I’m not talking about going crazy, I’m talking about making different choices.

Using your brain 🧠 to create a new reality by thinking and feeling outside the box 📦 of what your regular reality looks like.

In other words, losing your (old) mind and creating a new one.

For a lot of people, a life lived in what is familiar is a lot safer than stepping out into a future they know nothing about yet, even if they’re unhappy. ☹️

It’s very common to be dissatisfied with your present life, and yet remain stuck in it because it’s become a habit.

Living in the past is also a great excuse for not making changes. We can validate all of our negative experiences, traumas, and let-downs of the past when we continue to give them our energy. ⚡️

The issue is that as long as you are remembering or blaming something from your past, an event, a person, a situation that caused negativity in your life – you are essentially disempowering yourself from making any changes.

You hand over your power to that thing and deny yourself the chance to make any changes.

Essentially most of us are waking up every single day ☀️ with the same problems.
Whether it’s money 💵 worries, work 💼 stress, health 💊, family or relationships 👨‍👩‍👦 issues, we tend to circle back to the same pattern of thoughts over and over again.

Thinking and feeling from the past just perpetuates the past in the present.

All of us have had some kind of trauma, shock or negative experience that at the time created strong emotional reactions. These emotional reactions create chemicals, like adrenaline and cortisol in our body that we associate with those memories. 💭

The problem occurs when we continue to reinforce those thoughts 🗯, memories 💬, and subsequent chemical reactions as we circle back into the same thoughts time after time.

If we do that for long enough, it becomes our normalized state of being.

Think for example if you have experienced betrayal in a relationship. You were badly hurt and upset for a long time. If you continually think about the betrayal, you’re essentially thinking in the past.

Every memory that you have has an associated emotion, and so when you dwell on those bad memories, you also end up feeling that emotion all over again.

Your brain 🧠 and your body therefore remain stuck in the past because you are essentially recreating those thoughts and feelings all over again. If you are driven by those negative thoughts, you are keeping your body and brain in the past.

Remember that your brain cannot distinguish memory or real life – whatever is creating those emotions at the time feels 100% real to your brain and body.

It’s a vicious cycle.

What happens, then?

You remain stuck in the past and recreate the same thing over and over again. You reaffirm your life as you know it to be.

You might experience your family and friends asking you “what’s wrong? Why are you always complaining or sad? Why do you seem so frustrated?”

And you respond with – blaming your past, reaffirming that you are how you are due to the actions of this person who betrayed you, and therefore continuing to perpetuate the situation and its power over your life!

How do you change?

You have to make an effort to change how you think. You have to get out from under the weight of the past and find new thought patterns 💬 for long enough that you begin to turn around your regular state of being into something entirely different.

If your life is going pretty well, it’s a lot easier to forget the past and move on. But if you are unhappy with the way things are going in your life, it’s a lot more likely that you are stuck in old emotional cycles, being driven by those negative thought processes.

There are many times in our lives when we don’t realize we are living based on our past experiences.

Unconscious choices, thoughts, and ways of speaking that take time and effort to turn around.

For example, when feeling stressed if familiar to us, we might see how we are always saying we are stressed, acting stressed, speaking stressed, reinforcing to others that we are stressed, and probably hanging out with other people who are stressed too!

If we are always stressed, then not being one is going to feel totally alien to us. It’s going to feel wrong because it is so unfamiliar.

That’s why this work takes conscious effort. 🙌🏻

You have to literally teach your mind new ways of thinking and feeling. 👨🏻‍🏫

You have to allow your mind to think in entirely new ways.

How to Make Different Choices and Create Healthy Thought Patterns

Here are some tips to help you start changing your life by making different choices and choosing different thoughts:

Create a Thought Journal ✍🏼

Write down all of your negative thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and beliefs that you no longer want to live by.

Make sure you catch yourself and the way you tend to speak: 🗣

What words do you use?
What things do you always say?

Be mindful of these every single day so that you are able to stop yourself from just repeating the old, familiar ways of thinking.

In your thought journal, write down new positive thoughts, affirmations, and beliefs that you do want to keep as a habit.

Take time every day to write these down and repeat them in your mind until your brain becomes familiar with them.

Meditate 🧘🏼‍♀️

Every single day, take time to meditate and teach your body new emotions and thoughts.

Sit quietly until you genuinely feel these new sensations in your body.

The practice of actually feeling like a new person is the key to change.

Imagine 🌟

Before you begin each day, prime your brain by imagining how your day is going to unfold.

For example, see yourself being relaxed, moving through your day getting everything done easily, and being a happy, positive, and communicative person.

Essentially, you are hardwiring into your brain new ways of thinking, feeling, and doing.

If you put in the work every day and do it with energy and passion, you will change your reality.

Creating a new future begins with making a different choice. If you want to step out of your past, you have to be prepared to change the way you think.

The unknown future is not scary, it is full of magic and everything you wish to create!