In previous articles I have talked about the chemical reactions of stress and how they affect your body and your health–negative thoughts create negative chemical reactions in the body, which can negate or nullify the results you were hoping for from an exercise and diet plan. I hope by now that you are starting to get the idea that the way you think does matter in creating long term success for your body and health. To further help you understand the importance of tending to the mental and emotional side of your success, it may help to understand how you process information as well as how you look for success.
We have in our brain stem a mass known as the Reticular Formation. It is often referred to as the Reticular Activating System (RAS), which is the Reticular Formation and all its connections. The RAS is the connection point for millions of different neural pathways between various parts of our brain and the rest of our body. At every second we have billions of bits of information coming in from all of our physical senses, and it is the role of the RAS to process this information. Because our conscious mind cannot process this much information, the RAS acts like a filter to only allow the things we deem important to pass into our consciousness. What sets up the majority of that filter are the most dominant thoughts, beliefs, truths, habits, and ideas we have about our life. Therefore, out of all the information we receive every day, the only part that will actually make it to our conscious awareness is the information that lines up with those things we focus on the most–regardless of whether we deem them wanted or unwanted, good or bad. Of the billions of bits of information we receive every second we can only process somewhere between two thousand and four thousand bits. Because what gets through is information related to what you have determined are important points of focus, your experience and your perspective are completely unique to you. This is why two people can attend the same event yet have completely different memories of the experience.
Thoughts occur when neurons in your brain fire together via synapses. Every time you have thoughts about a particular thing, you stimulate the same neurons. The more you think this thought or thoughts like it, the stronger the connection between other neurons that were stimulated by similar thoughts becomes. This creates a strong neural network in your brain. This neural net helps to set the filter (the RAS) for the information that gets in.
So if you are focused on what you don´t like about your body and you dwell on those "bad" things, you are creating a neural net that helps to create your filter, which means you will continue to look for and identify things that relate to those thoughts and beliefs surrounding your body. This is why it is hard to change something that you are focused on in a negative way. Your brain is not wired to look for success, because you are focused on what is failing (which is only your limited perspective). Every time you look in the mirror, your brain is going to look for and tune in to what you don´t like. (It´s like the car you own–you probably notice that make of car more now than before you owned it. Your car is in your filter, so your brain picks it out of all the information you see when driving.) Every time you see what you don´t like, not only do you make the neural net stronger, but you also cause another negative chemical response in your body. You can see how this could potentially create a powerful negative cycle.
The way most people try to stop this cycle is through the action of working out or changing their eating habits. The hope is that they can do enough positive action to elicit a change so they will feel better and stop the way they were thinking. The problem with this is that if you are taking these actions to change what you don´t like about yourself, your filter will still be set to look for what you don´t like, and that´s still what you will see first–even if you have some success, you may not see it because your filter is not set to see it. Your model of success will be based on getting rid of what you don´t like, which will cause a negative chemical response every time you observe it, rather than looking for a new desired end result. You can´t look for evidence of what you don´t want to be gone and not create a negative chemical environment that could negate your positive intended actions of exercise and diet.
Success at this point may be dependent on how much work you can do to elicit a change in your body so you can change the way you are looking at and seeing your body. The problem with getting success this way is that success will be predicated on the action alone. When your success is dependent on action alone, you will be forced to continue this action (or some level of it) to keep your results. If you stop or slow down for any reason, you will lose the results you gained. Your dominant (negative) thoughts that helped create the situation in the first place would also be likely to return.
Now, if you change the way you think about your current body situation, which is only an interpretation, you start to change your filter from looking at and focusing on the things that are "wrong." Once you are at peace with where you are, you can start to turn your attention to what that situation helped you to desire–that being something like a healthy, lean, thriving body. From what you didn´t want, you created a desire for something else. When you focus on what you do want and why you want it (see last newsletter http://thethoughtdiet.com/layout3/Newsarticles/), you start to create a new neural net of this new image, and your filter (the RAS) starts to look for evidence of this. So when you do make some changes, they will be more noticeable, and you will have something in your awareness that reinforces the positive things, thus creating a positive chemical environment in your body that will only make the actions you take even more beneficial.
Use what you don´t want as a way to help you determine what it is you do want, and then figure out why you want it. What is this thing going to provide for you in your life that you don´t have already? Continue asking this until you are inspired by your answer. Once you are inspired by your answer, you will have a positive emotion and thoughts to add into the neural net to make it stronger. The stronger the neural net is, the more you will filter in the positive information and filter out the negative, and you will start to see evidence of your desire in places you couldn´t see it before. As you see more evidence of what you want, you add to your neural net, and that in turn stimulates the RAS to look for more success. This is the beginning of rewiring your brain for success. In the next article I will discuss some ways of making this neural net even more powerful.
