Get your RAS on board!
If you’ve been paying attention, you will have heard me talk about your Reticular Activating System a LOT. Funnily enough, your RAS is responsible for whether you pay attention (or not), and it’s one of the reasons putting your circles in the workout log journal works.
You RAS is a system in your brain rather than a part of your brain. It’s a bundle of nerves sending messages around the brain to regulate behaviour, motivation, and consciousness (it decides when you sleep and when you wake).
The real answer to where your motivation lies is, it’s in your RAS, and if you make friends with it, it will help you achieve all sorts of things you may have struggled with in the past.
Your RAS is the filter through which information passes, its primary role is to keep you alive by only delivering information that is important in that moment to your brain. If there’s a tiger nearby you don’t need to know the colour of the flowers underfoot, you need to be able to work out the nearest exit opportunity. That’s what your RAS does.
You can train your RAS to filter important and non-important (or helpful and not helpful) information, depending on what you need to get done. Like this, you know when you decide to buy a new car, something totally different to what you’ve had before and suddenly you start seeing that kind of car everywhere? That’s your RAS at work, paying more attention to that type of car than it has before (so you can gather more information about it before your purchase). There aren’t suddenly lots of that kind of car around, you are just noticing them all.
If you want to have the time for more workouts for example, we need to train our RAS to look for opportunities to workout, as opposed to only identifying obstacles.
It’s your RAS that’s paying attention when you celebrate even a small goal. This is why celebrating your achievements (especially showing up) are so important, and why celebrating the behaviour change rather than the outcome works to increase your motivation.
When we celebrate even the smallest behaviour change, your RAS will start to “optimise” for that behaviour and the more of the thing we do, the better our results.
Your RAS even helps you out on the circuit by embedding the memory of how to use each machine so after a few workouts, you barely have to think about where to put your arms and legs.
If you believe you are bad at something, can’t do something or find something hard, then your RAS will seek out information to confirm that. In other words, it helps you to see exactly what you want to see (for example the car you’re thinking about buying). The reason it’s important to make friends with your RAS is that it will validate your beliefs, whether they are supportive to your goal or not, so you need your RAS on your side!
Remember, your RAS doesn’t know the difference between “good and bad” behaviour – it only automates what you tell it to. If you want it to help you get fit, you need to make sure you work on the words you say to yourself about getting fit!
Without a doubt, our members who make proper use of the workout log journal, get their Coaching & Accountability each month and join in the challenges get more workouts, better results, and more satisfaction from their workouts than those who don’t, because those things harness the power of your RAS!
In addition, you can get your RAS on board to help you achieve your goals by:
Making lists
Journaling
Writing down goals
Celebrating achievements
Setting intentions
Getting good “inputs” (friends you hang out with, books you read, podcasts you listen to, what you watch on TV)
Talking about your goals and related information
Writing yourself good declarations and affirmations
Visualisation
Rewarding yourself (a LOT)
If you think of your RAS as a filter, you’ll understand that sometimes it gets clogged up with the junk we experience in life. Remembering its primary role is to keep you alive there may be some work to do to keep that filter clean! You can do this with meditation, actively practicing gratitude (include it in your journaling!) and mindfulness.
