The Reticular Activating System: Your Brain’s Filter for Happiness and Success
You can be in a crowded room full of people talking, but if someone across the room says your name, you suddenly hear it. That’s your brain’s Reticular Activating System (RAS) at work. Your name is important to you, so the RAS picks it out of the dozens of overlapping conversations and calls it to your attention. The same thing is true for anything that your RAS believes is important to you.
What the RAS is
The Reticular Activating System is a network of neurons located in the brainstem. Its job is to act like a filter, deciding which of the millions of bits of information around you at any moment deserves to get through to your conscious awareness.
If the RAS didn’t filter, you’d be overwhelmed. Instead, it highlights what it believes is most relevant to you based on what you think about most often.
How the RAS Works
Your RAS listens to what you focus on most – your thoughts, beliefs, goals, and repeated words or images – and then it scans the world to bring more of that into your awareness. This is why affirmations, goals, and visualizations are so powerful. You’re programming your RAS.
If you constantly think about problems and have negative thoughts, it won’t necessarily make worse things happen to you, but it will make your RAS scan the world around you to find problems and negativity, and it will make you notice them. If instead you focus on your goals and positive possibilities, your RAS will help you notice all the good things around you and all the opportunities to help you achieve your goals that you otherwise might have missed. This is really the magic behind manifesting your desires. It’s not that simply stating what you want automatically makes it happen. Instead, focusing repeatedly on what you want programs your RAS to bring people, opportunities and ideas to your attention. They would have been there no matter what, but by your RAS showing them to you, you can now take advantage of them to achieve your goals.
Why the RAS Matters
Your RAS is a bridge between your subconscious mind and conscious actions. It can help you:
Bring your attention to opportunities aligned with your goals, helping you to achieve more success.
Build your belief and confidence by bringing awareness to your successes and progress.
Improve your positivity and optimism by bringing your attention to all the good things in your life.
In short, the RAS is why “what you focus on expands.”
How Happiful Uses the RAS
At Happiful, we’ve built practices into our system that deliberately activate and train your RAS to work for you instead of against you:
Vision & Visualization – Writing a clear vision of your ideal life and revisiting it often tells your RAS, “This is important! Show me how to get here.”
Goals – Reviewing your goals each day programs your RAS to notice and show you the right opportunities and resources.
Affirmations – Repeating positive statements about what you want in your life programs your RAS to seek out those things, and repeating positive self-identity statements causes your RAS to make you notice when you are acting in conformance to that identity and thus reinforces it.
Gratitude Journal – Writing in your Gratitude Journal each day trains your RAS to notice what’s good in your life, which then crowds out the negative to make you more positive and optimistic.
Today’s Wins – Reflecting on your successes at the end of each day trains your RAS to focus on progress, building momentum.
Putting Your RAS to Work
Don’t let your RAS run on autopilot. With daily Happiful practices, you can deliberately program it to:
Help you be happier and more optimistic.
Notice more opportunities around you.
Stay aligned with your goals.
Build confidence and success through repeated positive focus.
Your RAS is always working. Make sure it’s working for you, not against you. If you haven’t yet taken our Design Your Ideal Life course (free for a limited time!), that is the place to start – sign up now!
"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." - Paulo Coelho
