World Mental Health Day. Get to the ‘why’ before changing

Guest Blogger - Eleonora Van Orman, Life Coach

You need to get to the ‘why’ before changing your habits

Thursday Oct 10 was world mental health day. The political focus on mental health awareness right now is on anxiety in teenagers and addition. I want to shed light on mental health issues that are common for people over 55. Twenty percent of people over 55 experience mental health issues such as anxiety and depression (cdc./gov/aging) and many more are overworked and stressed out.

During my facebook live interview this week I interviewed a life coach, Eleonora Van Orman (theinbetweencoach.com) who works with people over 50 that are finding themselves time strapped, not happy with some aspect of their life.

A few of the tips that Eleonora suggests to create and sustain healthy habits:

One of the most important and often ignored organ in our bodies is our brain. We are rarely aware of the 60,000 or more thoughts we have in a day since so many of them are automatic, habitual and often unconscious. Sadly, the busier we get the more we rush though our days unconsciously doing the most urgent tasks with little thought or planning. Ask yourself how many times you have cleaned off your child’s unfinished plate rather than throw out food, or simply nibbled your way through your cooking day even if you were not hungry. You become unconscious of your consumption until you come up against a problem like not being able to bend over comfortably, or worse having a health issue, experiencing pain, losing agility, all the while gaining unwanted weight.

Have you ever asked yourself why you eat this way? Do you believe it’s bad to waste food? Were you taught as a child to clean your plate? Are you avoiding other problems that cause stress.

How do you stop… The key is to start by getting support and learning how to become conscious and aware of your current thinking, once you start recognizing patterns of behaviour and habits that are not getting you anywhere, you can then learn use your pre-frontal cortex or your thinking brain to take some steps to help yourself:

One of the important elements to getting what you want is to get realistic with yourself. If you like me have tried every diet on the market, used every magic pill, or white knuckled your way through some short term fix then are not alone. Buying into the diet industry is sometimes like letting a toddler run loose in a candy store…it all sounds great, tastes less filling, should be easy but in the end it did not work. It’s time to finally rely on someone who has your best interests at heart, YOU.

Here are some tips to start the journey. Once you become aware of your mind and body and what is going on for you. Next steps may include some coaching, which includes things like:

Create a healthy eating plan and Decide on a minimum exercise baseline.
Plan ahead, schedule your time and stick to it.
Build self trust, you are the only one who can ultimately do this for yourself and make it stick.
Build on your successes and create new beliefs about your abilities. Remember failure is just an indicator what did not work, you are worth it, keep trying new things,