“The moment you have a certain thought and believe it, you will experience an immediate emotional response. Your THOUGHT actually creates the EMOTION.”
      -David Burns, MD

I love this quote because this is the secret sauce to how you create the reality you live in. Whether your reality is one you want or one you are trying to change, when you understand that your thoughts combined with the emotions evoked from those thoughts are creating your reality, YOU then have the power to change it.

Working with hundreds of people around the world, one of the most important things we talk about with our program clients is bringing awareness to the language we use.

We know how important it is to not only look at how we talk about ourselves or our symptoms, but the internal dialogue we have with ourselves as well. Every minute of every day, we are creating and then getting the experience of living out a story we ultimately created by the language we use and the emotions attached to it.

Sometimes these stories are a result of years of unconscious patterns that we have become comfortable with and accustomed to. Our stories can also be a result of things we heard or experienced at any point in our lives.

The first step in breaking the cycles of stress, anxiety, and depression that these stories cause is bringing an awareness to our stories and the phrases that are on repeat in our heads without us even realizing it. These automatic thoughts are often referred to as “self-talk”.

Once we have an awareness, we can then take back control of our thoughts, and we can begin flipping the script. At any given moment you have the ability to shift your reality and experience in your healing journey.

My favorite way to start rewriting my story on a daily basis is through the practice of reframing. “Reframing” is a technique originating in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to identify automatic (negative) thoughts and replace them with more balanced thoughts (thinking of what you DO want, instead of what you don’t want).

Think of your mind as an orchestra making a variety of sounds, both pleasant and unpleasant. As the conductor of our orchestra, if we don’t like what we’re hearing, we tend to try silencing all the unpleasant sounds in order to hear only the pleasant. But gradually the unpleasant sounds gain in volume again regardless of our efforts to block them out.

What if we could simply find a way to bring all the unpleasant sounds into harmony with the rest? This is essentially what the resilience-building practice of thought reframing is meant to achieve.

Studies have been done in the field of stress showing how powerful the mind can be in determining how our bodies react to stressful situations. Participants in research settings who experienced stress and believed the stress would negatively impact their health had poorer health outcomes, whereas those who believed the stress was positive had better health outcomes. Those who believed a little bit of stress was a good thing saw increased brain function, a greater sense of wellbeing, and even a boost in immunity.

When I learned about reframing, I made the mistake of thinking it meant I had to decide that actually everything was perfect or that I had to do a 180 in what I was experiencing. But, this is far from the truth.

Instead, reframing asks us to simply entertain questions like:

• Is there another way to look at this situation?
• What are some other possible reasons this could have happened?
• What can I learn from this challenge that will help me in the future?
• And, what can I do to achieve the best possible outcome?

You can also start shifting your outlook to one that is HELPFUL by asking questions like, “Is this thought supporting my forward momentum, or is it hurting me?”

Or, “Is this something I would say if I were trying to support a loved one or a dear friend?”