Change Your Coffee Filter to Change Your Life!
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
We have a major preoccupation with the weather here in England where I live. Now if we had a beautiful sub-tropical climate, with months on end of glorious sunshine, that might not be such a bad thing. But we don’t! We have lots of very dull, damp and dreary weather and many people find themselves depressed by the lack of sunshine. It even has a name, Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD for short, and that’s what it does, it makes us feel sad!
What has this got to do with anything?
Well, it’s a great metaphor for life and a brilliant example of how our life and our emotions reflect our predominant thoughts.
We spend our time bemoaning our atrocious weather and all the things it prevents us from doing and we begin to feel miserable and limited.
When it rains we moan about not being able to go out unencumbered, about the risk of flooding and the like; that the grass needs cutting again but it’s too wet to mow!
The irony is, that when the rain stops, we moan that water usage become restricted, that it’s too hot, too sticky and that the grass is brown!
It’s practically a national obsession, there really is no pleasing us and our lack of pleasure makes us feel down.
Life is much the same. If we spend our time noticing the lack of things we want and the abundance of difficulty and annoyance, we will feel snowed under (notice that weather pun there!) and fed up. If we constantly talk about the things that we dislike and wish were different, we will notice them more and more and our life will seem filled with them.
There’s no way of avoiding this. Our brains are programmed to function this way.
Think of your unconscious mind like the filter in your coffee machine. The little mesh or paper pocket lets the brewed coffee through but keeps back the coffee grounds. In the same way, your unconscious lets through the things which match up with what you’re focusing on (at an unconscious level) and keeps out the rest. It has to or your brain would literally fry! Of two million bits of information it receives every second, it only lets about 7 through to your conscious so it has to work quickly and efficiently.
In order to decide which bits to let through it uses a number of things. Your beliefs and values, things called meta programmes which are like your boot-up files, your memories experiences and language are all filters of your perception.
Here’s the thing though. You know how your brain works, even if only at a very basic level, you now know that what you are focusing on in your thoughts will appear more often in your reality. So, change what you’re thinking about and filling your mind with and you’ll change the filter in your coffee machine!
- Take time out each day to nourish your brain with positive and enlightening material instead of moaning about things you can’t change.
- Watch an educational or motivational movie instead of a dismal soap opera designed to numb your brain!
- Read an inspirational story of learn something new instead of the latest celebrity gossip.
- Do it daily and in no time you’ll notice a change in how you feel.
If you spend time focusing on the good things in your life, the goals you wish to achieve, the great capabilities you possess and the success you want to materialise, then your brain will choose 7 bits that fit into those categories.
Instead of noticing that the rain means you can’t go out in your sun dress today, you’ll be glad that instead you get to wear your funky wellies and the time you save from not having to water your plants you can spend reading a good book instead!