Activating the
Positive: How to Train Your RAS (Reticular Activating System)
You’ve got
to accentuate the positive * Eliminate the negative * Latch onto the
affirmative!
When Johnny
Mercer penned the lyrics to “Accentuate the Positive”
in 1944, he most likely wasn’t thinking about neuroscience and the mysteries of
the human brain. Nonetheless, he succinctly summed up the possibilities that the
reticular activating system offers us.
The reticular activating
system (RAS) is a bundle of nerves approximately 2 inches long and 0.5 inches
wide that starts above the spinal cord and extends to the midbrain. Its small
size, though, belies its power. The RAS controls our fight-or-flight responses
and our sleep-wake states. It’s also the connector between our subconscious
brain and our conscious one; it acts like a filter, separating what’s important
to us from the unnecessary stuff. The human brain is bombarded with approximately
8 million bits, or 1 megabyte, of information in one day, which makes the RAS’ filtering
feat even more impressive.
But in this age
of technology when more and more information is coming at us nonstop, it often
feels like our brains are heading for overload. How do we filter out the less than
positive, and even downright negative, information and train our brains to
focus on what will benefit our well-being? If only there were a way to Marie
Kondo our brains, sorting out and jettisoning the inessential and creating a
peaceful space for us to relax and live with what “sparks joy.”
Although
training our RAS is more complicated than learning how to fold our socks, it is
achievable. As with all things involving the brain, it takes focus, discipline,
and daily practice to achieve results. Some of these practices are ones that
most of us have been lectured about by a medical professional at least once in
our lives: getting enough sleep (between 6.5 and 8 hours a night),
incorporating exercise or mindful movement (i.e., moving with your attention
fully focused on each movement of you make) into our daily routines, reducing
consumption of processed foods with high levels of added sugar, sodium, and
fat.
Here are a few daily
mental exercises to train your brain and get your RAS filtering out the
negative and accentuating the positive.
·
Start
by setting a specific intent or goal. Specificity is important because it gives
your brain something to focus on. So, for example, rather than thinking “I want
to be happier,” zero in on exactly what might make you happier. If it’s having
less stress in your life, go deeper and examine what contributes to your level
of stress. Maybe one contributing factor is the compulsion to check your social
media accounts every five minutes. Rather than forcing yourself to get off all
social media in one fell swoop, start by minimizing how often you look at
Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Instead of every five minutes, make it twenty
minutes, and then forty-five. Keep decreasing the amount of time you spend
online, which will result in decreasing the amount of inessential information
that your RAS has to filter out; use that time instead for something that will
allow your overworked brain to take a brief break, like stepping away from
electronic devices to stretch.
·
Affirmations
have gotten a bad rap, in part due to Saturday Night Live’s memorable
Stuart Smalley skits (“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggone it,
people like me!”). But the power of affirmations has science behind it: If you
repeatedly tell yourself, either mentally or verbally, that you’re clumsy, then
you’re conditioning your RAS to allow in the information that confirms your bias,
which means you’ll continue to believe that you’re clumsy. But telling yourself
that you are graceful, on a daily basis and with conviction,
will begin to introduce a different narrative, one that your RAS will
eventually confirm.
·
Specificity
is also key to visualization. Come up with a visual scenario of a desired
outcome with as many sensory details as possible and replay that image once a
day. As with affirmations, visualization conditions your RAS to flag what’s
most important to you.
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