Women's Success Coach Podcast

9: How Your Reticular Activating System Can Help You Achieve Your Goals

February 20, 2023 Karen Vincent
Women's Success Coach Podcast
9: How Your Reticular Activating System Can Help You Achieve Your Goals
Show Notes Transcript

Episode Overview:

In this podcast episode, I am talking about the Reticular Activating System, or RAS,  which is a fancy name for the lens in your brain that filters certain things in, while glossing over other things. When you understand how this works, and how to manage it, you can dramatically change your experience in life.

What I Cover:

  • What is the reticular activating system?


  • What your Reticular Activating System filters in impacts how you feel, the actions you take in your life, and ultimately the results you get in your life


  • Your beliefs impact what your RAS will filter in and filter out. If you want to learn more about beliefs, how they form, and how you can create beliefs that serve you, be sure to check out Episode #1 of my podcast.


  • Examples of the Reticular Activating System in action.  


  • How you can make your reticular activating system work for you through visualization and creating mental movies. 


  • Things to be aware of when programming your reticular activating system.


  • Why gratitude practices work.


Let's Take Some Action:

  • Think about a goal you have. It can be personal or professional, big or small.  Be as specific as possible.


  • Spend a little time creating your visualization or mental movie as it pertains to this goal. 


  • Set 2 alarms on your phone and change the word “alarm” to a word or phrase that reminds you of your goal and have the alarms go off, maybe the first one in the morning, and the second one late afternoon. Run your mental movie when the alarm goes off attaching as much emotion as is possible to your mental move.


  • Keep doing this day after day and let your brain go to work for you.

Useful Resources:

Do you worry too much, overthink, assume the worst-case scenarios, spend a lot of time focusing on negative things that have happened, or discredit positive things happening? If so, you are dealing with the human brain we have all been given and you are not alone.

The good news is, you can change this and it may not take as long as you may think! If you want a free resource that will help you examine your thinking patterns, and change those that are not serving you, grab my 5 Common Thought Distortions Guide HERE.


Let’s stay in touch:

Website: www.KarenVincentSolutions.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karenvincentsolutions/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KarenVincentSolutions

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KarenVCoach



Karen:

Welcome to the Women's Success Coach Podcast. A podcast created to inspire growth and to help you learn, achieve, and evolve in your life ongoing regardless of your age. I'm your host, certified coach, and licensed therapist Karen Vincent, and I'm here to guide you and provide you with concrete tips and strategies you can implement in your life. I'm also here to inspire you, challenge you, and cheer you on so that you can create the life of your dreams and beyond. In today's podcast episode, I'm talking about the reticular activating system or RAS, which is a fancy name for the lens in your brain that filters certain things in, while glossing over other things or filtering other things out. When you understand how this works and how to manage it, you can dramatically change your experience in life. Well, hello. I hope you're doing well and that you're ready for the important information I'm sharing in this week's episode. I've seen significant changes in my clients when they understand how their reticular activating system works, and why it has such an impact on how they feel on a day-to-day basis. Today I'll be sharing this important information with you, and as I do in all my episodes, I'm going to give you specific steps you can take to make sure that your reticular activating system is working for you. Now, first things first. What is the reticular activating system? So I want you to note that I'm not going to give an in-depth scientific breakdown of how the brain works. Instead, I'm gonna give you my basic version of what the RAS is and how it works, so that we don't get bogged down in too many details that may not even be useful for you. Your reticular activating system sits above your spine at the brain stem, and it's made up of a bunch of nerves. And what it does is it connects the conscious part of your brain with the subconscious part of your brain. Now, if you think about it, you are exposed to more information each day than you could possibly manage in your conscious brain. And because of this, your RAS sifts through information and makes sure it brings awareness to the pieces of information that it thinks are important to you. What your reticular activating system filters in impacts how you feel, the actions you take in your life, and ultimately the results you get in your life. Your beliefs impact what your RAS will filter in and filter out because it will find you more evidence of what you think about and believe on a regular basis. If you think about this, that means that it could be really helpful and work for you or really unhelpful and work against you. In episode number one of this podcast, I talk all about beliefs, how they're formed, and how they can help or hurt you. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, you can go and check it out after listening to this episode. So maybe it'll be helpful for me to give you a couple examples of how your reticular activating system works. Let's say you are going to buy a new car and you know you want an SUV, but you're just not quite sure of exactly what you want. So you go to the car dealership and you're walking around the lot and you see a white SUV, and a red SUV, maybe you see a black SUV and you decide that's it. That's the one I'm gonna get that black SUV. And as you're walking back, you all of a sudden, out of the corner of your eye, you see a blue SUV that you've never seen a color like that before. You get really excited. You go check it out and you decide, no, this is your car. So you go inside, you do all your paperwork, and the salesperson tells you to come back in a couple days after they get the car registered and it's yours to put on the road. What will happen is you'll start driving around and you will see that blue SUV everywhere. Now this blue SUV doesn't just magically appear but what has happened is your reticular activating system now thinks that that blue SUV is very important to you because you're excited about it. So instead of driving aimlessly down the highway, it's scanning and it is pointing out and shining a light on any car, any color that looks like that blue SUV. That's how the reticular activating system works. Let me give you one more example. They've done research with mothers who live near airports. These are airports with huge jets taking off and landing all hours of the day and night. And what this research has found is that these mothers don't wake up at all, even though there's really loud airplanes coming and going all hours of the night. But what they will wake up to is the slightest noise from their baby in the room down the hall. And why this happens is because their reticular activating system is focusing on noises from the baby while tuning out noises from the loud planes. So it's honing in and filtering in and alerting these mothers when their baby makes noise because that is what's important to. So hopefully those two examples help you understand a little bit more about how your reticular activating system works. What I see happen with clients is that they spend a lot of time focusing on something that they perceive as negative about themselves or something happening around them that they perceive as negative. And as a result, they replay these negative thoughts over and over. And just like the blue car that you start to see everywhere when you're thinking about blue cars, you'll start to see more negative things happen when you are replaying negative thoughts in your mind. Your reticular activating system will think that you're wanting to experience more negative things. It will think that this is important to you, and so it will then filter in as many negative things as possible. And oftentimes at the expense of having you notice positive things happening. That's not good. Right? So how do you make your RAS work for you instead of having it work against you? The first important thing to note is that you are always in the driver's seat, and if you choose to take control of the wheel, you will take control of your brain. You tell it where to go, and it will follow. Let me explain this a little bit more. You can choose what you want to consciously focus on, and in doing so, you're going to tell your RAS what you want it to focus on. Let's say you're working on a goal that's important to you. You want your RAS to help you work on this goal, and you can do this by reminding yourself of your goal daily, or even multiple times throughout the day. Visualize what it will look like when you achieve your goal, and be very detailed in doing this. Pull in all of your senses when you think about achieving your goal, to really imagine what that experience will be like for you. And when you do this, you are telling your reticular activating system that achieving this goal is important to you. It will then help you notice anything that could support you in achieving your goal. It will help you remember other hard things you have achieved in the past. It will help you make decisions in the moment that will support your goal, and it will help you delay immediate gratification when needed, so that you can stay on track with where you're headed. It will also filter out things that are not in alignment with your goal, because you'll be telling it those things are not important to you. For example, let's say you want to take this amazing vacation. In doing this. think about that vacation, visualize it and be very specific about where it would be, how long you would be there, where you might stay, who you would be with the types of foods you'd eat, and what that food would taste like. You get the point. Create a mental movie of your amazing vacation, and when you do this, your brain will start to help you work to make it possible. It might help you see a travel deal on Instagram or in your email inbox that you otherwise may not have noticed if you weren't thinking about this vacation. You may see a blog post from someone who has been where you want to go, that's offering tips about how you can make your vacation happen. You may even overhear someone talking about a similar trip, went out to dinner that you would otherwise not have heard if you weren't focusing on your future dream vacation. Your RAS knows this vacation is important to you and it will help you make it happen by filtering in any information that may move you closer to making your vacation a reality. As another example, let's say you want to earn a certain amount of money in the next one to three years. You want to start focusing on your financial goal daily. Be very clear about why you want to achieve your financial goal, what it will look like and feel like when you achieve that goal, how it will impact others that you care about, what types of things you'll be doing more of and what types of things you'll be doing less of as you work towards your goal. As was the case with the vacation example, you'll start to see opportunities and possibilities that you would otherwise not see if you were not training your reticular activating system, that your financial goal is important to you. Now, one thing I want you to be aware of is that you want to create these mental movies with as much clarity and as much confidence as you can. So instead of saying,"I hope to earn X amount of money", Say,"I'm going to earn X amount of money in the next year." You're confident and specific. When you use a word like"hope", you're telling your brain that you'd like to earn the money, but there's a chance you won't. When you do this, you are inadvertently telling your brain to look for reasons you may not achieve your goal, instead of only presenting you with evidence for why achieving your goal is possible and to help you find the strategies for how to make it happen. When it comes to your reticular activating system, you want to focus on the things you want in your life with conviction. Get your brain to work for you by filtering in the things that will help move you towards your goal and filter out the things that will move you away from your goal. This is not some woowoo strategy for achieving goals. There's nothing magical happening because what you start to notice more of was always there and would be there either way, as was the case with the blue cars on the road. You just start to become more aware of it because you've programmed your brain to filter it in for you. The more emotion you can tie to what you want, and the more you remind yourself of it, the harder your reticular activating system will work for you. Now, just one more thing related to the RAS. If one of your goals is to experience better emotions on a daily basis and/or to be a more positive person, consider a daily gratitude practice, which will create an RAS that no longer has you replaying the hard things that happened in your day, or worrying about the anticipated negative things that will likely never even. When you intentionally look for something to be grateful for every day, your reticular activating system will know that this is important to you, and it will start to filter in more of the positive things you may otherwise not notice or remember. If your brain knows that at the end of the day you're going to want to write down something to to be grateful for, it will make sure it finds something for you, even on the hard days. So just something to think about in terms of the power of gratitude and how it impacts your reticular activating system. Now as we do in all my podcast episodes, we're going to take some action. So first, what I want you to do is think about a goal that you have. It can be a personal goal or a professional goal. Can be big or small, can be long-term or short-term. I just want you to come up with a very clear goal. Next, I want you to spend a little time creating your visualization or mental movie as it pertains to this goal. What will it look like? What will it feel like? How will your life be different? How will you be different? So get really clear on that mental movie of you achieving your. Next, I want you to set two alarms on your phone, maybe one in the morning and one in the middle to the end of the day, and change the word alarm to a word or phrase that reminds you of your goal. And when the alarm goes off, I want you to run your mental movie, attaching as much emotion as is possible as you visualize yourself achieving your goal. It only takes a couple minutes, a couple times a day, but you will be training your reticular activating system. Remember, you want to be in the driver's seat and you want to grab the wheel, so you'll be training your reticular activating system to focus on that goal and help guide you in getting there. And with this consistency matters. So keep doing this day after day and let your brain go to work for you. So that's what I have for you today and I hope you will take action to make sure your reticular activating system is working for you, not against you. And one more quick thing, if you like reading and want some more tips and strategies that will help you with things like managing your mindset, your stress, your worry, your anxiety, around setting and achieving goals, creating healthy success habits, challenging yourself beyond what you believe is currently possible, and lots of other topics related to creating a life of success, ongoing growth, and fulfillment, check out my blog. You can find it at www.karenvincentsolutions.com/blog. That's a wrap. You should be proud of yourself for investing time in you, which is so critical for success and for overall life fulfillment. I look forward to having you join me for my next episode. And in the meantime, go click that subscribe button so you'll know when it's released, and you can also follow me on Instagram at Best Boss Lady Life that's at Best Boss Lady Life on Instagram. Also, remember that whatever it is that you're working on, you've got this and I'm here cheering you on.