Enter the reality tunnel

Strap on your tin foil hat.

What I am about to tell you is mind-blowing.

What you think is not true.

The life you are experiencing is entirely made up by you.

You may be asking yourself if this is existential nonsense, and I don’t blame you. So I will attempt to explain why I think this is true.

Our wonderful, complicated, miraculous brains have hundreds of thousands of stimuli to take in every second of the day. Over a lifetime, it is impossible to calculate the amount of information our brain computes.

So, of course, our brain has to edit things down to make sense of them.

We distort the information coming in and sort it into algorithms or patterns that we can store in memory and automatically refer to.

With all that filtering, the nature of reality changes. It is our interpretation of reality, not actual reality.

At the most basic, biological level, your brain’s job is to keep you alive. It’s the command centre for all the processes in your body. You breathe, your heart beats, your skin reacts to changes in temperature, you see, touch, taste, hear.

Without you even thinking about it.

Your emotions are triggered by chemicals and laid-down memories. You feel uncomfortable around certain people, but you are not sure why. Others are so great that you want to be their friend or lover. Certain scents remind you of when you were six and on a holiday with your family.

Where problems arise with this distorted view we all have (in our own individual ways), is when our brains create patterns with good intentions (protection) but the ingredients of the formulae it uses are no longer relevant.

Take phobias, for example. They are based in fear, obviously, and your brain and body have a strong fear response to whatever you are phobic about. Such a strong response that you have no control over your reaction.

There will have been a point, often before you were ten years old, where the ingredients of that fear were recognised by your brain and laid down in the memory vaults for future reference.

Put mathematically it works like this:

Barking dog (trigger) = danger (fear) = run away (reaction)

To get rid of a phobia, we need to take you back in memory to the first time that equation was made.

And we use therapeutic tools to ‘rewire’ it using the mental resources you have now as an adult.

We might have to re-visit subsequent phobic incidents and re-wire those too. Because the problem with these faulty equations is that the brain likes to continually ‘prove’ them to itself, so they get linked, exacerbated and worse over time.

This subject is fascinating and huge as it influences other ways we behave, such as having imposter syndrome, low confidence or even why we keep having similar problems in relationships.

Let me know what you think in the comments and we will continue the story of your reality in subsequent posts.