Priming

Have you ever bought a new car and started noticing the exact colour and model of car everywhere? Or maybe it’s the car of someone you’ve just started dating, or a new car of a close family member or friend. Crazy isn’t it? Has that car just become popular in the places you go? Were they there before? Or are you just going crazy?

You’re not going crazy, the reason you are now just noticing them is because of something psychologists call ‘priming’. Now, I’m not going to run off too much psychological spiel because I don’t think it’s essential to the point that I am going to make but basically the cars were always there, you just didn’t recognize them consciously. However, when that certain make and model of car becomes part of your conscious thinking (at times like I suggested above), you then start ‘automatically’ recognizing all of the other cars that are the same because you are already ‘primed’ to do so.

The priming effect takes many forms and is way more prominent in your life than you think. In his book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, Nobel-Prize winner Dr. Daniel Kahneman explains research that was conducted in the 1980’s which demonstrates that priming doesn’t just influence the things that you consciously recognize, it also makes you perceive the same thing differently.

...psychologists discovered that exposure to a word causes immediate and measurable changes in the ease with which many related words can be evoked. If you have recently seen or heard the word EAT, you are temporarily more likely to complete the word fragment SO_P as SOUP than as SOAP. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen WASH. We call this a priming effect and say that the idea of EAT primes the idea of SOUP, and that WASH primes SOAP...

In the same book, Dr Kahneman again explains a different study on priming which portrays the notion that the way you think influences the way you act, and the way you act influences the way you think.

..students were asked to walk around a room for 5 minutes at a rate of 30 steps per minute, which was about one-third their normal pace. After this brief experience, the participants were much quicker to recognize words related to old age, such as forgetful, old, and lonely. Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction : if you are primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age!...

What is also important to note is that whether we are conscious of it or not, thoughts always proceed feelings.

William James, considered by many to be the father of American psychology came to a similar conclusion over 100 years ago, however he emphasized it’s effect on the feeling.

“Actions seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”

So, that’s it. If you want to be happy, just sit up and act happy....

Of course I jest, although for some it may be as simple as that, for many of us it will take more effort. Surprisingly, it will not take as much effort as one may think. Through adopting these different priming effects there are ways to become consistently happier.

What makes you feel happy

Anything that makes you feel happy does so by stimulating your mind and body to produce certain chemicals, like serotonin and dopamine. This includes eating chocolate, or a ‘happy’ meal from McDonalds, winning a game, buying a new jacket, spending time with family, and so on. Notice that the things I have just mentioned are momentary. If we are to produce a consistently happier state of mind, we must look towards more of a constant.

Prime yourself to be happier

One constant that we all have in common is our ability to think, and thus feel. Pleasant thoughts have also been scientifically proven to produce the chemicals aforementioned and thus makes you feel happy, particularly thoughts and feelings of gratitude, thankfulness, and appreciation.

Many people have already been convinced by building evidence of the science behind gratitude and it’s many health benefits. When you purposefully go through and think about the things in your life that you are grateful for and are deliberately feeling as much gratitude as you can, you are flooding your mind with the chemicals that are going to make you feel happy.

Furthermore, just as the conscious experience with a new type of car makes you ‘automatically’ recognize more cars of exactly the same colour and model, by consciously thinking, feeling and expressing gratitude you will not only be happier there and then in the moment, you will be ‘primed’ to ‘automatically’ recognize all of the things in your life to appreciate. Each time this happens, the chemicals that make you feel happy will be produced and sustained throughout the day. Do this every day and by virtue of logic you will become consistently happier.

But it doesn’t end there, combining the thoughts of gratitude and appreciation with acts that you are happy will have a supplementary positive effect on your state of mind. Smiling and laughter, literally the acts of smiling and laughing release the chemicals that are going to make you feel happy. Faking a smile and laugh may not be for all of us but maybe accompanying thoughts of gratitude with images that will make you do such acts would be much more appropriate.

This leads us to the conclusion that “if you are primed to think of happiness, you would tend to act happy, and acting happy would reinforce the thought of happiness”, thus producing a consistently happier state of mind.

Something to help

‘Blessed’ is an iPhone app that will help you learn to be more grateful(disclaimer: I built it). The core purpose of the app is to make thinking those pleasant thoughts of gratitude everyday as efficient as possible and assist in priming yourself to feel happier. It is also packed full of

Ready-made blessings(things you can be grateful for) for inspiration.

Quotes from geniuses of our time and the past.

Tips to remind and guide you on how to maximise this process.

Scientific facts on gratitude and neuropsychology in general.

The app is currently FREE in the App Store click here to download or watch the video below / visit https://blessed.lurna.net to find out more.