Activating This Magical Part of Your Brain Is The Key To Manifesting And Evoking The Law of Attraction

The Ultimate Guide To The Brain’s Reticular Activating System

There’s a magical part of the brain that is always working to satisfy all our desires and get us where we want to go.

Imagine you’re walking through a busy airport.

Think of all the possible things going on around you: hundreds of people walking and talking, planes landing and departing through the windows, announcements coming over the address system, luggage carriers, etc. How much of this is brought to your attention?

Not a lot.

While we might notice some of these things, for the most part, we are focused on getting to where we are headed. But now imagine a new announcement coming over the address system about something regarding your flight. Suddenly your attention is full-on and you are ready to spring into action if necessary.

This is your Reticular Activating System (RAS) in action, the automatic goal-seeking mechanism inside your brain that brings relevant information to your attention.

What is the Reticular Activating System (RAS)

The RAS is a network of neurons located in the brainstem responsible for regulating wakefulness, alertness, and arousal. It serves as a filtering system between the conscious and subconscious mind and its primary function is to sort and prioritize the vast amount of sensory information that bombards our brains every second.

If we had to consciously evaluate and think about every action to take throughout the day, our energy would be depleted by breakfast.

Essentially, the RAS filters reality to show us what our subconscious has deemed important and necessary. It takes all the relevant stuff from conscious reality and sends it to your subconscious mind. Then your subconscious will take this information and run any corresponding automatic functions and programs.

So what is actually deemed relevant and important?

First and foremost, the RAS focuses on survival. It exists as a mechanism to ensure our safety and health. For example, when we hear a loud noise, our RAS immediately alerts us to any possible dangers or concerns in our environment, causing the subconscious to trigger a surge of adrenaline and heightened awareness.

This harkens back to our early evolution as a species when our only goal was to find food while not getting devoured by a sabertooth tiger. The RAS is what has allowed our species to survive and thrive.

Besides basic safety and survival, the RAS also plays a crucial role in helping us achieve our goals and drawing our attention to what we want in life. Before we get into goals, below are some basic examples of the RAS in action in everyday life.

5 Examples of the Reticular Activating System in Action

1. Hearing Your Name: Have you ever been in a crowded room or at a party and heard someone mention your name from across the room, even though they weren’t speaking directly to you? This is because your RAS is constantly scanning your environment for stimuli that are relevant to you, such as your name.
2. Selective Attention: When you’re driving a car, your RAS filters out all irrelevant information and stimuli, such as the sound of other cars, to help you focus on the road ahead.
3. Learning a New Skill: When you’re learning a new skill, such as playing an instrument, your RAS helps you stay hyper-focused on the specific actions that are required for you to learn the task at hand while blocking out everything else.
4. Focused Attention/Flow-State: Let’s say you are deeply immersed in playing a tennis match with a friend or engrossed in a movie. Your RAS will not bring other things into your conscious awareness unless they are more significant than the tennis match or the movie. This is the experience of “getting lost” within an activity.
5. While Your Sleeping: Let’s say rain is expected overnight but you forget to close your bedroom windows before you fall asleep. When it starts raining, your RAS is what causes you to jump out of bed in a hurry to close them. Or if your newborn cries during the middle of the night, your RAS will awaken you from deep sleep to attend to them.

Reticular Activating System and Manifesting

The RAS is also a powerful mechanism for achieving goals and solving problems. Through intentional, conscious direction of your mind onto the things you want and the problems you want to be solved, your mind begins to find the resources, people, places, situations, and opportunities that will lead you to your desire.

The RAS is what makes ideas like conscious manifesting and the Law of Attraction not only very real but it’s where the magic happens. If thoughts do become things, it’s because of the RAS.

For example, imagine you have the desire to get a new car. Suddenly, you start noticing cars on the road that match the make and model you want to buy. This is because your RAS is filtering out all other cars and alerting you to the ones that align with your desire. You may also start noticing car ads on TV or billboards that you previously ignored.

Below is another example.

My leaky faucet story

A few weeks ago, I had a bad leak from my bathtub faucet. I called a plumbing company, and they told me I needed a new faucet installed which involved opening up the wall to perform the installation. It was quite a pricey and extensive job, so I decided to hold off because I knew there had to be a simpler solution. A few days later, while cooking dinner in the kitchen, I heard a commercial playing on the TV in the living room for a local hardware store about how most leaks get resolved by changing the cartridge inside the faucet handle. I quickly stopped what I was doing and ran to Mr. Google to verify what I heard. Two days later, the leak was fixed.

Now, how in the world did I hear that from all the way on the other side of my house while I was gingerly cutting cucumbers? It’s all thanks to my RAS.

The Goal Getter and Problem Solver

Whether it’s buying your dream car, fixing a leaky faucet, or achieving the loftiest of dreams, when your brain sets a goal or defines a problem that you are committed to achieving or solving, the RAS works to filter your experience to focus on information relevant to accomplishing your goal.

Here are some points on how goal-setting works in the brain in regard to the subconscious mind and the RAS.

• You might’ve heard the saying that “your conscious mind is the goal setter and your subconscious mind is the “goal-getter.” Ultimately, even though you consciously set goals with your mind, it is your subconscious mind that brings them to fruition.
• However, before we can ever influence our subconscious and program it to help us achieve what we want, we must influence our RAS and create a filter for our goal so it reaches our subconscious.
• To create a filter for the RAS to adhere to, you must deem something important or even problematic.
• The RAS is influenced by repetition. You must continually show your mind what you want. This is why visualization, positive affirmations, and gratitude practices are powerful tools for impacting the subconscious. Your mind always gives you more of what you focus on. (see below for more on repetition)

How do you know if you penetrated the RAS?

Simple, if you notice something pertaining to one of your goals pop into your mind during the most random times or situations. An indication of this is any time your mind is in an altered state, like when you are tossing and turning in bed and having a difficult time falling asleep, or when you are taking a shower. If you start thinking about your goal or problem during these times, it’s a good sign you have your subconscious working overtime to get you what you want.

10 Tips and Methods for Influencing the RAS to Achieve Your Goals

1. Bombard your mind through repetition.

As mentioned earlier, repetition is the key to influencing your RAS and subconscious. Repetition tells your RAS that what you keep repeating to it is important and that it should direct your attention accordingly — so you recognize opportunities and ideas that align with what you want. This can be done by simply repeating your goals to yourself on a daily basis or regularly doing any of the techniques on this list.

To learn more about the power of mind repetition, this quick article on the basics of programming your mind will help you.

2. Set clear and specific goals.

To activate your RAS, you need to set clear and specific goals that your brain can zero in on. Vague or ambiguous goals will not activate your RAS because your brain won’t know precisely what to look for.

3. Generate deep desire/dopamine.

Desire is a powerful emotion and is what gets you in the game. Without it, your car never leaves the driveway. You have to want something bad enough in order to activate your RAS. The emotion of desire generates dopamine in your brain which gives it the feeling that a reward is on the way. This helps you stay motivated and engaged in achieving your goal.

Try this quick exercise to help you generate dopamine on command.

4. Visualize your goals.

Continually visualizing the end result of your goal in detail will help activate your RAS by creating a clear mental image of what you want to achieve. Your brain will then begin to connect the dots from everything in your conscious experience on how to get you there.

Want to amplify your visualization practice? Try this simple visualization technique.

5. Use positive affirmations and practice gratitude.

Positive affirmations and acknowledging what you are grateful for immediately activate the RAS. Simply because your brain likes the feel-good neurochemicals they generate. Create positive affirmations that align with your goals and recite them daily to help your brain focus on the benefits achieving your goal will bring you. Better yet, turn your positive affirmations into lofty questions. (see the next item on the list)

6. Ask lofty questions.

Lofty questions are supercharged positive affirmations reframed as “why” questions. “Why I am so charismatic and outgoing?” “Why am I so healthy and fit?” “Why am I a wealthy entrepreneur?” The brain is wired to answer questions. Lofty questions become a way to hack into this power to get your RAS to filter reality and show you all the ways that confirm you are charismatic, healthy, wealthy, etc.

Want to learn more? Here’s everything you need to know about lofty questions.

7. Focus on what you want, not what you don’t.

As stated numerous times in this article, the RAS responds to what you focus on, whether positive or negative. So, instead of focusing on what you don’t want in your life, stay focused on what you do want! If you continue to focus on negative stuff, you will turn the RAS against you and experience more negativity in your life.

8. Take action.

The RAS responds to action, not just thoughts. Take action towards your goals, even if it’s just a small step. By taking action, you signal to your brain that this goal is essential, and it should continue to show you information related to your goal that points you in the direction of taking your next steps.

9. Set identity-based goals.

Don’t aim to convince your mind that you need to get in shape. Instead, convince it you are a healthy and fit athlete. Remember the main focus of the RAS is survival, and in modern living, that includes validating who you are as a person. When you set goals that touch upon who you want to become, the RAS will direct your attention to all the information that reinforces that identity.

Quick hack: create lofty questions (number 5) that focus on identity — affirming the type of person you want to transform into as a result of accomplishing your goal.

If you want to go deeper, check out this guide on identity-based goals

10. Work on your self-image.

Now, here’s the catch: trying to penetrate your RAS will be an uphill battle if your self-image is not aligned with what you desire. When this happens, your RAS will prevent any messages about your goals from getting through to your subconscious. This is why setting identity-based goals is so powerful — because most of the time, the real challenge to influencing your mind is convincing it that you are the type of person who can achieve your goal or manifest your desired outcome.

If you want to learn more about self-image, check out this whacky story about the power your self-image has over your life.

Bottom Line

Reaching your subconscious mind to help you achieve your desires and solve your problems is done by activating the Reticular Activating System. We can do this by creating a very specific and detailed picture of our desired goal in our conscious mind. The RAS will then pass this onto our subconscious — which will then go to work to help us reach success. The RAS performs this magic by bringing to our attention all the relevant information and ideas which otherwise might have remained as background noise in our experience.

There are clues all around you. You just need to convince your mind they are important enough to call your attention to them.

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