What’s with the Law of Attraction Anyway? A Scientific Perspective.

I began my self-development journey in the early 2000s, with a self-help book on Neuro-Linguistic Programming and a Yahoo Group Forum on Native American spirituality. Yeah. As you do.

Across the past fifteen years, I’ve been exploring the various threads that bring together identity, reinvention, sense of progress, and growth. One of the first “tools” I used was this Law of Attraction.

I learned about it via a movie called ‘The Secret’ at the end of 2006 when I was struggling with my mental and physical health. I’d spent a few days in hospital, and I was dealing with a ‘this is how my life is’ experience.

For me, finding this theory gave me a sense of control and hope that things could change, even where I felt I could not control the things around me.

As an adult, I look at it with mixed feelings. For context, I have a Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience and am also attuned in Reiki healing. Just to give a bit of disclosure of where I’m coming from.

What IS this Law of Attraction Thing?

At its simplest description, this is seen as a law of the universe, like the laws of gravity and thermodynamics, stating that human thought has an energy signature which the universe or the energy of the rest of the world responds to.

In a popular example, if you focus on imagining you have a fancy car — you spend time looking at pictures of it, imagine yourself in the driver seat, see yourself turning the key in the lock — then you can essentially THINK IT TRUE. You can ‘attract’ that car into your life through the power of your thoughts.

Now, my academic background does not allow me to ascribe to this idea in this reduced form.

However, most of the misconceptions I see about it do stem from some kind of ‘true concept’ if you dig under the layers of people’s interpretation.

What Science Suggests About Thought

The human brain, as a survival mechanism, has a ‘negative bias.’ This means it focuses more energy on and more importance on negative things.

If there is a lion about to attack us from the bushes, we don’t give as much time and attention to the pretty flower at the edge of the path; which is useful.

However, it also means that in our modern culture, we dwell on that presentation at work, that snarky comment on our social media, that doubt in the back of our head a lot more (and believe it more) than a similarly-strong positive experience.

Actively focusing on the positives (not to ignore or deny the negatives at all, just to even up the scales a little) can lead to positive impacts. We feel it’s more possible, more realistic if we see lots of examples of something happening. (Even if we’re seeing those things inside our own head.)

We know from neuroscience that visualising or imagining yourself doing an action will ‘light up’ the same brain areas as actually doing it — that thinking something has some kind of effect on our brain at that moment.

Even sceptical scientists seem to agree that relaxing muscles in the body and thinking positive thoughts will lower your heart rate and blood pressure. This, in turn, allows the nervous system to focus on healing instead of on keeping your heart rate steady or keeping your mind focused on your work.

The Scientist In Me

If you do not believe that thoughts impact your brain, your body, or your feelings, I’d like to direct you to google scholar, where you can find hundreds of scientific studies on the overall impact and main theories.

I’m qualified in low-intensity Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, where thought challenging (known officially as cognitive restructuring) is a massive part of the interventions for helping people take control over their anxious and depressive thoughts.

Again, this evidence-based technique does not suggest you can magically fix your life by thinking good thoughts, but rather helps you step back from letting your thoughts dictate your life by assuming they are facts.

Regardless of my beliefs surrounding souls and the human mind, I’m a scientist. I took a course on Quantum Mechanics at University and courses on the Philosophy of Science both in college and University.

Here I found myself able to believe that the universe is nothing but energy; that particles can be in two places or states at once and that string theory has a lot going for it.

My psychological and neuroscientist training tells me that our thoughts, emotions, beliefs and behaviour are the result of chemical neurotransmitters; much like electricity down wires.

My understanding of physics tells me that the energy of these neurotransmitters (such as that which is created by action potential) could have consciousness.

And my CBT qualification alongside years of practise of these evidence-based techniques has shown me that how we think and behave can change a phenomenal amount about our experiences.

Science Meets Spirituality

In the college course, which gave us a basic understanding of the history, ethics, & philosophy of science, our main thesis outline was to find something that wouldn’t be considered scientific; to analyse it for scientific “worth”.

I chose to look at the possibility of energy healing. I still have the 7,000-word paper copy with my APA style references in it.

I believe in the energy of each molecule in our body — blood moves via kinetic energy and we let off heat [thermal energy] and so on. We are energetic beings.

The Power You Didn’t Realise You Had

Through eating, we direct energy from our food to our muscles, a thought transmits from our conscious mind to our brain, where it becomes a chemical transmission which in turn moves our attention, physical muscles, or stimulates memories. This is the path of energy; changing form.

• If I visualise a tiger behind me; I can increase my heart-rate.
• If I imagine a warm fire; hear it crackling in my mind; I can stop myself shivering in the cold.
• If I remember a loving event from the past, I feel a flood of comfort. Oxytocin is released and my heart-rate lowers.

When someone is angry or upset, you can feel the tension even without them speaking. There’s something around them which gives off the vibe. If you’re close to them, you may not even need body language to feel it.

And that emotion often alters yours — either bringing our sympathy, compassion, anger or sadness. This is often why children or animals ‘play up’ when the adults around them are stressed.

Scientific Support is Found

‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne has a comment from Dr Dennis Waitley — a psychologist who took visualisation from the Apollo programme and instituted it into the Olympic training — this was a process called Visual Motor Rehearsal.

“Here’s an interesting thing about the mind: we took Olympic athletes and then hooked them up to some sophisticated biofeedback equipment and had them run their event only in their mind. Incredibly, the same muscles fired, in the same sequence, when they were running the race in their mind as when they were running it on the track. How could this be? Because the mind can’t distinguish whether you’re really doing it or whether it’s just a practice. I think if you’ve been there in the mind, you’ll go there in the body.”

— The Secret, Rhonda Byrne, 2006.

Returning to the example with the car — if we visualise it, believe it can happen, and spend time in a relaxed, calm state, feeling happy with our new car — our brain will point out that car to our consciousness more. We will see the deals on that car more obviously because our brain is made for patterns and joining the dots.

We then pay more attention to things we may have missed, we feel more motivated to then take action steps, and we can then change our behaviour to make it more likely.

The Darker Side

I have seen people suggest that because the Law of Attraction claims what we think about, we bring about, this also applies to negative events.

The book and movie do give an example of thinking “bills, bills, all these bills, how will I cope with these bills?” and that thinking this then ‘attracts’ more bills to us.

Again, from an attention-changes-our-behaviour aspect, worrying about bills can make us feel powerless, bury our head in the sand, not open letters, and thus the debt mounts up.

However, I have also seen people adamantly claim that people attract their cancer or abuse into their life through negative thoughts alone.

I appreciate that following a model of social behaviour, there could be some correlation. Those who are more negative may cope with stress differently, such as smoking, which may then increase their chance of lung cancer.

However, the idea that someone who is otherwise healthy is diagnosed with cancer due to ‘negative thoughts’ just isn’t backed up by science. Having experienced depression and anxiety, and worked in the mental health field for fifteen years, the correlations just don’t support this idea.

In the movie, there is an anecdotal story of a lady with cancer who spent her time with gratitude and comedy shows, which she attributes to the healing of her physical cancer.

I certainly do not doubt that laughter lowers the stress hormone cortisol, meaning the immune system can focus on fighting off illness. Equally, gratitude and a positive mindset help keep blood pressure low, stress managed, and release hormones that again, help with physical healing.

We do not know what other aspects of ‘healing’ she experienced, and once more, reducing anything in this life down to one black and white cause or cure just doesn’t make sense to me.

In Summary

The research suggests that using the techniques shared around the Law of Attraction, such as visualisation, gratitude, and positive thinking means we are more likely to notice positives by training our brain to combat our negative bias.

From a cognitive behavioural standpoint, what we think impacts how we feel and how we behave; so this likely will alter our behaviours too — perhaps meaning we take active steps toward that outcome we wouldn’t have otherwise — even on a subconscious level.

However, the other side of this ‘law’ claims that we attract everything that happens to us. Science just doesn’t back this up.

And to be honest, my own heart and intuition can’t comprehend this idea. Life isn’t that ‘fair’ in what I see, and reducing anything down to such a ‘simple’ answer just doesn’t make sense.

What’s more, it’s unhelpful. Suggesting someone with an illness focus on relaxing so their body can focus on fighting the infection is one thing. Saying they brought this on themselves doesn’t help anyone. Especially when it’s not true.

If you would like to reinvent your life from the roots of who you already are (and the psychology of how your brain already works) sign up for the free roadmap to reinventing yourself here.)