Would I like the fries or the side salad?
Should I buy the new clothes or put the money in savings?
Do I go to the gym or keep sitting here doing what I’m doing?
Pleasure now over long term goals… it’s something we wrestle with every day.
I’m a member of a few social groups that are focused on helping women stop drinking. I do it for a couple of reasons, one of them being that I am happy to support anyone who needs a boost, but I also learn so much from watching the psychology of what happens there. Yes, if these women have been drinking, the chemicals in the brain are a mess and that affects reasoning but they all know the right thing to do, it’s why they’re in the group. Through their words I can see that while the logical part of the brain is trying to reason with them, the emotional part of the brain which responds to instant gratification is in full battle-mode.
Our habits add another dimension to this too. Not only are we bad at visualizing our future self so we gratify the today self, we all have energetic habit fields that hold us in place.
Someone who hasn’t developed the habit of brushing and flossing their teeth may think things are going just fine. If you could show them a picture of themselves in 25 years with their teeth rotting and falling out, they’d start cleaning their teeth like a dental hygienist.
Do you know who your biggest ally is in the reward-now-or-later war you wage with yourself each day?
The YOU of the future.
Can you envision your future self? Who do you want her to be? What kind of life do you want her to have? How do you want her to feel days, months or years from now?
Everyone reading this email has, er, lived a few decades which helps us because we’ve already seen how our past lifestyle habits have negatively and positively impacted our current self.
Of all the dietary, exercise, meditation and behavior improvements I’ve made through the years, the most impactful one for this has been energy medicine.
Because I practice energy medicine on myself every day, I can think clearly and my emotions do not take over like they did before. I’m grounded, my brain is balanced, I am happy and thriving, and I don’t make rash decisions I’ll regret later.
Working with your energy is one of those things that’s hard to explain but 100% easy to feel in your body. When you do it consistently, you’re way more in control – that’s the simplest way to say it. One thing I’ve clearly noticed is that it’s much easier for me to pass up the immediate reward and focus on the reward in the future.
It’s like cleaning my teeth.
The today me is thankful, but I know the future me will be too.
