This Will Change Your Life

The idea is simple but the more information you have around it, the easier it will be to grasp.

Most advice out there doesn’t address the root problem. They provide hacks and strategies for overcoming procrastination or laziness without addressing why it is you’re lazy or procrastinate in the first place. This is why many people read dozens of books or watch hours and hours of videos online but they make no real progress. They know what to do, but they can’t get themselves to do it consistently.

Approval seeking is one such root problem that needs to be overcome before real, consistent change can occur.

A lot of the ideas and concepts that define who you are have been learned. They have been learned through Social Conditioning.

Our desires and motivations are largely derived from the Unconscious Mind which is heavily influenced by our upbringing and our environment.

Beyond this learned behavior, we have an even deeper drive that comes from our evolutionary past. One of the strongest evolutionary impulses is our drive for Self Preservation. If not for this drive, it’s very unlikely that we would have made it this far; we probably wouldn’t exist today.

Social conditioning and self preservation together account for much of our internal struggle, formally referred to as Cognitive Dissonance.

Historically, being part of the group was crucial to survive.

As a result, desiring to fit in and seeking approval from others is hardwired into our DNA.

For hundreds of thousands of years, being rejected by the group meant certain death. It’s only the last 1-2 hundred years that we’ve been able to be less dependent on a tribe. Even though we will always be social creatures, we’ve been able to develop tools and systems to help us maintain safety individually. But 1-2 hundred years is not enough time to override this evolutionary trait that’s been with us for hundreds of thousands of years. This is why desiring the approval of others and being accepted by the group is still extremely important for people. It’s a subconscious impulse.

The reason why it's important to understand these things is because in order to overcome something, we must first define what it is we’re overcoming.

Why does this trait need to be overcome?

Not everyone is capable of doing this or even understanding these concepts.

The extent to which we can overcome ourselves, is largely determined by how much neural activity we have going on in our pre-frontal cortex.

We have the ability to explore and understand every emotion.

Everything we experience has a reason - it can be explained.

Even dysfunctional emotions i.e. mental illnesses, have a reason why they occur.

Going back in time thousands of years, when we were confronted with some existential fear or something we couldn’t understand or explain, it brought about a lot of fear. And to cope with that fear, we began to create certain concepts to be able to ease the fear. E.g. Religion or other spiritual ideas - stories we made up.

We found ideas that explained it to us which diminished the fear.

We have the ability to overcome our fears if we can understand and explain what the cause is - because it has a reason. But if you don’t know the reason, you will try to find another concept that can cope with it.

Like a gun, for example. If someone pulled a gun on you, you would instinctively experience fear. But if you realized it was a toy gun, the fear would immediately vanish.

The problem is when we lie to ourselves.

The lies we tell ourselves in order to cope with emotions like fear or jealousy have consequences; consequences to ourselves and others. Negative side-effects that we don't take into account because we're only focused on the initial fear and uncertainty. We didn't find a solution to the problem, we are merely coping.

Going back to the gun example, if we truly believed the gun was a toy, but it was in fact a real gun, the fear would go away, but the danger is still there.

The lie we told ourselves has life-threatening consequences, even though the fear was dealt with.

This is why truly being honest with yourself is crucial.

The only things we are aware of is what we are exposed to - that is our world.

This is a big step in understand where our fears come from, why we feel what we feel and how understanding these things can allow you to overcome them very easily - rather than relying on coping mechanisms.

You must be able to zoom out and look at yourself from a third-person perspective. Observe your own cognitive processes.

This is often referred to as "Detaching."

This is crucial, without this, you will not be able to make the click.

Working out and eating healthy are some of the most important prerequisites in achieving the ability to detach.

This will help you expand your awareness.

Thoughts and emotions happen on a subconscious level. Our subconscious mind is more primitive because it developed earlier in our evolution. The part of the brain that uses language and gives us some level of self-direction has developed more recently.

The more primitive part or our brain experiences things before our newer, more "aware" part.

So we first experience an emotion, but the more advanced part of the brain can override it - like the gun example.

But before we can override the fear, we first need to know the cause. And this is the job of the pre-frontal cortex. The subconscious, primitive part of the brain cannot do this.

First you experience your emotions - and then you are aware of them.

This is why beating yourself up for experiencing certain emotions doesn’t make sense.

Rather than developing dysfunctional beliefs or suppressing emotions in order to cope, you can freely allow yourself to experience and process the emotions and then make sense of them - understand it and the negative emotion will not be able to harm you.

The more we can practice this feedback loop, the better we can align ourselves with reality.

Every emotion is rationalized after it is experienced. The problem is when we are unaware that this is happening, we are prone to rationalize poorly - making up some story that doesn’t align with reality in order to explain away the emotion.

Why is aligning ourselves with reality important? Because it is how we got to where we are today. The more aligned we are with reality, the better our chances are of survival, evolving, and thriving.

Realizing that we are not at fault for our emotions can be cathartic to many people - to realize that “I am not flawed - the part of me that is aware is not the problem.” can be a huge relief.

In order to experience this relief, you first have to trust, on a subconscious level, that everything makes sense - the emotions you experience happen for a reason.

Detach concepts from emotion. Many of our ideas or beliefs have an emotion attached to it - causing us to think with our emotions. So when we discuss ideas with other people, we aren’t talking about the concept itself, we’re talking about our emotions that are tied to it.

If we can avoid backwards rationalizing and attaching emotions to concepts, we can more easily discard bad beliefs and adopt new ones, bit by bit aligning ourselves better with reality.

If you allow beliefs to be connected to emotions, whenever that belief is challenged, you will feel an existential threat and your instinctual survival mechanisms will be triggered, shutting down your ability to reason and adopt new beliefs and concepts that will help you in the long run.

The reason why this information is so important to understand first is because it enables us to understand and trust that everything happens for a reason. Everything makes sense and there’s a high level of comfort that can be achieved by understanding the reason behind these things. Understanding the cause can provide existential equilibrium.

This insight gives us the god-like ability to rewire ourselves. The only thing we lack is understanding.

If your dissonance about how you feel or how you see the world is directed toward a will to understand what is going on, you will grow so much faster and align with reality.

On the other hand, going through life impulsively, adopting dysfunctional beliefs and processes in order to cope will turn you into a very conflicted person.

Here's the main insight:

People have come to me and told me, this insight has changed their life within in a few weeks.

All of this is just foundation, just structure to lead to this main insight.

When we think about the subconscious cocktail that drives us, basically, as we grow up and experience things, we gradually acquire, from outside stimuli, what we find most important. What we value the most. Family, money, relationships, knowledge, comfort.

This core value is developed very passively. We are unaware it’s even happening.

This core value has a very primitive reason. It allows us to tackle fear and perceived existential threats to our survival.

The core value is not a thought, it’s not an aware thing, it’s a gut thing. It drives us subconsciously.

Over time, as you grew up, your subconscious mind adopted your core value because it developed the story that that core value keeps you safe.

You begin to trust this core value.

And the reason for all this information is to illustrate that you can fully trust, on a fundamental level that everything does make sense. Everything has a reason and can be understood logically.

The moment we realize this and can fully trust it, is when all our fears and conflicts get translated into trying to understand the true cause behind everything.

The shift happens when your subconscious turns making sense as its main priority, as its main core value.

Not only will this allow you to achieve anything you want more easily, any value you already have will be fulfilled more easily, but it will give you the ability to rise above any conflict you have experienced in your life, it will turn all the dissonance into a drive to understand.

When you wake up and experience something you don’t understand, you won't default into dysfunctional beliefs, fear and get stuck in your head. Instead, you will experience stuff subconsciously and automatically desire to make sense and align your Self with reality.

Aligning to reality is the ultimate survival mechanism.

On a personal level, you will experience less pain and conflict. On a global level, it will cause a psychological revolution.

We are living in a time where we have more knowledge than any of our ancestors and as this knowledge has brought about all the technology and advancement we see around us, mastering our ability to improve our beliefs on the fly without being emotionally invested in them is one of the most important insights. I sometimes wonder what advanced artificial intelligence would look like if it would acquire the ability to improve its own hardware and software. But with our knowledge of the brain and our insights into the world, we are already in a similar spot. Our growth potential is enormous. The only obstacle is ignorance or rather, the lack of applying a simple belief.