The RAS is a component of the reticular formation, found in the anterior-most segment of the brainstem. The reticular formation receives input from the spinal cord, sensory pathways, thalamus, and cortex and has efferent connections throughout the nervous system. The reticular activating system is responsible for sensation, consciousness, attention, and the sleep-wake cycle.. It can control what we perceive in our consciousness, essentially a gatekeeper of information.
In layman terms, RAS is kind of a information filter in our brain which responds when
- Your name is called
- Face Threat and feel unsafe
- When your partner is checking out others or if your close people are cheating on you
- Allowing the info that you focus or think about. Filters the external information based on what is important to you.
For instance, if you are planning to buy a specific car, you tend to observe more of those cars in traffic. It does not mean that many people started buying your favourite car all of a sudden, but it means that the car model has always been there on road but your brain did not look at it because you never gave attention to it until you started doing research on it.
Another example is skiing. To ski without hitting any object ahead, It is a skiing strategy to always keep eyes of the path ahead instead of looking out for rocks or trees. When you focus on path and move ahead, there are less chances of hitting an object. When you are scared and look out for obstacles , then there are more chances of hitting some object because you are missing your focus on the path ahead.
Our brain has evolved to scan for threats around us and alert us. This is how we survived as a species over millions of years. It’s main job is to predict and protect us. Hence, it has a greater proclivity to magnify negative events and things around us. It forces us to think and ponder about anything that threatens our identity or our close ones
So you see more of the stuff that you think about and focus on. Whether we have negative thoughts or positive thoughts, we see the world around us from the lens of the state of our mind. But generally our brain responds to negativity more intensely than positive stuff. Now once you start accumulating negative beliefs and thoughts, they get more intense unless you force yourself to stop them. It is like lint in the dryer vent. Once the lint start collecting in the dryer vent, it tends to accumulate even more of that stuff.
Now coming to our daily lives, our RAC behaves similarly. Once you are into negative thought patterns, you notice more hopelessness and helplessness. You feel out of control and feel stressful about normal things. You get into high alert mode and may blow things out of proportion. You may make a mountain out of molehill. You feel disempowered because your RAC is in heightened state to protect you from invisible threat (which are your thoughts) and you feel disempowered.
It is same with positive thought patterns. When you are feeling a sense of gratitude, when you are peaceful, when you are giving love unconditionally, taking care of others, serving others, being a positive impact on others, when you are growing and progressing in life, when you value what you have and do the best with your limited resources, then you get more of positivity. Your RAC notices opportunities and attract your attention to the things that enable you. You feel empowered because your RAC is filtering stuff that is positive for you.
One way to switch our RAC to optimistic mode is to interrupt our self limiting thought patterns. For this you need to become self aware and it is scary to become aware of our thoughts. It is uncomfortable to question our way of thinking. The tough part is to identify that your mind is running those negative thoughts. The difficult part is to learn to become aware of your thoughts that act against your wellbeing.
If you say to yourself that you are not enough or have enough to improve your life, if you beat yourself down by saying that you don’t deserve better life due to your past or current circumstances, when you blame others and complain about the what you don’t have, when you beat down yourself by saying that you are in this situation because of some external factor, then you are most likely would remain that way. When you are in a state of ‘Lack’ then you notice more reasons to stay where you are. You observe hurdles instead of possibilities.
Another way to improve your state of mind is to take care of yourself. When you grow and development yourself to be physically and mentally strong, you feel good about yourself. When you realize your hidden potential voluntarily challenging yourself through exercising or doing something out of your comfort zone, you reward yourself with new found self confidence. When you get more courageous by overcoming more self-imposed challenges, you learn the skill of doing difficult things even though they are scary. When you do things that are unfamiliar to you and improve, then you grow as a person and you build your courage and confidence through small wins when repeated again and again. When you feel better about yourself and capable, then your mind would observe more of possibilities . When you feel strong, courageous and confident, then you get optimistic about life and see opportunities.
No one self-sabotages one’s life intentionally. No one sits up one day and says today i am going to destroy my health or destroy my relationship or give up on my dreams or loose my job or lie to others or cheat on others. No one wants to feel like they don’t have control over anything in life. No one wants to break things that are going on fine in our life. But we get triggered and provoked, feel anxious and stressed of the things that are out of our control and fall into our limiting patterns. In a low energy state like anger, resentment, revenge, frustrations, guilt, misery, people pleasing, seeking fame, having grudge etc,. we give into our self-deprecating behaviours because it is cognitively very difficult for us think rationally. Our senses are heightened to save our ego and get into that negative self-talk that makes it easy to give up on the very things that serve us well.
Another way to get a grip our our thoughts and life is to take control of what you can control. Stop controlling the things that are external to you because nothing outside of your body can be controlled by you. Nothing means nothing. It is difficult to control our body and what’s inside us. We can’t even control the autonomic nervous system to a large extent and it is very difficult to control our flow of thoughts which are largely coming from years of mind programming and patterns that we developed right from our childhood.
We lose momentum and consistency because we do not believe in the process and stay in the process of staying healthy and fit, having loving relationships, a successful career or any other achievement in life. Many of us don’t understand that health and fitness is a process and not a one time activity, loving and caring relationship needs continuous work, there is no top job but you need to keep moving from role to role to grow in career, there is no permanent happiness but there is a constant pursuit of happiness and the definition of happiness keeps changing throughout our life.
Exercising or any physical activity, nutritionally rich foods, optimum sleep, meditation, deep breathing techniques and others self care activity would enable our RAC to re-focus. When you settle your nervous system from fight and flight state to rest and digest, then you are applying brakes on a system that is in overdrive. Any self care activity that enables growth, nourishment and progress leads to positive impact of our RAC.
*Do read the Disclaimer