Let’s know how powerful your mind is. Compare your mind to the most sophisticated man-made device ever created, the computer. The average computer can hold about 250,000 pictures, 20,000 songs, and hundreds of full-length videos, nowadays on something the size of my finger. Crazy! But let’s compare it to your mind. Your mind can perform an estimated 10 quadrillion operations per second without you even knowing it.
Wild! Ask yourself right now, what’s making your blood flow throughout your veins with the perfect amount of pressure to keep you alive? What’s making your heart beat right now? Are you consciously commanding your heart to beat right now? No. What’s maintaining your body core temperature to the perfect degree to keep you alive? What’s doing the six trillion things to your 60 trillion cells every single second? It’s something called your subconscious mind. This is the powerhouse to who you are.
Your cat has it, even your puppy has it. But of all the things that your subconscious mind can do, it can’t do one thing. And this thing can help you attract good things into your life or can absolutely demolish your health. What is that one thing it can’t do? It can’t distinguish between a real event and something you merely think about. Sounds absolutely ridiculous, right? What happens when you have a nightmare? You wake up, your heart is pounding, you’re sweating, and you’re anxious beyond words. The nightmare existed in your mind.
You weren’t in any real danger at all. But your mind didn’t know that. You physiologically reacted as if the nightmare was actually taking place in reality.
There was a study conducted where a doctor hooked up an elite athlete, a professional skier, to a device that measured the athlete’s muscle fibres. He told the skier to merely think about skiing down a hill without moving a muscle. The act of thinking about skiing down the hill actually made the same muscle fibres that would have actually fired off if he were to be actually skiing fire off from thoughts.
This has been demonstrated time after time with the placebo effect. Group A suffering from a particular illness gets prescribed a pharmaceutical FDA approved drug specifically designed to treat that illness. Group B suffering from the same illness gets a sugar pill thinking it’s real medication. Both groups get cured. In fact, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study involving two groups suffering from the same degenerative knee disorder. Group A had a surgery designed to scope out the knee and relieve the symptoms of the disorder.
Group B, with the permission of the family, had a fake surgery. A fake surgery. A placebo surgery. Thinking that they had a real surgery. Only three small incisions were made in the kneecap but no real surgery was performed. Both groups reported that the surgery was a success.
In fact, researchers are suggesting that a minimum of one-third of all medical treatment, including surgery, is due to the belief that the treatment is going to work. The placebo effect. Most people don’t realize that there is also something called the nocebo effect.
It’s practically the opposite of the placebo effect. The mind, instead of curing illness, contributes to illness. That’s what a hypochondriac is. Their belief that they’re going to develop a disease actually causes them to experience the symptoms of it. Whatever belief you hold in your subconscious mind will become your reality.
That’s how hypnosis works. The hypnotist implants the idea in the back of their subject’s mind and the subject experiences whatever they hold there. If they hold the belief that there’s a spider on their arm, their eyes actually see a spider on their arm.
An amazing demonstration occurs when the hypnotist walks towards his subject with his finger extended. He tells the subject that his finger is hot and burning. The hypnotist slowly touches the subject on their arm and a blister actually forms in the exact place that the finger touched.
Now, this is crucial to understand in all healing. Free will, as we understand it, is practically an illusion. In fact, two to four percent of the time you decide what you want to do.
You actually make the decision. Ninety-six to ninety-eight percent of the time you don’t. You’re on autopilot.
Your subconscious mind controls your decisions ninety-six to ninety-eight percent of the time. Don’t believe me? Do you like ice cream? If you do, snap your fingers and stop liking it. Do you enjoy watching sports? Snap your fingers and stop enjoying it.
You can’t. Ninety-six to ninety-eight percent of the time everything we crave, desire, and act upon comes from what we hold predominantly in the back of our subconscious minds. Whatever we hold predominantly in the back of our subconscious minds, we are attracted to in life.
What happens when you buy a new car? It’s the only car you see on the road for the next two and a half weeks. You saw those cars before you bought your car, but why didn’t they stand out to you? Because you didn’t own that car yourself. You weren’t thinking about it yourself. What you hold in your mind, you’re attracted to in life. That’s how subliminal ads work so effectively. They work so effectively that they are banned in over 10 countries as a way to advertise.
So if what you hold in the back of your subconscious mind shapes your reality, what shapes your subconscious mind? Practically everything that you’re exposed to. Everything that you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel is shaping your subconscious mind. Let’s look at some specifics. Television. Here’s a scary stat. By the time a child finishes elementary school, that child has witnessed an estimated 8,000 simulated murders on TV. All of these extremely graphic scenes are sinking back into their minds. And don’t be tricked by Hollywood or cartoons. In the most important developmental years, when a child should be taught compassion and understanding, extremely intelligent minds behind the creation of perceived harmless children’s cartoons are sinking violence into the back of their minds.
Don’t be fooled. What are you listening to on the radio? Every single word or thought you hold in your mind has a particular vibrational frequency. Negative words or intentions have slower vibrational frequencies, and positive words have higher vibrational frequencies. This is a song by Lady Gaga called Bad Romance. Some of the lyrics are, I want your drama, I want your ugly, I want your disease, I want a bad, bad romance. Our thoughts create us.
We have to be extremely careful with what we are feeding our minds. Music can be beautiful and beneficial, but it can also have a negative impact on your health. Choose wisely.
When I was growing up, the most violence we had on video games was Mario and Luigi jumping over turtles’ heads. This is what our youth are playing today. These gruesome, extremely graphic images are sinking into the backs of their subconscious minds, weakening their immune systems, and having astronomical, gradual negative effects on their health.
Nobody’s saying that these games are going to cause them to pick up a gun and go shoot somebody, but these games are affecting their health. There is zero doubt about that. What happens when you gossip? In order for you to gossip, you have to hold a negative memory and negative thought inside of your mind.
You not only think about that negative memory, you share it with the other person that you’re talking to. The second you hold negative thoughts in your mind, the biochemistry of your brain changes, and you release cortisol, the stress hormone, into your blood, which then weakens your immune system, inhibits the actions of your white blood cells, increases the chances of infection, and even promotes weight gain. All from gossiping.
All from your thinking. You can’t gossip without hurting yourself. Remember that.
But of everything you can expose yourself to, there is nothing more important than the thoughts you hold in your mind. We have, on average, 60,000 thoughts a day. And the reality is, not only are most of these thoughts the same thoughts we had yesterday, but they are negative thoughts, either dwelling on something bad in the past or fearing something that could potentially happen in the future.
The second we have these negative thoughts, the second we release cortisol, the stress hormone, into our blood. Our thoughts create us. Most people believe that situations cause them anxiety, stress, or cause them to be depressed. The reality is this. There is absolutely no situation in the entire universe that can cause someone to experience anxiety. None.
It’s your psychological reaction to the situation that can cause you to experience anxiety. Not the situation itself. This is crucial to understand.
Why is it that when one person skydives, their brain releases endorphins, the good-feeling chemical, into their blood, while releasing cortisol into another’s? It’s the same situation. How can the company of one person cause excitement in one person while making another person stressed? It’s because it’s never the situation that causes anyone to experience anxiety, but their reaction to it. You create your anxiety, not a situation.
When you truly, fundamentally understand this truth, that’s when you realize that you control your anxiety, not a situation. It’s one of the most liberating feelings you can ever experience. If you create it, you can take it away. Your thoughts control your life. You are the creator of your everything. Choose your thoughts wisely.