Our brains are constantly processing information both internally and externally. The reason our brains process information is to manage our body-budget–predicting and preparing to meet the body’s needs. Often times are brain’s are preparing our bodies to deal with threats that aren’t actually present just because of “the voices in our head.”
I am making a distinction between the voices in our head and self-talk. Self-talk is more of a conscious conversation with ourselves; whereas, the voices in our head are much more unconscious.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the power of committing certain texts to memory to help guide your mental state in intentional and meaningful ways. Personally, I have been quoting Seth Godin’s The Practice in a lot of my recent blog posts because the act of repetition helps me to internalize the ideas and, then, those ideas start to influence my subconscious.
Reading and writing are such powerful tools for influencing your subconscious because they can shift your brain’s processing of information in a manner that feeds you with a greater sense of agency over your decisions and actions in life.
Therefore, I encourage you to re-read and re-write the words and sentences that resonate with you deeply, so that the voices in your head start defaulting to those words and ideas. Good times to do this are first thing in the morning and right before you go to bed. During these times, your brain is producing alpha waves, as opposed to beta waves. Beta brain waves are the state your brain is in most of the time during the day in order to expend more cognitive effort; whereas, alpha waves occur right before sleep or right after coming out of sleep, which gives you a more direct window of opportunity to influence your subconscious.
Once you start taking action to influence the voices in your head, you will find that your self-talk will already be more purposeful, possibility based, and productive, as opposed to random, reactive, and restrictive.
