Your Brain Creates Whatever Reality You Tell It To

Here's something that blew my mind when I first learned it: your brain creates your reality based on what you tell it to look for.

Not in some woo-woo manifestation way - I mean literally, neurologically, your brain will find evidence of whatever you're practicing looking for.

I went down a serious neuroscience rabbit hole during my self-improvement phase, and understanding how your brain actually works is fascinating. The cool thing is that once you understand it, you can use it. It's simple - not necessarily easy, but simple. And you don't need thousands of dollars in courses to do it.

Your Brain Is a Reality-Creation Machine

Your brain does what you tell it to do and will create your reality to fit what you've told it you wanted. It can create joy if that's what you've asked it to look for. It can just as easily create a negative experience.

With practice - what you do all the time, what you feed it (social media, TV, news, your internal thoughts) - all of that goes towards telling your brain what you want. Once it's got the program, it will look for more of that thing and help create that reality.

You know how if you buy a Corvette, suddenly you notice all the Corvettes on the road? That's your brain doing its job - finding what you told it to look for.

So what you practice all the time, what you tell your brain to look for all the time, is what it gets really good at.

Doom scrolling? You're asking your brain to look for things to make you feel righteous and outraged. Stress about every little thing? Your brain will help you by finding more things for you to stress about. Want more joy? You need to tell your brain to look for things that bring you joy and then appreciate those things when you do. That gives your brain the "oh that was good, okay, more of that then" signal.

Why Your Brain Resists Change

Your brain is lazy. That's not an insult - it's brilliantly efficient. It creates shortcuts by automating as much as possible.

Your brain uses about 20% of your body's energy. To conserve resources, it automates things into sequences. For most people, things like showering become automatic - turn the water on, shampoo hair, soap up, rinse off - you don't have to think about what to do next. These automated sequences are sometimes difficult to change because they're wired together.

Your brain also has a built-in "negativity bias" - it's wired to notice and remember negative experiences more than positive ones. Those experiences were more likely to be things that were threats and could get you eaten by a bear. (Side note - people always use tigers when talking about our ancestors running away from threats. But really, given that there have been bears in far more places there have been humans versus tigers, and we seemed to have named two entire continents based on whether there were bears there or not, wouldn't bear be the more appropriate animal to refer to? Just saying, but I digress...)

Change is also seen as a threat because it's new. Your brain doesn't know where all the dangers are when things are new, so it's automatically flagged as dangerous. This is also why our brains prefer the dangers we know versus new ones - at least we know them and can predict them.

Our brains work mostly on prediction: this is what happened before, so this is likely what will happen in this scenario in the future. When we look at a situation, our brain is using all the stuff that happened in the past to try to predict the future of what's likely to happen. This makes assessing new terrain or new situations really difficult because we don't have the information to predict very well, and this makes our brains super uncomfortable.

The Cool Part: Your Brain Can Rewire

Here's where it gets really interesting: your brain remains changeable throughout your entire life. New neural pathways can be created and strengthened at any age. You're never "too old" or "too stuck" to create lasting change.

We're always strengthening or weakening a pathway all the time by what we do day to day, minute by minute.

My ex studied aikido with George Leonard at Aikido of Tamalpais, and I'd occasionally go watch classes there. George used to say, "If practice makes perfect, be careful what you practice." (I know he didn't coin this, but he said it often, and it stuck with me.) One thing George would do when someone executed a technique particularly well was tell them to stop and "print that" so their brain would learn that's what they were trying to do.

That concept applies to everything. Your brain is learning from what you're practicing, whether you're conscious of it or not.

How Neural Pathways Actually Work

Think of your neural pathways like trails through snow. The ones you use all the time - those paths are deep and wide and really easy to choose and navigate. When you're creating new neural pathways, you're traipsing through virgin snow that takes a lot of effort to create that path. If you don't keep using it, it gets covered up pretty quickly. It's also way easier to find yourself taking the wider, well-trampled path when you're going along the same route.

In the beginning, you have to be more conscious to take the new path and keep making it wider and deeper in the snow. But if you keep using that newer path, it will become easier to use and the old path will get covered up. Eventually you won't even remember where it was.

Research shows that:

• New neural pathways start forming immediately

• Noticeable changes typically happen within 2-4 weeks

• Strong, automatic pathways take 60-90 days of consistency

• Full integration can take 6-12 months

Another thing that happens is that as you level up, your brain panics and starts doing everything it can to get you back to what it considers safe - which was the old normal, even if that was someplace you were miserable. This is why so many people quit right before breakthrough. But this panic is actually a sure sign that you're on the right path. If you keep going, you can set the newer patterns as your new normal and safe. Reaching this point takes patience and consistency, and the ability to reassure your brain that you're okay when it starts to panic and tries to pull you back to your old habits.

What I Find Fascinating (And How I Use It)

Understanding how things work - whether it's your brain or how an engine works - that's what's cool to me. It's understanding the world. Then, by default, my brain likes to think about ways to make things better. But that's another story.

Small Changes Work Better

Research shows that tiny, consistent actions create stronger neural pathways than dramatic, infrequent efforts. Smaller changes tend to be less shocking to the system, so your brain doesn't resist as much.

I use the 2-minute rule a lot. The 2-minute rule is simple: start with changes so small your brain doesn't register them as a threat. Two minutes is short enough that your brain doesn't panic about the effort or time commitment, but long enough to start building the neural pathway. Want to feel more confident? Stand in a power pose for 2 minutes before an important call. Want to reduce anxiety? Do 2 minutes of deep breathing when you first wake up. Want to shift your energy? Put on one song that makes you feel good and dance in your kitchen. Your brain will build the pathway without triggering its change-resistance.

Mo Gawdat's Strategies

I thought Mo Gawdat's approach was genius when I first heard it. When you notice negative self-talk, ask your brain to bring you a better thought. Keep asking until it comes up with something more positive. Your brain learns faster when you give it something TO do rather than something NOT to do.

Another strategy I use: when your brain likes to go down the rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios, ask it "and then what?" At each step, explain to your brain how you could handle it. This helps your brain learn that you can figure out how to be okay at each step. Keep going until you get to ridiculous lengths - nuclear destruction, whatever - and then you're like, "oh okay, so we're at nuclear destruction and then it really doesn't matter, does it?" It actually stops the spiraling because the brain understands that you can handle things and also is like, "well this isn't fun anymore."

Stacking Habits

You can use your brain's love of automation to your advantage by attaching new practices to existing habits. Need to remember to take meds in the morning? Put them by your toothbrush so you take them right before you start brushing. Your brain will add it to the automatic sequence.

Celebrating Progress

Each time you acknowledge progress, you're literally rewiring your brain to notice positive outcomes instead of just problems. Plus, you're telling your brain that these are the things you want it to find more of. Your brain is quite the people pleaser (people being you) and will do what you ask it.

The Fascinating Truth

Your brain is doing exactly what brains do - following the pathways you've practiced most and finding evidence of whatever you've told it to look for.

I'm naturally a pretty positive person - always accused of being Pollyannaish, maybe even overly optimistic. But understanding WHY you think the way you do and HOW your brain creates your reality based on what you're practicing? That's awesome.

The fact that we're all walking around with these incredibly sophisticated prediction machines in our heads, constantly reinforcing whatever patterns we feed them - whether we're aware of it or not - that's wild. And kind of beautiful.