Your thoughts define your reality

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Photo by Tianshu Liu – Torii Gate, Japan


Let's do a little exercise.
What if I told you that behind everything green there is a note of 10 dollars.
Close your eyes for a few seconds with that thought in mind and then open your eyes and look around.
Do you now see more green items in your environment than before ?

What if I told you that behind everything red there is a note of 100 dollars!
Close your eyes for a few seconds with that thought in mind and then open your eyes and look around.
How much red items are you now aware of? And interestingly, are you still even aware of anything green?

This exercise illustrates two things:
  1. Our thoughts will define our focus. The thoughts we have in our mind give meaning to events and things around us.
  2. The stronger the meaning (or emotion) associated with the event, the more important they become to our consciousness.

The Gatekeeper

Most people are convinced that reality is something very real, very physical that is out there in the “real world”. Simply put, it has to be real, since we assume we base our perception on the combined information of our 5 senses (hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell).
First of all there is the fact that our senses are rather limited:
  • our eyes only see a small fraction of all existing wavelengths, the so-called Visible Spectrum : between 380 and 740 nanometer (see diagram below, the visible spectrum is only a tiny sliver of the spectrum out there)
  • speaking of light: we do not see the actual colours an object has, which would be the colours that get absorbed by the object, since what enters our eyes are the colours that are reflected by the object. For example, as you probably know, white light (as in sunlight) contains all colours we can observe (all the colours of the rainbow). A white object, looks white to as because it reflects all those colours back to us. Since no colours are absorbed, the object is in reality black (which is the absence of colour).
  • our ears are limited in the frequencies they can perceive. People can hear sounds at frequencies from about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, though we hear sounds best from 1,000 Hz to 5,000 Hz, where human speech is centred. Hearing loss may reduce the range of frequencies a person can hear. It is common for people to lose their ability to hear higher frequencies as they get older. By contrast, cats typically hear sounds at frequencies between 55 Hz and 79,000 Hz.
  • etc
Photo by Harry Quan

What does physically gets to our brain, is then interpreted. Humans will associated what they see, hear, etc with what they already know. When new information comes in, we check our massive database for things that are similar, so that we can associate it. So all information is perceived, not simply stored.

Finally, when we talk about reality, we typically refer to the world we are consciously aware of, in other words we are referring to the conscious mind (as opposed to the unconscious mind). And that is where it becomes really interesting.
We have at the top of our brainstem a bundle of neurons called the Reticular Activating System or RAS.

The RAS has several functions:
  • it controls the different sleep and arousal states humans can have (waking, asleep, and asleep and dreaming)
  • it participates in our fight-or-flight response
Fundamentally, the RAS is a filter system that determines what our conscious mind will be aware of and what is only available to the unconscious mind.

We are continuously bombarded by an enormous amount of information. According to the NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) Model of Communication, we get some 2 million bits/second of information, of which we roughly keep some 134 bits/sec in our conscious mind, typically organised in give or take 7 chunks of information. See the diagram below: there is some serious filtering going on between what comes in and what we are consciously aware of.
As an example: if you are sitting down at a desk, reading this article, there is an enormous amount of information coming towards you that you are (most probably) not consciously aware of:
  • the temperature of the room you are sitting in
  • the humidity of your surroundings
  • the feeling of your body sitting on the chair
  • the feeling of your clothes on your skin
  • any tension in muscles that you are currently feeling
  • potentially a feeling of thirst or hunger (that you now suddenly became aware of)
  • ….
It is not that this information is not available, all that is required is for you to become consciously aware of it. You could visualise the conscious mind as a flash-light shining a light on a particular part of the information flow.
The RAS is sometimes referred to as the gatekeeper, who determines what is allowed into our conscious awareness and what is filtered out.

So in a nutshell:
  • our thoughts give meaning to events
  • the meaning creates an emotional connection to the event
  • the RAS will select the things or events with the strongest emotional connection
  • you only see those things in your “reality”

Change your reality

From what we discussed before, it follows that by changing our thoughts and by changing the importance we associated with things, we change what we see around us.
In these somewhat uncertain times, this becomes very important.

If you find yourself focusing all the time at what is going wrong around you: the empty shelfs in the supermarket, the fact that there is no toilet paper, the fact that your favourite artist's concert was canceled, … you can change this by changing your thoughts.
It will probably require a conscious effort at first to change this.
Start by becoming aware of your daily thoughts, what do they dwell on, are they positive or negative? Don't judge what comes up in your mind, simply start being aware.
It really helps to have a daily meditation session (10 minutes in the morning can be enough) to develop that awareness.

Other conscious things you can do:
  • Avoid reading sensationalist news
  • Use common sense
  • Don't give in to panic (honestly, we can't take rational decisions when we do)
  • Take time to relax
  • Practice your hobby
  • Go out and walk in a calm and natural environment.
A lot of what is important to us (and hence what we see in our reality), is based on the values and beliefs that we hold. A lot of those have been with us for a big part of our lives (you picked up quite a few when you are a child). Some people can re-align their values by themselves, but most people aren't even truly aware of their own values.
Eliciting your values and aligning them so that they are supporting your goals is an important part of the work you do in life coaching.
Simply stated, life coaching is about:
  1. Having an honest awareness of where you are currently in your life
  2. Define a compelling future (goal) where you see yourself
  3. Create the tools to help you on your way from where you are now, to where you want to be.
A life coach won't tell you what values and beliefs you should have (again, there is no judgement here), but will be a guide to help you discover what your values are and whether they will support you in attaining your goals.

If you are interested about Life Coaching, please feel free to contact me at:
petervandaele.lifecoach@gmail.com

More information:

For those who love TED Talks: some talks on what reality is


“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
―Gandhi

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