Emotions and health are connected. Getting well requires changing the way you feel and expressing your emotions on a regular basis.

Hopelessness and despair often precede chronic illness. Repressing emotions over a long period of time is associated with unhealthy physiological changes.

Changing hopelessness and despair to hope and excitement about life are essential changes for an individual to make emotionally.

Changing patterns of repressing and denying our emotions to effectively feeling and expressing our emotions in healthy ways is necessary in getting well.

How do you feel the way that you would ideally like to feel?

You have to understand how your emotions work, and then develop strategies to practice, strengthen, and expand the range of your emotions.

To change your limiting beliefs, or to change any belief, try the following steps:

1. Identify the disempowering emotion. For example, fear or anxiety.

2. Identify the limiting belief. For example, “I can’t get well.”

3. Determine the experiences or references that support the unwanted or disempowering belief. For example, “My doctor told me that I would only live six months, and I know two other people who have the same diagnosis and they are doing well.”

4. Use questions, statements, stories, or metaphors of counterexamples to create doubt about the remaining experiences, and thus about the belief. Who are some people I could meet who have a similar diagnosis and are doing well?

5. Demonstrate to yourself how the belief violates your efforts to reach your short-and long-term goals (thus violating your sense of personal power).

6. Make a commitment to change the belief.

7. Practice the new belief with consistency.

8. Anchor your new belief by reinforcing it and creating a new experience.

9. Create a new experience that violates past beliefs, using your personal power.


The power to change your mind about how you view things gives you the ability to change your emotional state and even your health.

As outlined above, to make changes, you must first attach a different and better meaning to life events. In simple language: Pick a better thought that gives you more emotional relief and that feels better.

Did you know that about 99 percent of your stress responses are not activated by real danger, but are because you merely perceived danger?

Most of our emotional pain, anger, and fear are activated by perceptions that are created through unhealthy, learned beliefs and attitudes.

When you’re in a state of emotional pain, anger, or fear that arises from unhealthy beliefs, you’ll stay stuck in those danger emotions until you shift your focus or change your belief.

Changing your focus is short-term emotional management. Changing your unhealthy beliefs is long-term emotional management and leads to long-lasting stress management, increased states of emotional well-being, and optimal health!