MANAGING EXPECTATIONS

When you have health and wellness goals, your expectations can determine whether you reach those goals or not.

Everyone wants wow-worthy results, be it weight loss, body re-composition (toning and tightening), better sleep, or managing your stress, but having unrealistic expectations can lead to giving up entirely.

Meeting your health, nutrition and wellness goals comes with trade-offs. That’s simply the reality of changing your behaviors and habits. And unless you are able to understand the trade-offs and set your expectations accordingly, you are setting yourself up to be disappointed.

Let’s use stress management and yoga as an example.

It’s been proven that a regular yoga practice helps reduce stress, reduces anxiety, improves mental health, and can improve your quality of life – along with numerous physical benefits like increased flexibility, strength, balance, boosted immunity, and better sleep.

But what does it take to achieve the FULL benefits of doing yoga?

Five minutes a day?

Twenty?

An hour?

Are you focusing on breath work or meditation techniques? Because while focusing on these two areas can have a significant impact on stress reduction, anxiety, and improved mental health, they are not going to have much of an impact on your flexibility or strength.

Are you devoting the time, energy and resources to immersing yourself into a yoga practice; or are you doing a couple of poses to stretch and relax before you crawl into bed at night?

Neither of these 2 scenarios is “wrong”. But if you’re expecting to do complicated poses and twist yourself into a pretzel after a couple of weeks of stretching before bedtime, that is an unrealistic expectation.

Or if you’re focusing on the physical benefits of yoga (twisting like a pretzel), you’re not as likely to achieve the same stress relief as practiced breath work and meditation can provide.

There’s no right or wrong reason to start doing yoga (or trying to lose weight, gain muscle, better sleep, whatever your goal is), but you are going to have much greater success if you go into the health change you’re trying to accomplish with realistic expectations.