If we don't break out, we are stuck there, repeating the same valley of despair, over and over again. Here are my thoughts:
Hello everyone! I'm Denise Roberts and for the past several weeks I have been blogging and vlogging on a goal that I have which is to take back my body and transform it into its former fit self. Now, I want to share with you not only some of the progress and what's been going on with this but I recently spoke on a topic called the five stages of the Emotional Cycle of Change, including the valley of despair.
Now, before I get into that I'd like to explain that as you have heard before we have different parts of our brains that do other functions. One of the parts is the thinking part that makes the decision to make a change. Another part is the emotional brain, which always seeks to head toward pleasure and avoid pain. Now, these two have to cooperate for you to get what you want. So let me explain using myself. As I said, I set this goal to take back my former body. So, stage one of the five stages of emotional change is uninformed optimism. Woo hoo! I'm going to change, I'm going to get back to the way I used to be, life is great. And I start here and then I start to go into stage two. Think of this like a roller coaster.
So now as I'm heading down I'm going "wow this is harder than I thought." I have now hit stage two which is informed pessimism. My body hurts from these workouts, I have foods I can't eat and they're restricted, blah - but I'll power through this. Stage three is what's called the valley of despair. Why is this not happening, I'm not seeing much change, it's not happening quickly enough, this is harder than I thought, who was I kidding I'm 10 years older and 25 pounds heavier. And this is where most of us get hijacked and stop. Remember, that emotional brain doesn't want pain, and if we do that we're going to start all over again with something else. Let me go find a new diet, let me go find a new gym, let me go find something else. Right? And we'll go one two three one two three one two three.
Now if I power through this and get to stage four, stage four is informed optimism. Seeing some changes, it's beginning to feel like I can do this. Remember, that emotional brain it'll still kick in because now I'm starting to feel good and it might say "hey you're good enough, you don't need to keep all this structure and rigor around you, you don't need to keep going to this gym three times a week, you don't need to keep working out, you don't need to, you know what to eat and what not to eat, you know what supplements to take, you could stop right here."
And if I do I will never get to stage five. This is where most of us will veer and not stay the course and be frustrated that we didn't get through. So stay tuned - in future videos, we'll talk more about how to stay the course. What kind of support to put around you to make that happen? Take care, talk to you soon!