You Have an Inbuilt System That Can Change Your Life
Bridge the gap between the conscious and subconscious mind for balance, motivation and optimism.
Most people spend their lives out of alignment with their subconscious, creating a constant, low-grade sense of confusion. For example, have you ever had a nightmare after what seemed like an essentially decent day? Have you caught yourself, mid-sentence, using an intonation that felt much more antagonistic than you intended? Remained in a job or relationship in spite of the many signs that the arrangement just wasn’t right?
All of these instances are examples of dissonance between the subconscious and conscious mind. I’d argue that this absence of rapport is at the root of all our problems.
Fortunately, bringing the conscious and subconscious into alignment is a straightforward process.
Congruence is written into your nervous system
“It’s against my dignity as a body to accept some ideology.” — Terence McKenna
The Reticular Activating System (RAS) is a bundle of nerves within the brain stem. It’s responsible for sleep, arousal, and the filtering of extraneous sensory information, among other functions. The RAS acts as a filter between the conscious and subconscious minds, and it’s what enables you to narrow your attention on the most salient features within your environment. Without it, concentration would be impossible because you’d be overwhelmed with sensory data irrelevant to the concerns of everyday life.
Intriguingly, the RAS is also the reason that something you spent your entire life ignoring suddenly becomes impossible to avoid once you realize it’s there. For instance, you might get striped socks for the first time and realize later that everyone has a pair. Or you buy a car you thought was rare then see it at least twice every time you step outside. When something strikes you as salient, you become primed to notice it.
As a result, the RAS is the perfect tool for mindset optimization. Built into your physiology is a method of directing the trajectory of your thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Let’s talk about how to use it.
Use susceptibility to your advantage
If you want clarity, motivation and an all-around more enjoyable life, you need to reprogram your subconscious mind. The mind emphasizes that which you feed it most, and as a result, you must saturate your mind with empowering information.
The first step involves realizing the degree to which you’re susceptible to being programmed. Everything you watch, read, listen to, and talk about travels into your subconscious and forms the basis for how you perceive reality. The issue is that your subconscious mind has undergone programming since your birth, and most of it isn’t helpful.
If you’re like 98 percent of the population, you didn’t grow up in an exceptionally nurturing environment, free of criticism, biting tones, and misspent time. Therefore, you were wired by people who were parroting their own trauma-based conditioning. Most people get their programming from television, movies, advertisements, and none of this content is made to help viewers create a tranquil internal environment. Most of it is actually engineered to do the opposite —setting people up for fear-based, scarcity-driven mentalities that encourage passive approaches to reality.
In the classic Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill emphasizes the power of autosuggestion, a method of putting yourself into a trance without hypnotic induction. While the idea of going into trance might seem like a commitment, the truth is that whenever you focus on something, you enter a trance. The key is to make the most of this tendency. Practically, this means replacing the material manufactured to create anxiety, fear, and worry with any subject that consistently inspires or excites you.
Focus on programming your subconscious with thoughts and perspectives that are forward moving. Look, you might be 29 but your subconscious is three years old. She’s innocent and lost. Be her best friend. Listen to nurturing material when you wake up, when you go to bed, when you exercise, wash dishes, and so forth. Prioritize the topics that reliably intrigue you, and don’t be afraid to listen to motivating content repetitively. You can even make a discipline out of listening to that which raises your mood, treating it like a workout or a daily apple.
When you saturate your mind with pleasant feelings, they filter into your subconscious and raise your baseline level of well-being. This makes it easier to approach challenges or even the mundane from a foundational level of ease. It also makes pivoting away from fear-based messaging much easier. Your subconscious can’t tell the difference between imagined and lived experience, so it’s always better to read and listen to content that evokes feelings of peace, excitement and motivation rather than anger, worry or cynicism.
Fall in love with action, not its fruits
Another way to prime your RAS is to act for the sake of acting, forgetting extrinsic rewards. Interestingly, a core message from the classic early 20th century text, Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich, has striking similarities with research on flow conducted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Wattles encourages the reader to aim for micro-instances of success, rendering failure impossible by default. He recommends making your every action one of maximal effort, care, and completeness. This means that if you want to write an award-winning book or flawlessly paint your bedroom, start by making your bed and chewing each bite of each meal with precision.
When you commit to excellence in everything, you make failure impossible because that commitment to accuracy and finesse bleeds into whatever you touch. After all, how you do one thing is how you do everything.
One method for committing to micro-instances of success involves adopting a flow-based lifestyle. As you likely know, flow is the juncture in which skill meets challenge. It occurs when you become so immersed in a task that time falls away. You lose sight of external rewards or the need for motivation. Engaging in your task becomes its own form of satisfaction.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, has conducted research on the flow-based or autotelic personality, a person who automatically positions themselves in situations that induce flow. Autotelic personalities also enjoy a greater ability to manage the balance between play and challenge. Like those who strive for success in everything, autotelic personalities find success as a net result of being fully engaged in the solving of a problem.
Even if your temperament doesn’t make flow natural for you, adopting a flow-based lifestyle involves a pleasantly simple shift in mindset. Rather than placing exclusive focus on the pleasure you’ll gain or suffering you’ll avoid by taking an action, act for acting’s sake. Cultivate the skill of immersion and forget about the end result. If you become talented at immersing yourself in anything, getting lost in it no matter how challenging or mundane, you’re gaining massive power.
Over time, you’ll be able to pull enjoyment out of a hat because it will become easier to tap into that sense of immersion as you commit to consistently doing it. And once you master the skill of immersion, your circumstances inevitably change. You’ll no longer be limited by the aversion to boredom and pain that traps most people in unfulfilling situations.
By reprogramming your subconscious mind, aiming for micro-instances of success and becoming autotelic, you unite distinct levels of your conscious awareness. These strategies offer you the opportunity to prove that the law of attraction is not simply a universal law spoken about only when written on a note attached to a tea bag string. It’s not simply an artifact of mysticism or friendly only to the lucky.
Instead, a tool with the power to change your life is built into your nervous system. All you need to do is learn the language it loves to hear.