In the ongoing battle to strengthen you mind so that you can keep and maintain commitments you need every psychological win you can get. It is perfectly acceptable to figure out how your brain really works and to trick it into doing what you want. Here is something fun to think about. Your active conscious mind can come up with an idea, contemplate that idea and your subconscious or primal brain will have no clue and does not even care. The primal side of you is controlled by forces that have been at play for countless years of evolution, it is the active side of your mind that you can control. That is the conscious side of you, it probably is what you call you and some will refer to this as their soul.
So the battle between “good” and “evil” is also at play within your own mind. You are constantly being influenced by this primal side of you to act, or not to act based on urges and impulses that you have very little influence over. You probably know what I am talking about. Take hunger for example. When you are hungry, really hungry, that primal side of your mind takes over and you almost become a different person. Your active brain gets bombarded by signals from your subconscious and you become a machine designed to target and find food. Those tasty little sugary cookies sitting in your cupboard do not stand a chance! The human mind, body, senses, agility were designed to be the perfectly adept hunter and gatherer. When you are hungry, and those primal forces are at work, all cookies should be afraid!
The point is that this other part of your mind is extremely powerful and hard to resist, so consequentially it takes effort and patience to build enough strength in your active mind to redirect, harness and manipulate the tendencies of your primal self. You can and absolutely should lie and cheat your way into mastering this part of your mind. Nobody is going to get in trouble for lying to your primal brain. Tricking yourself and using every psychological slight of hand to your advantage is perfectly acceptable. You are a a disadvantage, your primal brain has had thousands of years of a head start on you. All of this discussion is in preparation of one of the “tricks” that I recommend that you employ right away, in fact right now!
If you are contemplating a new years resolution, I know what you are thinking. Today is 12/30. You have two more days left to your evil ways, whatever that maybe, and starting Wednesday you are going to change. You are going to overcome and start something new. You are going to orchestrate a big change in your life and things are going to be different. Except for the fact that they are not. Your primal brain will blow you up, defeat your plans quickly. You will fail, misstep and all will be out the window. Yet another resolution down the drain, I guess you will have to wait until 2021 to make that change, right? How long will your new resolution last I wonder? How many days will you make it, before the primal mind has its way with you? This is where the psychological win comes in. You are not going to like it, but it works. I have proven it to myself over and over again. Here it is.
Start your commitment today. Yup. Start the new resolution on 12/30 instead of 1/1. It is a simple trick, but it is amazing how it works. You see the point is this. The active mind has to decide, once and for all, right now, not tomorrow, that it has assumed a new identity. I am no longer a smoker for example, or I am now a runner, or I now eat healthy. Whatever it is that you want to achieve, become that right now. Right it down in a notebook or something, write the statement as if it has already happened. I am …. fill in the blank. Make the decision on 12/30 that you are now a different person. This will completely kick your primal mind in the butt. It will take 3 – 4 weeks for it to recover from this. Your active mind, having made the decision to start right now, rather then waiting for some mythical future special date, will have taken away one of the primal mind’s greatest tools. You see, it is constantly telling you that you are going to fail, so you need to forget about the hard effort. Keep in mind the primal mind wants to protect itself at all cost, avoid any and all risk and will try to reduce any and all efforts to only what is absolutely necessary to survive. It loves to tell you to wait until some day in the future, or once that date has come, you now have failed so just give up.
So flip the script on yourself. Start right now. This morning. If your resolution is to go to the gym everyday in 2020, then just go right now. That is right, get up, put something on and go to the gym. Do not give your primal mind time to think through excuses. Do not worry, even if you do not have a membership the gym will most likely let you work out on a trial basis. So just go. Do not have a gym, then just do 5 push-ups, sit ups, squats and walk 2 miles. Cannot do a push-up, then do a kneeling one. Whatever it takes, just do something now, today. That should take you less then 1 hour to do, so just get out the door and do it right now. I am a healthy person, I exercise everyday. Start now, and destroy your primal mind’s number one weapon against you.
This will be a major psychological win for you. Start the resolution early. Whatever it is, just do it now. You may think, well I am not prepared. I need to get this and get that. I need to buy this or that. I need to get this organized, or that filed away. All of these thoughts are coming from a very deceptive, evil dark side that wants you to fail. Break on through to the other side, by starting right now. Just decide on your new resolve, get up and do it. It will not be perfect, it will most likely be silly. Your effort will seem elementary and amateur. That is OK, you are not worried about that stuff, you are just doing what a healthy person does. Alas, having said all this, you will not believe me.
If you are not keeping your new resolution now, and you have wanted to for quite sometime, then your primal mind has you under control. You have been brain washed. That is what brain washing is, it is training the active mind to be subdued by the subconscious. If I can convince you to be afraid or otherwise irrational about some behaviour, then you can be controlled by stimulating the part of your primal mind that is triggered by this behavior. So if you are under this influence, you will have already dismissed what I am trying to convince you to do. You will have already said, yeah, I do not have time for that today. I am too stressed. I am too tired. I am too busy. I am too this or too that. I need time to think about this. WRONG. Break through! Get out of the clutches and control of the primal mind! Become you! Become the real you! Start RIGHT NOW! Not in two days from now, resolve to become who you are, who you are destined to be, by starting NOW!
Guy Reams
