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How Understanding Motivation and Emotion Can Help you Become Healthier

Understanding motivation and emotion are linked can be the key factor in helping yourself transform your life into making lifestyle choices that will allow you to become healthier. If you know that how you feel about something is going to affect how successful you are at it, then you can try and stop yourself from thinking negatively about what you have to do, or what you have to give up, and concentrate instead on the positive side of what you will achieve.

For example, if you are told by your doctor that you must lose weight, understanding motivation and emotion will allow you to realize that if you concentrate your thought processes on how much you weigh every day and stress about every pound not lost, if you think about all the things you love to eat and drink which are now denied to you, then you are not likely to keep to the healthy eating plan your doctor wants you to follow. Read up so that your understanding of motivation and emotion is better, and follow any exercises it gives you to turn your negative thoughts into positive ones.

Instead of thinking about what you’re not allowed to eat and depriving yourself of all candy, motivate yourself by allowing yourself a small bar of candy at your weekly weigh-in if you have lost weight. That’s a good reward as it allows you a little of what you’re no longer supposed to have as part of your normal diet, but at the same time, it lets you feel as if it’s not quite 100% off limits. This is a perfect example of how understanding motivation and emotion can help you to accomplish a healthier lifestyle without feeling as if you are being denied any of the things that you really enjoy, because it’s the deprivation of these things that can create the destructive emotions that would sabotage your best efforts.

Someone who has an addiction could also benefit from understanding motivation and emotion in action. Although the reward for abstaining from the substance or other addictive process can’t be connected to this, a suitable reward in shape of something else that’s enjoyed can be used instead.

In both the case of stopping an addiction, and starting healthier living practices, using an understanding of motivation and emotion can also work in a group environment. This doesn’t work for everyone as some people are more successful on their own, but many people find that a group dynamic helps them to get adrenalin going and improving their motivation for continuing something, and so they feel better about doing it, and it goes better until the practice of having to eat healthier, or exercise regularly, or not smoke or inject is not so much a thought process, but more of a subconscious habit that no longer requires any understanding of motivation and emotion at all!

The creation of a good habit could be the goal that you are really looking for when you start out with your lifestyle change. Using an understanding motivation and emotion process can really help you get the momentum going in the early days and weeks when doing the things recommended to stop the unhealthy habits is especially difficult as you continue to dwell on what you’re missing instead of what you’re gaining. At first reading to get an understanding motivation and emotion may seem more technical than you’d like, but once you understand the basic principle of how you feel about something affects how successful you are likely to be because it affects how much effort you put into it, you’re well on your way to achieving your goal.