Is What I’m Telling Myself True?

We think a lot.

Thoughts move through the mind constantly, most of them unnoticed. Some are practical and helpful — get up, make coffee, answer that email. Others are less so and it's usually the unhelpful ones that get loudest when we're trying to change something.

That's because thinking tends to get louder around change.

When people feel stuck, it rarely has much to do with what's happening on the outside. It has everything to do with the way their thinking has narrowed around the situation. Certain thoughts begin to feel absolute, convincing, final and when a thought feels true, we act as if it is.

What's easy to forget is that thoughts aren't facts. They're momentary descriptions of reality, shaped by mood, habit and state of mind. When the mind is unsettled, thinking sounds more urgent and more believable than it really is. A bad night's sleep, a stressful week, a number on the scale that wasn't what you hoped — and suddenly the story in your head sounds like the whole truth.

That's why a simple question can be surprisingly useful:

Is this actually true?

You’re not analysing or trying to change your thoughts. Just a quiet pause — nothing more.

Often, the moment you ask it, something shifts. The thought loosens. Another perspective becomes available or the certainty drops away just enough for common sense to quietly return.

The mind doesn't always like this. It prefers familiarity. Even unhelpful conclusions can feel safer than uncertainty — at least then it knows what to expect. But you don't need to fight that either.

Awareness does the work.

When you begin to notice your thinking — not to fix it or argue with it, but simply to see it — it naturally loses some of its grip. You start to recognise the patterns. The same explanations, the same stories that reliably appear whenever you're about to do something different.

I've already blown it today, so I may as well start again Monday. I can't do this while everything else is going on. I don't have time for this right now.

Sometimes those thoughts dissolve the moment they're seen. Other times they hang around, but with less weight. Either way, they're no longer running the show.

You don't need to write them down or replace them with better ones. You don't need to talk yourself out of them or construct a counter-argument. Just noticing that they're thoughts — not instructions, not commands, not the truth — is often enough.

From there, the next step tends to make itself clear because you're no longer being held in place by something that was never solid to begin with.

If this is landing for you, I've written a short free guide that goes deeper into what's actually been going on underneath every food struggle.

It's called Hiding in Plain Sight: What's Really Underneath Every Food Struggle — and it's a five-minute read that might start to make a few things make sense.

And if you're ready to go further, A Weight Off Your Mind is an eight-week course built around exactly this.

Or get in touch and let’s talk.

 Photo by  Max from Unsplash