Switchwords: How to Use One Word to Get What You Want. Liz Dean

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      But this is what happened next. Liam immediately spent £35,000 on home improvements. He and his wife, Sarah, had been trying to sell their house for 18 months in a slow market, and Liam believed this would make it saleable. It was way more than they needed to spend, but he insisted. Why spend so much on a house they were going to leave, Sarah asked?

      A friend Liam worked with needed a heart operation. She would have to wait eight months for surgery, until Liam offered her £9,000 so she could have her operation within weeks.

      Another friend ran a breast cancer charity. He donated £5,000.

      He spent £10,000 on a better car, but sold it within three months. He didn’t like the steering.

      And then all the inheritance money was gone. When their house finally sold, its price had only increased by a fraction of the value of the improvements.

      Looking back on that period of his life, Liam reflected: ‘How could I have spent that money on myself? It was Dad’s money … It somehow didn’t feel right.’

      Sarah added: ‘That money was contaminated for him, so he took no pleasure in it. He maybe had the feeling it was right to suffer emotionally and financially – not to benefit. So, in effect, he gave it away.’

      Liam’s grief over his father got expressed through money – he got rid of it as quickly as he could, making sure not to purchase anything he would have to live with long-term. A subconscious money programme was running the show, not his conscious mind, which knew, logically, that the money should be spent first to help himself and his family (with donations secondary). This was how he consciously chose to spend his inheritance. But his true beliefs about what the legacy money meant showed up in his actions. He made decisions about spending from a place outside of his immediate conscious awareness.

      So how did Liam’s actions get ahead of his conscious decision not to spend money in the way he spent it? One explanation is that …

      The subconscious has impeccable timing

      One aspect of the drive of subconscious behaviour is its timing; there’s a race between the subconscious urge and the conscious reaction. Say you want to kick your eBay habit – browsing and buying has become all too consuming; you know you’re spending too much time and money, but yet again you drift onto the site after an email leads you to Facebook, which somehow reminds you that you could just take a peek at eBay. No harm done yet. Your conscious mind senses that you’re about to break your own rule, but you’re in the thrill of the danger zone, directed by that old subconscious urge. You click and buy (after all, it’s already happening, so it’s too late). The reason why the hand gets to the mouse before the conscious mind can effectively intervene might be explained by neuroscientist Heather A. Berlin: ‘Recent imaging, psychophysical and neuropsychological findings suggest that unconscious processes take place hundreds of milliseconds before conscious awareness.’ Could this be the neurological reason why our subconscious wins out, why it’s always one step ahead? This is brilliant news if we have self-togetherness and self-awareness; the knowing, clever subconscious takes action before we get too analytical, and gets the job done. But if you’re subject to negative habits, which are deeply ingrained in the subconscious, the subconscious wins again, and sabotages our goal.

      Liam’s subconscious behaviour pattern is also illuminated by research conducted by various cognitive neuroscientists. Studies suggest that the conscious mind is only in control around 5 per cent of the time, whereas the programmes of the subconscious mind influence 95 per cent or more of our experiences. This is a stunning statistic; in effect, we’re run by our subconscious programmes most of the time. Which is fine if enough of our programming is positive, but if not – and rarely do we have dominantly positive programming – the results can be failure and frustration. Just as Freud believed that we are driven by our subconscious patterning, the biologist Bruce Lipton in his book The Biology of Belief comments:

      … We are completely unaware that our subconscious minds are making our everyday decisions. Our lives are essentially a printout of our subconscious programmes, behaviours that were fundamentally acquired from others (our parents, family and community) before we were six years old. As psychologists recognise, a majority of these developmental programmes are limiting and disempowering.

      Because Switchwords talk directly to the subconscious and we work with them with an understanding of the power the subconscious has to direct our actions (and win out over our conscious mind), we can turn our subconscious into a friend rather than an enemy we must defeat. The language of Switchwords communicates with the part of us that has most influence over our actions, decisions and attitudes.

      What the subconscious learns at night school

      According to recent research at Northwestern University, Chicago, sleep could be the key to reprogramming unconscious attitudes. ‘Although the tendency for people to endorse racist or sexist attitudes explicitly has decreased in recent years, social biases may nevertheless influence people’s behaviour in an implicit or unconscious manner, regardless of their intentions or efforts to avoid bias,’ say Gordon B. Feld and Jan Born in their report ‘Unlearning implicit social biases during sleep’. In one study, the team looked at unconscious bias towards gender and race. They presented two biases: one, that science is more likely to be associated with a man than a woman; and two, that a black face is more likely to be associated with bad words than a white face.

      A group of 40 white men and women were exposed to pictures of women and science-related words, such as ‘maths’, ‘geometry’ or ‘physics’. Researcher Jessica Creery explains, ‘We got them to strongly associate women with science words. So every time they saw a woman that was shown with a science word, they had to press a button, and every time they correctly and quickly pressed that button, they would hear a very unique sound.’ (If they didn’t press the button, they wouldn’t hear a sound.) Then the subjects repeated the counter-bias, this time between a black face and positive words, hearing a different, distinct sound when quickly pushing the button. When the subjects were in a deep sleep, one of the sounds (for women/science or black face/good) was played to them quietly so as not to disturb them. When they woke up, the subjects were played both sounds and tested again, and the results showed they had less bias associated with the one sound they were played during sleep. This lead the researchers to deduce, in Jessica Creery’s words, that ‘associations that you learn while you’re awake are strengthened while you’re asleep’.

      Although the researchers state that it’s difficult to see how long the effects of the counter-bias sleep training may last – due to the reinforcement of stereotypes through the media, for example – this study does show that it is possible to reprogramme implicit social bias buried in the subconscious mind, and that sleep – an unconscious state – is the key to this learning. The report authors explain how this happens:

      During sleep, information recently stored in the brain can be integrated with other information and transformed into stable representations through a process known as systems-level consolidation. The mechanisms of this transformation are thought to involve repeated reactivation of information, particularly during sleep, leading to subsequent improvement in post-sleep memory performance.

      Just as sound was used as a trigger to embed a memory and strengthen an association at an unconscious level during sleep in the experiment, Switchwords, I believe, as sound vibrations that talk to the unconscious, have a similar impact, strengthening new, positive associations and reducing a bias towards unwanted beliefs. Feld and Born also suggest that ‘novel sleep manipulations could be adapted to aid people in changing various unwanted or maladaptive habits, such as smoking, unhealthy eating, catastrophising or selfishness’.

      To empower Switchwords by listening to them during sleep, see СКАЧАТЬ