Self-Help: How to overcome your biggest obstacle. Your body.
In my last post, I spoke on how your body is your biggest obstacle.
I basically announced that an all-out war needs to be waged on our own bodies. I said I would give some ways that you can wage this war and win (in my opinion).
If you want to check the last post out, I will leave a link to it at the end of this post.
Moving on,
I personally believe that the best time to take full control of your body, to make your body work for you and not against you is childhood.
As a child, you are just starting out on your journey of conditioning.
It is what the child sees that he or she emulates or ingrains. It is what the child is exposed to that influences what that child will become.
If a child’s parents are drunks, the ideals and behavioral patterns of the parents will automatically come onto the child.
It’s common knowledge.
At childhood the body is not so strong to negate your will, it is easier to condition and control your body to do what you want.
Even the Bible supports this claim.
Train up your child in the way that he should grow so that when he is old, he will not depart from it.
But most of you reading this are not children so,
“What is the way forward?”, you might ask.
Be spiritual.
The first thing I will say is, be spiritual.
In my last post, I opened saying how Christians believed in being spiritually Intune to relate with God.
It is a main theme of Christianity to focus more on spirituality and all other things become easier to accomplish.
I am not trying to force you to do anything, and I am not here to preach.
But from my viewpoint, being spiritual is a way to start taking control of your body.
Become a child of God, build a relationship with him.
As children of God, we naturally have the power to subdue anything we want as God is the creator of all.
I mean, there was literally a prophet that could run as fast or even faster than a horse. He definitely had control of his body.
But there is a not so spiritual way you can take charge of your body.
By playing a trick on your body.
I call it the “small doses” trick.
Before I tell you how to play the trick, I need to explain the approach or, better yet, the perspective I used in coming up with the trick.
My perspective
In my previous post I referenced a Bible scripture.
The soul is willing, but the flesh is not. Or something along the lines of that
From the passage above,
We can agree that there is a soul and there is a flesh.
The flesh is obviously our body and everything in it.
The soul in the passage refers to something else.
There have been arguments surrounding where the soul is located, what it is and all that.
But in the context of the scripture, I think the soul refers to our thoughts, our actual wants.
Now here is the interesting part, thoughts are formed in the brain and the brain is part of your body.
The natural functioning of the brain,
controlling the nervous system,
controlling movement,
memory retention,
even thought formation are what makes up the brain as part of the flesh.
The thoughts themselves are what makes up the soul.
The brain is where the battle of control is fought between the soul and the body.
The body usually wins because it is the actuator. It acts upon the thoughts that benefits it. Naturally.
You are hungry, you think of getting a burger to satiate the hunger, you buy and eat the burger.
You are bored, you think of watching Netflix, you watch Netflix.
The way to win the battle or at least increase your chances of winning is by playing a trick on your body with your body.
Specifically with your brain. And some of your sensory organs.
“Small doses” trick
From what I have said, the body acts on only the thoughts that it finds useful but not stressful.
So, we will win by using small doses and our sensory organs.
The sensory organs I am talking about here are the ears and eyes because our thoughts are by-products of what we see and hear.
How do we play a trick with this? We use “small doses”.
The first step is to consistently read and listen to the things that will fuel the change that we want to have,
in small doses.
The body will not react to listening to a 5-minute podcast on healthy eating.
or reading two pages of a book on proper hygiene.
Even if you do it every day. It isn’t stressful.
The consistency of the first step will help saturate your thoughts so that every time you are hungry,
you mostly think of getting something healthy to eat.
You have to first target the brain because the brain is the entry point into defeating the body. You must constantly think about the things that you want to be your new normal.
The next step,
When you constantly think of doing that thing eventually the body will
or be more liable to
or more receptive to act on doing that thing.
When your body acts on the thoughts, do so in constant “small doses”.
The body will not react to doing 3 sets of 2 sit-ups every day, it is insignifact to it.
But what you are doing is conditioning your body so that every time you think of working out it will easily do the reps without any issue or resistance.
The final step,
Once you have started doing what you actually want in small doses,
the next step is to increase that thing in small doses.
That is moving from 3 sets of 2 to 3 sets of 5.
Like James Clear said in his book, Atomic Habits.
Standardize and then optimize.
Just for iteration, everything I have written in this post is purely my opinion and what I am trying to implement in my life.
I felt it would be nice writing it on medium.
And while I would like to take credit for everything here, my reasoning was influenced by Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Read it, it will change your life.
And for those of you interested in reading the previous post, click this.
Thanks for reading and please follow me if you enjoyed this post.
