Chapter 2 - Use Your Heart and Mind to Reduce Your Stress

The first half of this chapter will focus on using your mind to create new behavior patterns, and the second half will examine how using the power of your heart can reduce your anxiety by up to 60% and increase your energy up to 45%.

We touched on the importance of creating new beliefs briefly at the end of the last chapter, and now we will explore that further. Your beliefs are like a computer program in that they influence every aspect of your life and every decision you make. Embracing supportive beliefs leads you to making great choices in your life, like going to bed early!

Many of you may be asking:How do I know If I have unsupportive or limiting beliefs? Great question! The simplest way is to openly, honestly look at your life now, identifying any areas where you are experiencing challenges;that is where you could potentially have some limiting beliefs. For example, if you have a great job, earn a wonderful income, but you keep finding yourself in bad relationships, you probably have a few limiting beliefs leading to that pattern. Conversely, if you are in a great relationship and have wonderful friends/family, but you are in severe debt and can’t control your spending, you may have limiting beliefs allowing you to amass unreasonable debt.

We are going to spend a little time looking at beliefs under the microscope, as it’s important that you understand where they came from, how powerful they are, and how you can create some new ones for yourself. Most of the core beliefs you have about life were created by the time you were seven years old. Children’s brains operate in such a way that they absorb and learn from watching their parents and caregivers. They have an abundance of the slow brain waves (theta), which we experience when we are being hypnotised or during light sleep. For this reason, children learn effortlessly – like a sponge soaking up and forming meaning about the world from what they see. The adage “Give me a child up until the age of seven and I give you the man/woman” is accurate.

Since we form most of our beliefs about life from imperfect parents or caregivers, then you - along with everyone else - have picked up some limiting beliefs about life. According to Shelly Lefkoe, a world renowned expert on changing limiting beliefs, most of us don’t escape our childhoods without picking up such beliefs as “mistakes and failures are bad”, or “I am not important”, or “I am not good enough”10. How do children form these beliefs? Mostly by listening to their parents when they were angry or upset saying things like, “How many times do I have to tell you”? Or “Can’t you get it right?” If a parent is continually pointing out what is wrong with a child or shaming them, the child may form the limiting belief, “I am not good enough” – unfortunately, this is a very common one. These limiting beliefs form part of the child’s belief system that later becomes the basis for a lack of confidence. In turn, the grown child may make poor lifestyle choices like taking on too much, worrying about everyone else or sabotaging themselves by not eating properly, exercising, sleeping right, spending too much, going into debt, and gambling.

The list is endless, however, if you have one of these negative or limiting beliefs, you could be sabotaging your life in some way. You may wonder why beliefs are so powerful. Can’t we just tell ourselves to stop spending too much or eating too much? If we could do that easily and sustain it, there wouldn’t be multimillion-dollar industries built solely on the mission to stop us from overeating. There wouldn’t be a huge increase in people going into debt, or the record number of people living on their own because