By Dr. Camilla Griggers, co-founder at The Healist.

How do you get to a 50% chronic disease rate? That’s the stark stat we face in the U.S. While we have to be emotionally honest to even begin to address our situation, we also need to look at the thoughts that have led us down this path if we hope to do better. Here’s my list of the top 11 thoughts that lead to a chronic disease epidemic like ours.

If I don’t have a diagnosis from a medical doctor, then I’m okay and don’t need to take action now. I’ll be healthy if I have health insurance. Take antibiotics as my first line of defense when I’m sick, even if it’s for a flu. All vaccines are safe and affect everyone the same. Food should be cheap. Eating fat makes you fat. Doctors know best. Never question a doctor’s expertise. Choose a dentist by who offers the cheapest fees or doesn’t exceed what your dental insurance will pay. I don’t need to detox; detox is a fad. The FDA, AMA, ADA, EPA and USDA will protect me. (External regulation relieves me of the burden of self-regulation.) People just ‘get’ sick (get cancer, get Alzheimer’s, get diabetes) as if a chronic disease is something you catch, rather than a condition you create over time.

If you find yourself thinking any of these thoughts, you might want to question whether they are adaptive enough to keep in your cognitive repertoire. Neuroscientists say most of us think the same thoughts over and over, to the point that we are using only about 2% of our full brain capacity. It might be time to detox your thoughts, as well as your liver, because without the thought to detox your liver, for example, you never will.

Without the thought to question current medical practices, you won’t explore prevention practices that are emerging or that have been used in healthy cultures for millennia. Meditation is a good place to start, because meditation develops the observing self, an aspect of our consciousness that is capable of observing our thoughts from a place outside of them. And that’s the first step toward healing what really ails us.