3 Low-Effort Ways To Make Literally Every Part Of Your Life Better, Says Life Coach
Yan Krukau | Canva If life always feels harder for you than it does for other people, it might be because you're putting too much effort into the wrong things.
Research found that when kids experience their feelings getting dismissed or treated like they don't matter, it creates lasting patterns that carry into adulthood. These early invalidating experiences teach children to suppress their emotions and develop core beliefs about themselves and the world that end up controlling their behavior years later.
After a while, these beliefs that once served you became unnecessary armor that you carry with you through your life, weighing you down with every step, just like a 300-pound shield would slow you down on the battlefield. Here are a few examples of what some unproductive limiting beliefs could be:
In work:
- I have to do it all on my own.
- Work is a struggle. I’m not allowed to enjoy what I do in my work.
- Becoming financially wealthy is the only thing that matters in life.
In your relationships:
- All love that is offered to me is fragile.
- I am a difficult person to love.
- Nobody actually cares about me.
- I am fundamentally unlovable/unworthy.
- No one has my back.
With your health:
- Food is a reward that I must earn.
- Financial gain/social status is more important than being healthy.
- My body, and how it appears, is my ultimate worth in the world.
How do you keep these unconscious beliefs from taking over? Most of us think we need a full overhaul to get a better life: more discipline, more will-power. But that's why so many people stay stuck. Real change usually doesn't come from doing more. These three low-effort shifts are surprisingly simple, but they have a way of making almost every part of your significantly better.
Here are 3 low-effort ways to make literally every part of your life better:
1. Become aware of your thoughts
Different people need different awareness exercises. Try meditation. Ask your intuitive friends for their perceptions of your blind spots. Dream tracking and analysis. Group therapy. Anger-releasing exercises and/or somatic healing work. Once you have identified what your limiting beliefs are, it’s time to let them out.
Research in Clinical Psychology found that mindfulness practices help you see your thoughts as just mental events passing through your brain, and not facts you always have to believe. Once you start noticing your thoughts this way, you stop getting stuck in negative thinking loops and can actually choose which thoughts deserve your energy — and which don't.
2. Let those thoughts out
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Journal about it. Engage in some talk-based therapy. Feel your feelings/old stored negative emotions by doing emotional processing work. Tell your limiting beliefs to a trusted, non-shaming person. Again, many ways to go about this. You need to find the healing modality that is right for you and your situation. People generally don’t let their thoughts out because of what they fear that it says about them. Here’s the good news: you are not your thoughts.
Research looked at tons of benefits-of-journaling studies and found that writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings genuinely helps your mental health. When you get what's stuck in your head out onto paper or say it out loud to someone safe, it loses its grip on you because you've actually processed it.
Whether you think that nobody actually loves you, that life will never be easy for you, or that you’ll always secretly be the nerdy teenager that nobody wants around, you’re fine. You’re a human being. And the human mind is a BS generator that will spit out all kinds of crazy stuff at you. It doesn’t mean that your thoughts are real. You are not your thoughts.
3. Stop acting in accordance with those thoughts
Once you’re aware of your internal demons whispering things in your ear, you are then free to choose to go a different way. Maybe your sense of unworthiness would have you hide your true feelings and not let your lover know how you really feel about them. But you choose a new path and you open and reveal your heart fully.
Research on cognitive defusion, a mindfulness technique that helps you see thoughts as just passing events, shows that you can train yourself to hear your thoughts without automatically doing what they say. The study found that once you learn to see thoughts as just noise your brain makes instead of orders you have to follow, you're free to make choices based on what actually matters to you.
Maybe your ego/fear-mind/old beliefs would try to convince you that you’re not worthy of starting up your new business because it’s going to inevitably fail. You can choose a different way and have a genuine shot at your dream career path because you know that you’ll regret it on your deathbed if you don’t.
Maybe you have a deep fear that men/women only appreciate you for your looks/money/social circle. Choosing a new way would look like revealing your other (internally based) gifts to others and affording them the opportunity to respond to those things. That and/or allowing yourself to let go of old friendships that no longer feel in alignment with who you are at your core. Here’s a specific exercise that you can start using in order to clear out your old stored negative emotions.
Were you bullied or emotionally invalidated at some point in your childhood? Chances are, yes, you were. Because of the emotions that you suppressed, a part of you is offline and unusable.
Here’s how to heal that: Set aside half an hour. Begin by writing down or verbalizing your most painful thoughts. When you write down or say a sentence that makes you tear up or start to cry, keep saying it, over and over again, in order to release the associated emotion.
Once that thought no longer produces tears, move on to another thought or painful memory. Be as clear, direct, and descriptive as possible. Don’t dance around your pain. Go straight for the epicenter of it.
Some of my most tear-inducing sentence prompts used to be “When I was a little boy, I thought that everyone that I loved hated me” and “When I was young, I felt that I had to become needless to survive.” Now, when I write those things/say them out loud, they produce no emotional response. Because I’ve tapped those particular wells dry.
What this does is it builds back the full spectrum of your emotional ability, and it releases old stored negative emotions that the bullied/invalidated/afraid younger version of you didn’t feel like he/she had permission to feel. Do this, even just a few times per week, for the next month, and your life will begin to shift in magical ways.
Simple is rarely easy. This work won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. Become aware of the thought patterns that are running the show, express them in some format, and then begin to choose a new way forward. Your life depends on it.
Jordan Gray is a five-time Amazon best-selling author, public speaker, and relationship coach with more than a decade of practice. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Women's Health, and The Good Men Project, among countless others.
