How To Reprogram Your Mind: Mental Content vs. Emotional Patterns

how to reprogram your mind

A common metaphor used to describe the mind in Psychology (and its satellite areas of practice such as NLP), is that of the movie theater.  It’s a simple but effective metaphor and I will attempt to explain not only the metaphor of the mind, but also how to reprogram your mind as well, in my own words here.

The Theory

Let’s first understand the theory behind how to reprogram your mind. So basically our mind is all the time projecting something on our inner mental screen—memory fragments, thoughts, imagination of possible future scenarios, daydreaming and so on.  For example, you were at a party where you met and had a chat with various people you know or just met. You had a good time.

You leave the party and go to bed but your mind is still full with tiny bits of experiences which it starts projecting on the ‘theater screen’—maybe a part of a conversation and how good or uncomfortable it made you feel, the face of a new person you met or for instance changing a conversation you had and inserting in something you should have said in hindsight (editing the movie!).

You get the picture. It’s play, pause, fast forward and rewind as you relive fragments of your past experiences and project possible or alternative scenarios you still haven’t experienced.  But here is the key note . . . those projections were accompanied by a feeling, sensation or emotion. They were ‘psychically’ or ‘emotionally’ charged. They had an energy pattern to them in the form of an emotional or psychic charge.

So think of it as though the mental projections in your head have two layers; the image or ‘content,’ and the emotion (or let’s call it the energy pattern). You see the image projecting on your mental screen and it affects you in some way. It evokes joy or fear or disdain or some other feeling that it might stir up.

It behaves like watching a movie in a real theater. The imagery and scenes in the movie will actually affect you as if they were real; you will be thrilled or scared or laugh or hold your breath in a moment of great anticipation. Even the body would be reacting physiologically: breath changing, heart pounding, muscles tensing or relaxing, sweating, etc.

So the core idea in NLP or hypnotherapy is that while you consciously can discern between what is real or not, your subconscious mind doesn’t and as your wakeful consciousness is caught off guard (such as while sinking into the plot of a movie), the subconscious mind is responding to the content as though it was actually real.

And the important point is that this is why hypnosis works or why auto-suggestion or affirmation works. It is also why visualization works or why what you think and project in your mind affects your life in general.

The Practice

Now that you can understand that the content and energy of a thought are paired together, let’s add another twist in understanding how to reprogram your mind! They can also be separated or even recombined, and it can be very useful to do so.

Let’s say for example you have a painful memory. Every time you recollect a particular scene—perhaps an accident or something somebody said or did to you—it summons up the same emotions as though you were experiencing it the first time. The imagery of the memory by itself is not what holds the power. It is the link between that imagery and your emotional response to it which is stored in your memory.

In fact I always tell people that if they want to remember their dreams when they wake up, they shouldn’t try to recollect the imagery because most of the time they will fail. They should seek to remember the energy of the dream—the emotional tone or texture. Once you do that the imagery starts recollecting. This shows the power of the emotional psychic energy vs just the imagery itself.

You can see it as though the content of a memory has a charge—an energy pattern to it. Yet the two can be separated. In NLP there is a standard method using this called reframing. The basic idea behind reframing is to summon up the memory but then start changing the imagery or ‘projections in your head’ in a way that diminishes or neutralizes that imagery.

For example by fading the image, or turning it black-and-white, or making the image distant or even smaller. As you do this, the emotional response to it (for example grief or anguish) also diminishes and with repeated effort a new pattern is created wherein the content of the memory is separated from its energy altogether . . . hence, neutralized.

An alternative way of separating the content from the energy is by focusing on the feeling alone and ignoring its accompanying imagery. Try to stay with the feeling without allowing the images to come up. When the emotional energy gets isolated from its context it starts losing its grip or power because it no longer has the support of the ‘audio-visual theater.’ Suddenly it’s like shifting from a 3D movie to a hand-drawn comic strip on a 2D sheet of paper.

There is another, completely opposite angle, on how to use the idea of content and energy. If you want the opposite effect, that is to create a positive mental projection such as in affirmations or visualization, the two need to reinforce and compound each other.

When you want to visualize something strongly, such as a goal, you need to create a visual projection that will invoke a strong positive emotional response. This means that when you visualize something, what is important is not how clear or detailed the vision is (although of course these could be of great benefit too), but how much emotional energy it can summon. The greater the emotional response, the more powerful and reinforced the mental link is going to be.

Recap of how to reprogram your mind

1. The mind is like a projector in a movie theater. It constantly projects ‘movies’ of past and possible future scenarios.

2. Just like a movie, these mind projections have an audio-visual element (the content) associated with an emotional response (the energy pattern).

3. The content and emotional energy pattern of a ‘mind projection’ can be separated or, oppositely, reinforced through conscious conditioning.

4. When we try to separate the two (for example in a painful memory), we either tone-down or diminish the imagery content or we try to focus only on the feeling while isolating it from its content. This neutralizes the strong bond between the two and hence takes away its power over us.

5.  If on the other hand we want to create a powerful mental projection, we can reinforce an image or scene with a strong emotional energy pattern. Doing this repeatedly will reinforce a connection that our subconscious will take as real and hence work on until it reaches that projected outcome.

Rewire your brain and infuse it with positive thoughts. I hope these simple tips will help you learn how to reprogram your mind and lead you on the path to success!

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About the Author

Gilbert Ross is a researcher, blogger, philosopher and online media expert. He teaches personal development topics through workshops and the online media, particularly about positive life transformations and unfolding the human potential.

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