Change your life lens

I have been reminded recently just how much information we can absorb and how much we have to delete in order to have the brain capacity to make sense of our world. This is because our brains would pretty much explode if we could pay attention to and remember everything that is going on around us…. For example, you don’t tend to think about how your feet feel in your shoes, as that is just part of what we take for granted or delete in order to leave room for the details our mind labels as a priority.

To watch the Youtube video go to  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo 

This is an old recording of an experiment that shows how we only see a small amount of what is really going on around us apart from where we put our attention. This is because we filter everything coming into our world, so that much is deleted or distorted in some way to meet our expectations and beliefs

So it is with everything in our experience and can affect how we see and react to what is around us, imagine that you only noticed the negative things and that coloured your view of the world to the extent that you begin to look only for those things that prove how awful the world is, or conversely if you only looked for all the good around you, how you would believe that the world was made of only the good.

These are of course extremes and I have never seen a client who came to me because the world and their life was happy and good all the time. But I do see some clients who genuinely believe that their lives are filled with difficult, challenging situations and people, most or even all of the time, so that they struggle to see anything positive.

Small shifts in perception can make a much bigger impact and open up the possibility of seeing through a different lens or filter, which means that we can notice more of what makes us happy, more of the time.