What To Do When Your Impulsive Nature Is Pushing You Towards A Bad Decision

You want to eat the cheesecake, but you know you shouldn’t because it DOESN’T align with your goals. Or you know you SHOULD do something (like food prep or workout) because it DOES align with your goals, but you’d rather do nothing. This is called an internal conflict. There is a battle between your impulses- what you want now- and your consciousness/ awareness of what you want in the future. What you need is protection of yourself by yourself. You need a response to slow you down so you can make good choices!

The good news is…we have a self monitoring system that tells us we’re about to do something we’ll later regret. When our brain recognizes such a warning, our best friend, the prefrontal cortex, jumps into action to help us make the right choice. We want to buy ourselves time and calm our body down physically in order to activate this self monitoring system.

I suggest taking deep, slow breaths and relaxing your muscles the minute you identify an internal conflict taking place. This is the time I also review my values, roles, and goals. By doing this I’m allowing my parasympathetic nervous system to kick in to calm stress and make good choices. I can take flexible, thoughtful action from a calm state of mind. The goal is not to paralyze ourselves in the face of internal conflict, but to give ourselves freedom from our impulsive nature that only thinks about NOW.

The more we exercise, eat healthy food, deep breathe and consciously slow our brains and bodies down, the better the parasympathetic nervous becomes at overriding our fight or flight tendencies that are only supposed to be used in true emergencies (other than for true emergencies, the fight or flight response is counter productive!) Making good decisions becomes instinctive with the right mind/body training!