If you’re like me, you get stuck in seasons where the same negative patterns keep emerging, despite your best intentions.
You start to miss workout sessions, seek out junk food, stay up way too late, live in your stress, everything is an automatic (usually negative) reaction based solely on feelings.
Boy, do I get it. When this happens emotionally in the brain, my counselor calls it the Amygdala Hijack.
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According to healthline.com:
The amygdala is a collection of cells near the base of the brain where emotions are given meaning, remembered, and attached to associations and responses to them (emotional memories).
The amygdala is considered to be key to how you process strong emotions like fear and pleasure.
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When we react in fear, anxiety, and stress over and over again, we train our amygdala to grow in power. It tells us to live in fight, flight, or freeze.
Soon, this fight-or-flight-or-freeze response begins to take over, or hijack, the frontal lobe, which is the thinking, reasoning, decision-making, and planning part of our brain.
When our amygdala is on overdrive, we’re not able to make healthy, reasonable decisions. Getting our frontal lobe to better respond takes training, takes reps.
In fact, I like to think of positive exercise, nutrition, and mindset actions as little Frontal Lobe reps.
- Ordered burger sans fries. #rep
- Got up and went to bed instead of passing out on the couch. #rep
- Honored my satiety and didn’t reach for a second glass of wine. #rep
- Chose the heavier MedBall for my Finisher this morning. #rep
- Doubled my serving of veggies at dinner tonight. #rep
- Put my phone down while kids were playing next to me. #rep
- Did my third set despite wanting to end my gym session early. #rep
And just like flexing muscles with weights in the gym makes them stronger, each healthy habit rep strengthens that calm, rational, thinking part of our brain.
Less reacting, more preparing.
Less captive to feelings, more empowered to make healthy decisions…
…not only in that moment, but again and again.
At Valeo, we call these reps “1% wins.”
And you know what? Big change is just a series of 1% wins.
So, don’t let yourself believe you have to give in to every feeling or that being healthfully-disciplined is too hard.
Do a quick #rep and prove to your brain you’ve got what it takes.
‘Cause on the way to (even more) awesome, every rep counts.
What 1% wins will you celebrate this week?
Jess + Team Valeo
