This episode is all about the RAS, the reticular activating system aka your brain’s filter.
At any point in our lives there are millions of bits of information coming into our awareness that we're perceiving through our physical senses. With all of this information, our reticular activating system puts emphasis on what we deem as important and filters that into our awareness.
It's impossible for our brain to be able to process all of the things in our surroundings at any given time. As you're reading this, you probably don't feel the clothes as they're touching your body. Prior to me mentioning that feeling, you weren't really aware of it, because that information isn't really important, you don't need that information, so your brain filters it out.
The cool thing about your RAS is that you are the one that gets to decide what is important and what is not important.
Think of your brain, kind of like online shopping, imagine going to any store online and typing in “T shirt”, there's gonna be tons of results that come up. This represents all the bits of information that are coming in, there's 1000s of T shirts, like there's 1000s of bits of information. Let’s say you only wear blue t-shirts, so you put a filter on the website. The same thing is happening with your mind, what you focus on and what you deem is important, your RAS will filter through the information and focus on what it thinks you need to know.
This happens sometimes when you purchase a new car. Let's say you go to the dealership, and you buy yourself a Volkswagen bug. Now, all of a sudden, everywhere you look, every grocery store you go to, every street you drive down, even someone in your neighborhood has the same exact car1 Did everybody go to the Volkswagen dealership on the exact same day to get the bug? No, that's not what happened. What happened is, you put a filter into your RAS that said that this vehicle is important.
How does this apply to our life? Well, what you focus on will grow. If you are always focusing on how unworthy you feel, or how much you hate your life, or how much your job sucks, or things like that, then your brain is going to say, “Oh, this is what's important to us” and it's going to look for more situations that confirm that because it believes that that's what's important to you.
If you’re always thinking, “I hate my job”, then every time you're at work, your brain is gonna filter out all of the good things, and only show you the annoying co worker, the overload of work, the mean thing your boss said, to make you feel like your job sucks.
We have up to 60,000 thoughts a day, some of these are conscious thoughts and some of these are unconscious thoughts. 90% of the thoughts you have today are exactly the same as the day before, and the day before and the day before and the day before. If you have these stories that were formed as a young child, whether these stories are about how people are untrustworthy, or how relationships always fail, or how money is scarce and hard to get, or anything like that, your brain is going to consciously and unconsciously repeat these stories day after day. Because you've repeated this so much, and your brain believes that this is important to you, it's going to show you all of the evidence that people are untrustworthy, it's going to show you all of the evidence that money is scarce and hard to get, it's going to show you all of the evidence of relationships not working out.
You have the power to decide what you want to focus on and what you want to experience more of. This is where practices like daily gratitude or positive affirmations become extremely beneficial. Because the more you're focusing on these positive things, and consciously choosing what to focus on, the more those things are going to be filtered into your awareness.
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