4 Crucial Techniques for Reprogramming Yourself into A Better Person
Every day of your life, you’re bombarded with attempts to influence your behavior. You pick up the paper and it tries to convince you to take a political position. You turn on the TV, watch a sitcom, and recognize that there’s a moral message shoved into it. While you’re watching the sitcom, commercials play. Do those ads stick in your brain?
Let’s find out.
Which company has the slogan, “Just do it”? Which candy “melts in your mouth, but not in your hand”? Here’s a golden oldie: Which fast food chain introduced the phrase “Where’s the beef?”
Because the changes wrought by these messages tend to be subtle, most people erroneously believe they’re unaffected. Of course, they’re very wrong. It costs $3.5 million to run a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl. You think those companies pay out dumptrucks of cash for those spots without believing they’re getting their money’s worth? So, here’s a question: Since you’re being programmed by outside sources on a day in, day out basis, why not run some of your own programming that’s designed to make your life better? There are a number of ways to do it.
Affirmations and visualizations work.
So does unplugging the TV. I did that in the early 80s, after soaking up content from several Pacific Institute-based seminars (Louis Tice in Seattle, NOT the enviromental scumbag in the Bay Area) and James Newman’s earlier books.
Be advised though: one’s ‘reality’ can become so unlike the Popular Culture that your comfort zones will be violated by just being around people who don’t realize what it is.
It’s a nice problem to have.
“Be advised though: one’s ‘reality’ can become so unlike the Popular Culture that your comfort zones will be violated by just being around people who don’t realize what it is.”
Very true, and makes for a very awkward adolescence and even more awkward adulthood if you stick to it and refuse to explain yourself.
So it’s NOT just me! That’s a relief!
But if all your friends gave up television, you could form your own society and frame your own reality. Amish frames of reference must be very different.
Your self-reprogramming methods seem related to the psychiatric methods known as DBT and CBT. Respectively Dialectic Behavioral Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
“Re-programming” is a continuous, lifetime process. I sometimes call that continual process living in the “everything you ever knew is wrong” zone. We do know a lot of stuff, that’s true — spend a day with a kindergardener and any adult will be amazed at how much we adults know, without much knowing anymore that we know it. And yet, EVERYTHING we know is wrong in some significant way. Even something as simple as 1+1=2. What’s wrong with that? Well, units of measure for one! What are we adding?
As the old saying goes “you can’t add apples and oranges” — the “wrongness” of a simple fact like 1+1=2 is in how it is applied, and really, such basic facts have no useful meaning whatsoever until they are applied in reality, until they are applied properly in real life.
Be joyous about discovering you were wrong. That’s something for which to retrain the psyche! Fear of being found wrong is a hobbling fear. Embrace and find joy in discovering how what you thought you knew is actually wrong.
The modern young generation fears being found wrong, that being result of growing up as social marketing targets to a very sophisticated and long developed Ad and Marketing industry, and the modern educational methods emphasizing positive affirmation for all in group endeavor over individual achievements earned through toil and risk, and “wisdom” initiatives like “anti-bullying”, “anti-violence”, and BORING playgrounds and super-watched recess periods where no one ever gets hurt.
Why is anxiety so sky high in the young? Because they never learned to embrace and have joy in being found to be wrong.
What a load of crap. At least you can all feel secure that the money you spent for your Tony Robbins et al audio cassettes has given you a great return on investment.(sarc)
You people are even more delusional than an MSNBC anchor.
No pills or counseling? Is this advice really free? Heh.
another great piece
More silly psychobabble from the totally unqualified.
I’d be interested in what Dr. Helen thinks of this claptrap. (Ditto for the earlier introverts post.)
Who is unqualified? Real psychobabble comes from nattering “professionals” who are more neurotic their subjects. Their only real skill is drugging people for problems they created in the first place.
Interesting isn’t it that people were modifying their views and behaviors long before Fraud, er, Freud invented psychobabble. Seems to me that psychology and psychiatry are forms of religion invented to provide income for their priests.
This is Brain Washing methodology, pure and simple! It denies man’s true nature as a rational being with free will and replaces it with sheer programmed reactions to events. Shame on you! I find it insulting to my intelligence.
Poor DC555 must be having a bad day. What positive meaning can we take out of his response?
In short, the Advertising Industry has caused immense damage to the citizens of this country, it has turned ordinary people in to virtual dummies, period.
And are prey to the liberal claptrap that’s being fed to them 24/7.