Betsy Guerra explains how pain narrows what you notice through the Reticular Activating System, a filter that locks you onto what you already believe. When you focus on one bad thing, you miss everything else. She recommends consciously shifting your attention toward positives and gratitude instead.
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If you're in pain and you think everything's going wrong for you, you need to listen to this. When you're enduring some sort of adversity, you feel that everything's going wrong and it causes you to fail. You fail at work, you fail as a parent, you fail as a spouse, you fail. And there's a reason for this. There's a part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System, or ras. The mission of the RAS is to filter outside information so that we don't have to pay attention to the 20,000 stimuli that's going on at the same time in our surroundings. However, the RAS filters information or chooses to pay attention and notice the things that are aligned with what we already believe in. And that's called confirmation bias. We're able to confirm you see what I believe was true. So think about, let's say, your adversity has to do with struggles in your marriage. And you think that your spouse is super selfish and never pays attention to you and doesn't care about what you're asking of him or her. And your RAS just proves that, because you will find every little detail that could say that he was not paying attention. So your spouse could be doing everything perfect and working really hard and trying his or her best, but you will focus only on that one thing he or she didn't get right, because your RAS is wired to look for that. Now. How do we change this, Betsy? Well, choose to focus on something different. Choose to focus on the positive. I always tell my clients that their life is like a big, wide wall full of blessings, and then there's this black dot in the middle. And because the black dot is right in this, like, spank in the middle, they choose to focus on it. So they're looking at it and they're like, oh, this hurts. Oh, this sucks. All my life, I'm the victim. But if they look around that little dot, there's all these blessings and amazingness. Same thing in a relationship, same thing in your financial experience. Same thing with regards to your health, your family. If you choose to focus on the black little dot, you're not going to be able to see the blessings. So how do you do that? You start reprogramming your brain and you tell yourself what you want to believe. Oh, my life is great. And you start thinking about the things that are good about your life or your marriage or. Or your family, your child. You know, my spouse is very loving and giving. I like that about him. And, yeah, he tried to pick this up he's not the best at it, but he tried to pick it up and I acknowledge that he made an effort or yeah, you know, right now my daughter is sick and I'm having to see her suffer through this. But I have insurance. I have people that can stay with my other children. I have. I have the possibility of being there taking care of my daughter because I'm healthy. There are so many blessings around you. If you choose to focus on them, you're filled with gratitude. And gratitude is the first step to joy. So stop focusing on the black dot and tell your ras what to look for. Surround yourself by the positive version of what you're experiencing. If you found this to be helpful, please like and subscribe and share with somebody that may need to hear these words. I'm here to serve you. So if you want more tools and resources, please visit betterwithbetsy.com.
