Live Earth was on this weekend, so here's my tuppenceworth.

It's nice to know that the world is waking up to the fact that our behaviour is wrong. It's not that we are bad. but many are unaware of the impact wasteful, thoughtless behaviour has on the environment, so this weekend's awareness raising session by celebrities is fantastic.
But how has it got to this stage? Why do we have to be 'sick' as a planet, race or individually before we sit up and go "Oh shit"! (in more ways than one).

I guess that it's more than just lack of awareness. Probably many of us will have been exposed to this message many times before, but we still choose to behave wastefully. Those who profess to religiously recycle and reuse etc, usually do it because they like doing it. It fits in with their thrifty ideas about the world anyway, so it's no hassle. They then can feel righteous and say, "well, I recycle, buy 2nd hand clothes and cycle everywhere and so should everyone else!".

Like any behaviour, we do it often because it 'suits' us. It 'resonates' with us. If there was a law made forcing us to stay indoors, it would 'suit' the socially phobic and agarophobic, but the rest of us would build up tension. Same with the environmental message. To be green would create 'tension', particularly begin with as we change habits. It doesn't come naturally to us .

So how could it be made easier? Could we change something so that we can resonate more with the green way of life? The message this weekend delivered by celebrities went some way towards it, as what they did was change beliefs. Beliefs create tension which creates our behaviours.

The message that I got at the weekend was: 1. It's cool to be green; 2. It's important to be green; 3. It's wrong to be wasteful; 4. We all have individual resonsibility and 5. Working together will produce big results.

Beliefs like this can enable positive desirable behaviour, but what if you also hold on to the old previously held beliefs? for example: 1. Green is for hippies; 2. Live for today and don't worry about tomorrow and 3. Green is the government's responsibility? Will it result in positive change or will old habits win?

Repetition might be one way to get the message through, and I guess that's what we do in health education, but it's pretty costly, hard work and time consuming. It's not just about education about the positive, but a process of identifying the negative beliefs and consciously working on getting people to let them go.

The same thing happens when we want to tackle our health or make any positive changes in our life. We can do it a lot easier if we sort out the opposing beliefs that sabotage our good intentions.

When we want to lose weight, for instance, we get a diet plan, and a target weight to aim for, but the reason so many people fail is because of the sabotaging part of us (and cos fat and sugar taste sooo good!). Many of these beliefs are unconscious. They might be several of a whole list of beliefs, for example, "I have no self control; I am scared of being the right weight because of new responsibilities; Being fat protects me from advances of the opposite sex; Eating stops me being angry; I am a bad person who doesn't deserve to be healthy or beautiful" .

There are a few new energy therapies that can be used in a self help way to quickly deal with these. Check out my website for my favourites.
www.stressalternatives.co.uk
Liz