Reticular Activating System

I assume many of us have heard some variation of, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” The phrasing implies that we are responsible for whatever comes out of our mouths.

I also assume many of us weren’t taught to take full responsibility for our thoughts, and I wonder why this isn’t a common point of teaching. Maybe it feels invasive, abstract, or difficult. Maybe we wouldn't feel safe to be vulnerable within our own minds. We do register everything we think though, so is there any use hiding? I believe when we refuse ownership of our own thoughts and feelings we tend to blame other people for our negative experiences. Do we want others to have that sort of influence over our inner peace?

In one scenario I get mad because somebody is rude to me. Once I’m mad, I replay the situation in my brain many times, imagining all the ways they were wrong and all the ways I could have proved it in the moment. It’s their fault that I’m feeling this way.

In a different variation of the same scenario, the same person is rude to me, and I get mad, but instead it’s because I let myself get mad. I know that the anger gives me a feeling of control, and I start replaying the scenario which makes me angrier. I then decide that feeling angry makes my experience worse, and I let it go. Eventually, I practice this enough that my bursts of frustration shorten and shorten until I rarely get mad in the first place.

The first variation of the scenario takes less effort than the second. We don’t need to forgive people to let things go, we just need to accept ownership of our experiences so that we can change them. In the first variation, I let others have influence over my experience, and in the second variation I took ownership.

A few relevant reminders:

• Everybody has a unique experience, and nobody knows us better than we do ourselves.

• Most things do not apply to everybody.

• Managing trauma is much different than managing typical daily frustrations.

• I’m an aerospace engineer writing from my limited perspective regarding matters that (interest me) I’m not formally educated on.

Siddhartha Gautama is accredited with saying, “The mind is everything. What we think, we become”.

The physiological perspective on this is related to the ARAS - the Ascending Reticular Activating System. The ARAS is the part of the brain responsible for differentiating between wake/sleep states, filtering which sensory information to ignore/notice, and directing our attention to what we expect or value.

A common example of the ARAS in work is when somebody shows us a new song for the first time, and it seems that all of the sudden it’s being played everywhere. Another example is something that I heard a friend refer to as, “hater goggles”. It’s when we have distaste for somebody, and it starts to seem like everything they do is bothersome. They could be perfectly pleasant, but what they say and do feels irritating, nonetheless.

This also means inward love can become just as routine as self-loathing can. I once heard an expert say that we start to act in accordance with how we view ourselves. The idea is that if I like myself, I'll likely behave in a way that looks like I do - signaling to others that I'm worth liking. There are physical implications alongside the social, mental, and emotional.

I once read about an experiment that surveyed 100 hotel maids that all believed they weren't physically active. The doctors leading the experiment told 50 of them that the work they did everyday qualified as being physically active, showing them data to support the claim. The doctors came back a few months later and surveyed the same group to find that the 50% who learned that they were working out every day lost a few pounds on average, reported having more energy, and generally showed an improved physical health assessment. This 50% also reported changing zero habits between the two visits, suggesting that the only difference in their positive health changes was the belief that they were more active than they originally thought.

One more time: “The mind is everything. What we think, we become”.