
Why thoughts are essential in healing PCOS?
If you deal with any type of hormonal imbalance, that’s usually a result of your thoughts. It doesn’t matter if you have lean or insulin resistant PCOS. It always stems from bad thoughts. Lack of self confidence or low self esteem might cause you to indulge in addictive behaviour. Binge eating, excessive exercise or restrictive dieting all origin from the thought of not feeling good enough. When you’re in homeostasis your body won’t let you overeat, under eat or over exercise.
So how do thoughts affect your hormones?
Our thoughts are translated into feelings and those feelings trigger a chemical response which affect your glands throughout the whole body. These glands are responsible for the regulation of your hormones. It’s a constant balance between your thoughts that cause something in the body to happen and the body responding it back to your glands. That’s why the solution for any imbalance in the body is always mind first, then body follows.
( For more scientific details a good read would be: Breaking the habit of being yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza)
When we live with those negative thoughts, feelings and believes we’re basically living in survival mode. All that you’re communicating is I am not good enough and this is stress for the body. You might express this belief through excessive exercise, restrictive eating, binge eating, feeling guilty and so on, which adds up to stress even more.
Your job is to get yourself out of survival mode. When we’re constantly living like this, that’s when our health starts breaking down. I remember having all these strange symptoms. All the result of thoughts I had over a long period of time. If I tell myself over and over again, I need to lose weight, I need to run 5 times a week, I need to be productive, I am not allowed to rest, I need to be someone in order to be enough. Can you see how much stress that puts into the body?
The body can’t distinguish between different types of stressors so it just shuts down everything that is not necessary in times of survival. Your period stops, your heart rate can either go too high or too low, your body might easily gain weight, your blood sugar levels might rise, your digestion and detoxification stop. All these things are designed to help you if you’d be in real danger, but it wasn’t our environment that created this stress response, it was our thoughts. That’s why it’s so powerful to change our thoughts.
So how do I change my thoughts?
Change is never easy. The friction between habitual patterns and new beliefs is what makes change so difficult, since your auto-pilot is going to tell you, hey wait a sec. this is not our familiar pattern? What is happening? Our bodies choose what we know and what we’re used to, our habitual thoughts and patterns. 99% of your behaviour is subconscious, we don’t think about it.
When a thought starts for the first time, it’s not a pattern yet, when we have the same thought over and over again we start acting on it, we then create an experience with that thought which gets memorised by our bodies and that’s how we form behaviour patterns.
A good example would be my high school times, I remember that I was young motivated to learn new things, but I believed that other kids were better than me. Every time the teacher asked a question, I had this belief in me, that I was going to say something stupid. Then of course I didn’t raise my hand, even though I knew the answer to his question. This thought has now caused me to experience a situation in which it got confirmed. Then as I continued to go to school, without being aware of this belief, I experience myself to be less smart than others. Can you see that no one except me caused this situation to become a reality?
The thought rose, I believed it, I acted on it, and I did this over and over again until I could finally say, you must be less than other kids, you’ve shown it day in day out. It has become a memorised pattern. When we believe our thoughts to be true that’s when we start acting upon it. We start using this program, even without consciously being aware of it, we start becoming this thought. First, it might feel like a mood you’re in, then when it lasts for longer, we start identifying with it. The longer you act a certain way, the more you are going to think it’s you and your subconscious will eventually take over the chemicals your body creates, thus make you feel something without you even having to think. When a thought has been believed and repeated time after time, it’s in your subconscious and that’s why you might feel a certain way without thinking. This is the vicious circle you have created for yourself.
How can I break this vicious circle?
We need to unlearn old patterns and start creating new believes. It all starts with the question what do you want yourself to believe? Currently I am doing an experiment with changing beliefs. Although the previous example was many years ago, what has still stuck with me is the anxiety I have around sharing my thoughts. I figured out that I needed to be free of the opinions of others. That’s why I chose to learn the belief:
‘I am completely free of the good and bad opinions of others.’
It’s still work in progress, but it’s getting better and better each day. So I am going to explain to you how I am doing this. First you have to become aware of when this thought is arising? You don’t always feel anxious, so at what moment does this happen? Then when it happens, recognise the thought is there, you also might feel the chemical reaction in your body happening right at that moment. That’s fine, because it’s probably your subconscious responding without you having to think anymore. Now when you accept that this feeling is okay, try to observe it and tell yourself, nothing apart from me in this moment is causing this chemical reaction in my body. It’s the thoughts you project into the future that made you feel this way. Now you need to tell yourself the new belief and try to act as if it’s already true. It’s kind of fake it until you make it. You need to create new memories with this belief in order to shift this pattern to your subconscious again.
It might take a while for these deep rooted beliefs to change but as one wise person once said. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Just start doing this exercise in a space that feels right for you. If we make manageable steps out of it, we don’t get demotivated. Start where you’re at and progress from there. We never go from A to B in linear progression, it goes up and down, and up again.
It took me 9 months of rest and thinking healthy thoughts for my period to return. Thoughts are energy we put into our bodies. Love is the one that’s healing, in which your body has enough energy to heal itself.
I never understood the value of loving your body, but now I do and I believe it has healed my PCOS, more than food can ever do. Of course it’s good to eat healthy but when your thoughts are not in the right place your body cannot be healthy.
I hope you now understand how important thoughts are and how our bodies are responding to this. Before I had PCOS I was so unaware of all the connections in the body and that symptoms can never just be treated by itself. The body is a wholeness that should be treated holistically
