Give yourself five minutes to reflect upon your life as it is and then think about your everyday thoughts and tell me if the above statement is true or not!?!
What it is
Autosuggestion is something most of us do every day in our head. We tell ourselves a story (self-talk) about what is going to happen in this and that situation and we do it habitually. This is what one would call autosuggestion, even though some might say it should be words spoken out loud for it to be autosuggestion (to me they are almost the same though).
Let me give you an example, let’s say you are on you way to work and you notice traffic is starting to get worse, you might think that you will be late for work. Guess what, not only will you be late for work but those initial negative thoughts will most likely be with you for most of your day and they will for sure not do you any good!
How autosuggestion works is by rooting the thoughts, words, phrases or sentences which we tend to use over and over again. They will get stuck in our subconscious mind and if they are negative (which most are), they will come back and hurt us and that is why we have to be in control of our thoughts and what we are autosuggesting to ourselves!
Why autosuggestion works
Have you ever been in a situation where you have just “felt” that you are going to get sick and then you end up getting sick? Or, you have just “felt” that this is going to be a bad day? I think most of us have done that AND experienced the consequences. What is interesting here is that if I think about those situations I have let myself get into earlier in life, those negative occurring thoughts did not just show up once and then disappeared! No, they would run in my mind and as soon as something happened (or I imagined I felt something), in my mind I would then confirm (auto-suggest) that it really was going to be a bad day and I knew it! The interesting thing now is that even If I feel 100% certain I inflicted that on myself via autosuggestion, there are now studies to prove it.
There have been numerous studies done on “mental training vs actual training”. If we think about something (whilst adding feelings to it), we are actually visualizing it and our brains cannot separate if it actually happens in real life or only in our minds! That is the beauty of this phenomenon and why autosuggestion works. What does this mean? Well, if I think about being sick all day every day, guess what, my body will also start to think I am sick and make me sick because it cannot tell the difference from being actually sick and me making me sick by starting the process in my mind! I am not going to link to all studies but here are a couple of them: Mental training instead of physical and Muscle power by using the mind.
So if you keep telling yourself or even having a lot of negative thoughts you will experience lots of negative things in your life. You might look at others and think they have the perfect life; happy, healthy and wealthy. Well that is the story we tell ourselves every day put into work. I have friends with a negative attitude to life, work, their health etc. and I also have friends who are the exact opposite. By spending time with them, I know how they are, what language they use, how they behave and what they think about and it is miles apart! Think about it for yourself, I am sure you have friends like that. So just take a moment and reflect upon the way they usually talk and think – then connect the dots!
Autosuggestion works either we want it or not. Our thoughts get ingrained to our DNA and mirror our personalities and lives so I would say it is of outmost importance that we all use it to our advantage!
How to use it in your favor
First of all we need to be aware of the massive importance our mind has over our lives. So what we think about and what we talk about will have a massive impact which you know now after having read the above. You also have the understanding of how autosuggestion works and the only thing we have to do now is to put it to favorable use!
So the first thing we should do is to write down what we normally talk about, what we normally think about and what we normally tell ourselves. Most likely you have a few dominating thoughts that are occupying quite a large part of your daily “thinking” (well that little non-stop voice in your head). On this topic you can read my post on how to take control of that mind chatter (monkey mind).
According to research we have 50,000 – 70,000 thoughts per day and out of those around 80% are negative and around 95% repetitive!!! This means that most of our lives are being lived through a lens of our past!
Do you honestly not think it makes a difference if those 80% were positive instead of negative? If you do, that is great as we can then make things happen and the good thing is that we only have to change a few of the most dominant thoughts that occupy our minds most of the time!
By first recognizing those dominant and negative thoughts of yours, you can start working on them. You need to understand where they are coming from and why and then work on replacing them with other thoughts. I know this can and most likely will be hard work but just the fact that you are aware and understand how and why autosuggestion works will have a massive impact. Especially since you now understand the consequences of you not doing anything about it!
So this is what to do:
- Become aware!
- Take back control over that voice in your head, start by reading this post on meditation.
- Every time those negative thoughts you just wrote down come popping back up in your head, just let them pass in your mind, basically give them no attention.
- Replace those negative thoughts with positive ones, you can either use my free book with your personal affirmations (see below) or just write down relevant phrases which you want to give to your subconscious mind. Remember these thoughts are hard-wired so you will have to train your mind frequently and ideally emotionally for them to get fixed.
- Always have three things in your mind for which you are extremely grateful and as soon as you have negative thoughts, think about those grateful things. You can’t be angry and grateful at the same time!
- Start a journal of gratitude.
- Use positive affirmations (like I do every morning when having a shower, link below)
- “Brainwash” yourself to success! read this blog post and then let autosuggestion kick in!
Actions to take (besides from the above):
- Challenge yourself to NO negative talk in 30 days (it will make wonders)
- Challenge yourself to just letting your negative thoughts pass by, like a cloud in the sky
- Use your vision board (which I hope you already are) to get you in a positive state!
- Do your personal affirmations twice per day – download my free e-book here
- Start your journey of a life on your terms to improve the quality of your life
Rome was not built in one day either so take it step by step, just one at the time and I know you will be able to see how autosuggestion works and use it to your advantage!
– Jakob
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