You Are Where You Look

The Psychology of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

There is an inherent danger in clinging to narratives as they can rule your life.

Stereotyping your own experiences can be just as toxic to your mental state as the unfair stereotyping of others.

Let me give you a real-life example:

You believe there's something yellow in every room.

Okay, so now, you're convinced of this. In fact, you're so convinced that you've trained your brain to look for something, anything yellow in every room. But, here's what really happens:

Not only do you trigger your selective attention (also known as tunnel vision) in your search, but often you also create false answers to support your belief (aka confirmation bias).

If you've ever taken the "Gorilla test," you've experienced how overriding this behavior can be - I mean everyone didn't see a GORILLA because they were looking for something else (here's a link to a different but similar test if I ruined this for you).

Why does this matter?

When put on a large scale, these are the driving factors behind a lot of chronic mental illnesses - systems of thought you've been trained/conditioned to believe in the worst way because of trauma and the way our society is structured. However, these narratives limit our ability to grow.

Here's a few examples of detrimental narratives you may have on a regular basis:

Everything sucks, love never lasts, I'll never be able to _, I'm getting too old for that, my body/mind won't adapt, it's too late for me, this is all hopeless, people will always betray me.

There are so many more. In each of these statements, we have created a negative, influential, selective attention narrative.

If you think all romantic relationships are bad, your mind will go out of it's way to help you pick out those negative things in any relationship around you. Your worn down neural paths may even go so far as to surround you with horrible relationships to prove your point (see the confirmation bias at work?).

If you believe you are too old to learn something or that your body is breaking down with age, you will create that for yourself. This is an all too common trap despite numerous studies showing the wonders of neuroplasticity in adults.

If you believe someone will betray you, you will become so fixated on finding the littlest instance of betrayal, or sometimes, you may even create situations of betrayal, so your amusingly egotistical mind can say, "See I told you so."

And yet in these moments you have created this of your own regard.

Now, don't think I'm being dismissive of trauma - or even that I think it's easy to re-wire your brain. I'm not saying that. Trust me, I know first-hand how difficult this can be.

But I am saying that it is POSSIBLE and it is LIFE-CHANGING, which makes it worth it.

Awareness is the first step.

You are where you look - so be careful what you're looking for.