Free and More Effective than an Anti-Depressant

Would you like to know something that is free and more effective than an anti-depressant for your head? In fact, it is so effective that you could think about it as ‘a happy pill’…

Exercise.

Yep. Getting out of your head and moving your body. It could be as simple as a walk every day.

If you are like many people, even though you know how good it makes you feel, you don’t exercise the way you want to… Do you ever wonder what is that about?

So I want to share with you what I found out when I applied a new piece of learning about ‘Guiding Questions’ to myself on this topic.

You see, behind everything we do is a thought process. Those processes are triggered by something (like what time of day it is), and we can also think that those processes are triggered by questions we ask ourselves. So my process with ‘not exercising most days’ and you can think of this as being like the answer to a question I was asking myself.

I discovered that the question that was in the background when I thought about exercise was ‘Do I have time to exercise today?’ or ‘When am I going to fit in exercise?’.

Basic to this question was that exercise was on a mental ‘To Do List’ for me, something that I ‘ought to’ or ‘should do’.

When I asked myself this, what followed was a process where exercise was competing with a long list of other things I ought to do. Not very surprisingly, my ‘exercise’ thought process ended up with me not exercising a lot.

So, I changed it and now I ask myself ‘Do I want to take the happy pill or the sad pill today?’

And It has been working a treat.

If you think about some of the behaviours you are really good at, but don’t actually like, and ask yourself ‘if this behaviour is the answer to a question, what would that question be?  What question would quietly be guiding this in the background?’

Note – this concept of the guiding question comes from an NLP process developed by Steve Andreas.

If you would like to learn more about NLP, join me online in the next FREE  Introduction to Coaching and NLP Course.