passed away. I hadn’t been back there since. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go back, but Lincoln and I talked about it, and ultimately we said maybe that would be a good way to honor her memory.
So we went to the game and actually had a really good time with our friends. On the drive home that night, we talked about how great it was to finally be able to go back to that place and remember my mother with a smile rather than all those feelings of sadness. Shortly after we got home that night, Lincoln said he didn’t feel well. A few minutes later, he collapsed. I had to call for an ambulance. His family met me at the emergency room. We waited for what seemed like forever until finally a doctor came out. Rather than taking us back to see Lincoln, he took us back to a private room and sat us down and explained that Lincoln, the most adventurous person I’d ever met, was gone. We didn’t know at that time, but he’d had a heart attack. He was only 26 and didn’t have any history of heart problems.
Now I found myself a 26-year-old widow, and I didn’t have my mom. I thought, “How am I going to get through this?” To describe that as a painful period in my life feels like an understatement. It was during that time that I realized when you’re really going through tough times, good habits aren’t enough. It only takes one or two small habits to really hold you back. I worked as hard as I could, not just to create good habits in my life, but to get rid of those small habits, no matter how small they might seem. Throughout it all, I held out hope that someday life could get better. Eventually, it did.
Years down the road, I met Steve, and we fell in love, and I got remarried. We sold the house that Lincoln and I had lived in, bought a new house in a new area, and I got a new job. But almost as quickly as I breathed my sigh of relief over that fresh start, we got the news that Steve’s dad had terminal cancer. I started to think, “Why do these things always have to keep happening? Why do I have to keep losing all my loved ones? This isn’t fair.” But if I’d learned anything, it was that that way of thinking would hold me back. I knew I was going to need as much mental strength as I could muster to get through one more loss. So I sat down and wrote a list of all the things mentally strong people don’t do, and I read over that list. It was a reminder of all of those bad habits that I’d done at one time or another that would keep me stuck. I kept reading that list over and over because I really needed it. Within a few weeks of writing it, Steve’s dad passed away.
My journey taught me that the secret to being mentally strong is that you have to give up your bad mental habits. Mental strength is a lot like physical strength. If you want to be physically strong, you need to go to the gym and lift weights. But if you really want to see results, you’d also have to give up eating junk food. Mental strength is the same. If you want to be mentally strong, you need good habits like practicing gratitude, but you also have to give up bad habits like resenting somebody else’s success. No matter how often that happens, it will hold you back.
So how do you train your brain to think differently? How do you give up those bad mental habits that you’ve carried around with you? It starts by countering those unhealthy beliefs that I talked about with healthier ones. For example, unhealthy beliefs about ourselves mostly come about because we’re uncomfortable with our feelings. Feeling sad or hurt or angry or scared—those things are all uncomfortable, so we go to great lengths to avoid that discomfort. We try to escape it by doing things like hosting a pity party. Although that’s a temporary distraction, it just prolongs the pain. The only way to get through uncomfortable emotions, the only way to deal with them, is to let yourself feel sad and then move on, to gain confidence in your ability to deal with that discomfort.
Unhealthy beliefs about others come about because we compare ourselves to other people. We think that they’re either above us or below us. We think that they can control how we feel or that we can control how they behave, or we blame them for holding us back. But really, it’s our own choices that do that. You have to accept that you’re your own person and other people are separate from you. The only person you should compare yourself to is the person that you were yesterday.
Unhealthy beliefs about the world come about because, deep down, we want the world to be fair. We want to think that if we put in enough good deeds, enough good things will happen to us, or if we tough it out through enough bad times, we’ll get some sort of reward. But ultimately, you have to
accept that life isn’t fair. That can be liberating. It means you won’t necessarily be rewarded for your goodness, but it also means no matter how much you’ve suffered, you’re not doomed to keep suffering. The world doesn’t work that way. Your world is what you make it. But of course, before you can change your world, you have to believe that you can change it.
I once worked with a man who’d been diabetic for years. His doctor referred him to therapy because he had some bad mental habits that were starting to affect his physical health. His mother had died from complications of diabetes at a young age, so he just believed he was doomed and had given up trying to manage his blood sugar altogether. In fact, his blood sugar had gotten so high lately that it was starting to affect his vision, and he had his driver’s license taken away. His world was shrinking. When he came into my office, it was clear he knew all the things he could do to manage his blood sugar; he just didn’t think it was worth the effort.
Eventually, he agreed to make one small change. He said, “I’ll give up my two-liter-a-day Pepsi habit and trade it in for Diet Pepsi.” He couldn’t believe how quickly his numbers started to improve. Even though he came in every week to remind me how horrible Diet Pepsi tasted, he stuck with it. Once he started to see a little bit of improvement, he said, “Maybe I could look at some of my other habits.” He traded in his nightly bowl of ice cream for a snack with a little less sugar. Then one day, he was at a thrift store with some friends and found this beat-up old exercise bike. He bought it for a couple of bucks, brought it home, and parked it in front of his TV. He started to pedal while watching some of his favorite shows every night.
Not only did he lose weight, but one day he noticed he could see the TV just a little bit more clearly than he had before. Suddenly, it occurred to him that maybe the damage done to his eyesight wasn’t permanent. So he set a new goal for himself to get his driver’s license back. From that day forward, he was on fire. By the end of our time together, he was coming in every week saying, “Okay, what are we gonna do this week?” because he finally believed that he could change his world, that he had the mental strength to change it, and that he could give up his bad mental habits. It all started with just one small step.
So I invite you to consider what bad mental habits are holding you back. What unhealthy beliefs are keeping you from being as mentally strong as you could be? What’s one small step that you could take today, right here, right now?
Thank you.
Leave A Comment