Automaticity is something we are unaware of, and yet 95% of your life decisions are made by the unconscious brain unconsciously! So make sure you know what you are doing in 95% of decisions you make or in the last hour of your last day, you will regret how you wasted every opportunity.

Are you really happy right now?

Are you living your dream life?

At any point in time, we do want something, Right?. We are beings of “desires” and “wants”, and that is a good thing. It helps us to set our goals and navigate through our life.

Things you will get to know about Consciousness:

1. History of autopilot
2. Why is automaticity important?
3. How being on autopilot is ruining your life…
4. How to get what you want

History of Autopilot

To get into the history of being on autopilot or I can say psychology of autopilot, we need to know a bit about human history. We all know nature takes time to evolve and we do have evolved(Speaking of genetic variation) but since ancient times our body and mind have not changed much (our DNA have not changed much), we just changed our lifestyle and way of executing things as new challenges occurred in human history, but in very basic form sapiens 10,000 years ago were same as we are now.

Coming to evolution every species adapted and evolved just to survive and reproduce. If you think about what other species are doing on earth, all you can observe is they just eat and reproduce. We, humans, were evolved for the same, “eat and reproduce!”.

But we are gifted with consciousness and this consciousness is the basic factor of all the development humans have made so far. How does our consciousness work? Check Following Representational Diagram

This might sound Similar to “Machine Learning”, in fact how you can train a machine is inspired by how you can train your brain. Both of them work in very similar ways.

What does this way of executing things do?

It creates neural connections in our brain to act as per situation, which leads to automaticity.

Let us see why, why does our brain creates automaticity in the first place.

Why is Automaticity important?

We need to pay for all the services we get. Electricity is delivered to your house, you pay. You do online shopping, you pay. You do some work and in return, your boss or client pays you. There is a cost for any active process.

So does our body have to pay for every action!

Our body uses Nutrients, Chemicals, and Energy as currency, the more work an organ has to do in a particular time frame, the more will be the energy consumption. This distribution of energy is totally dependent on the organ. As a CPU and GPU require high power to run as compared to other parts of your laptop, in a similar way our brain, which is just 2% of our body weight, uses 20% of Nutrients and Oxygen as compared to the whole body. This is a very big number, but this number is the only reason we are able to survive all the Saber-Toothed Tiger attacks and all the advancement you can see around.

If you visit a site for the first time there is a chance that you face a delay when the page loads. This is the time taken by a device to find the IP address of that site on the web. When you have visited, your device stores that IP Address for the next time. That’s why when you open a site for next time it loads faster. This storing process reduces friction caused due to time and energy, our brain works in a similar way to save energy and execute things faster. All our reflexes and automatic work is to reduce processing and execution time. Because in emergency situations we rely on our unconscious brain to execute things fast.

This is a very classic idea of using the unconscious brain, and it was helpful in ancient times, but not now. 

If you are living your life on autopilot, you are just missing your gifts and opportunities.

How being on autopilot is ruining your life…

Our brain is not a selfish organ, it worries about the rest of the body too. So, to save energy and nutrients, it adopted automaticity. Being automatic is a very helpful factor and you don’t have to worry about it if you were given the task of just finding food and reproducing.

As we know, in this modern era we have a lot of work to be finished off. So, we can’t trust the default programming. Now food is easily available to most of us, I mean you don’t have to risk your life for a Saber-Toothed Tiger Dinner. You earn and pay for the food you want to have. But our mind wasn’t designed for this complexity so it still fears that you are going to be hunted by someone.

While moving in a park, if you see bush shivering done by a squirrel, even for a bit, it scares us. We feel something is going to come and eat us. Yes, that mini heart attack is our natural reflex. We live in a very safe environment now but our mind is programmed as per ancient times. This ancient time programming is the very first reason you are missing your gifts and your talents.

Trying to go to the gym- can’t maintain it for a long time, trying to learn how to play guitar- can’t continue, trying to get a new job – fear losing current one, all these things come from ancient coding our minds have adapted to i.e, not to go extreme.

Whenever we try to do something new we all face resistance because our mind is programmed to be safe and not to explore much, be in the safe zone, as we might attract natural danger. But things have changed now, this is unfair with other species, but we are dominating this planet. The only fear we are left with is just mental fear.

If you are living a mediocre life it’s just because of your mindset. The hard-wired mind for being safe. A ship might want to stay tugged at the harbor, but Ships are not meant to be tugged at the harbor, they are meant to explore new waves. 

So, next time if you fear something there is a good chance it’s just mental fear, not a real one.

The question now is how you can overcome it.

But first ask a question from yourself: What would change/happen in your life if that fear is gone?

Just think about it. Try to write two to three lines about it.

Now you know how our brain works, and why it does so, let us know how you can benefit from it.

How to get what you want

Letting your brain work on Autopilot is a habit and like any habit, you can work on it, change it, leverage it and get impactful results in your life. Is it easy? No! not that hard either, if you make a strategic approach.

Let me share with you a routine, which I use daily to create an impactful life.

These methods are so impactful that you can use them to install/change any habit.

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If you have any doubts you can comment down below.

Share with your friends and family if you learned something new.

 

Cheers,

Priyanshu Kaushal