Please brainwash yourself. (Episode 2)

This post is the written version of the second episode of my podcast.
I’m sharing it here for anyone who prefers reading over listening, or who wants to sit with the words in a more sensory-friendly way. The audio version is more conversational and unscripted, but the heart of it is the same—this is me thinking out loud, telling the truth as I see it, and letting my voice be heard without over-editing or performing. You can read below, listen to the episode, or move between the two in whatever way feels right.

Listen to the audio version here → [Spotify]

Hello and welcome back. In today’s episode, I wanted to talk about the messaging that we receive on a daily basis from our peers, our environment, the media, and the content we consume—and how we can take our power back from a subconscious standpoint despite all of this messaging going on around us.

Now, this topic is something that I have a personal relationship with because when I started my trauma healing journey a decade ago, my therapist and I went deep on dissecting my childhood trauma. We went deep on identifying narratives, identifying perspectives, pretty much looking at anything I might have absorbed as a child and rewiring, reframing those experiences to better suit me, my life, and my wellbeing.

But it’s important to note that you don’t have to be somebody who experienced childhood trauma or neglect in order to benefit from this work.

Let’s start out by talking about the brain.

Yes, our brain is very complex, but it’s actually pretty predictable for the most part. Our brain likes to take pathways that are familiar because those are the ones it has deemed safe, and the brain’s primary concern is survival. Now this gets a little tricky when the thing that you survived doesn’t exactly match up with the vision you have for yourself, your life, or your goals—but we’ll talk a little bit more about that later.

We also know that the brain is not rigid. It has periods of time where it’s more malleable or less malleable. Neuroplasticity exists, which basically means that your brain is capable of great change and adaptation. And this can be good or bad, depending on what your brain is learning to adapt to. 

Either way, your brain is the most malleable during early childhood, specifically ages zero to five. It’s also very malleable during your adolescent years into early adulthood, so up to about age 25.

Now, it’s quite likely that if you’re listening to this podcast, that time has come and gone. But the good news is you still have pockets of time where you’re able to rewire your subconscious now, in your present.

Studies show that almost 95% of your daily decision-making is made by the subconscious mind. So you are basically on autopilot most of the day. Most of the day you are in the passenger seat, and your subconscious is in the driver’s seat—the very same subconscious that likely developed way before you had any say in what got programmed in there.

That’s why I personally believe that reprogramming your subconscious mind should be just as high on your priority list as movement, water intake, and a healthy diet. But it’s not common knowledge how to rewire your subconscious as an adult.

This is actually easier than you think.

Every single day when you wake up, the first seven to sixty minutes of your day is a window where your brain is more plastic, aka more malleable to change. There is some debate on how long this window lasts, but regardless, I like to say that the first half hour is your prime time.

What are you doing in that first half hour of your day? What kind of content are you consuming? What kind of words and images are making it past your conscious mind and into your subconscious? Are they helpful? Are they harmful? Are they useful? Are they useless?

I’m sure you’ve already heard about that experiment where you can grow two identical plants, feeding one kind words and encouragement and feeding the other hateful words and anger, and we’ve seen how this can impact the growth of each plant. Spoiler alert: it’s very hard to grow in a hateful and angry environment.

And even though there’s a control plant, the plant that received kind words and encouragement somehow grew even better than the control plant that didn’t receive any outside stimulus.

The other window of time when the brain is more malleable is when we’re asleep, and this is the window of time that I really love to take advantage of. When we’re asleep, our brainwaves shift into a different state, and this can allow your brain to reorganize and strengthen new connections. It also allows your brain to prune away unnecessary ones.

A couple years ago, I actually started listening to sleep affirmations to see if it would help with some blockages I was experiencing.

I was having a lot of desire and ambition, and I really wanted to see growth in specific areas of my life. But I kept getting stuck when it came to actually following through, and it was really discouraging. It was disappointing. I felt like I was losing trust in myself every time I couldn’t follow through. So I was like, okay, well, let me try this. What do I have to lose?

Once I started listening to these sleep affirmations, it was kind of an immediate shift, which I honestly didn’t expect. I didn’t really have as much luck with regular affirmations, especially the “I am” type of affirmations, because it kind of just felt like I was lying to myself.

The sleep affirmations I started listening to used “you” statements. So instead of “I am enough,” the track would say, “You are enough.” I specifically liked them because they felt easier to receive.

I was pretty skeptical at the time, so I set a timer on my phone to have them stop after the first three hours, but even that seemed to make a difference.

I started to play around with sleep affirmations sporadically. I specifically liked Jessica Heslop’s Reprogram Your Mind series on YouTube, which, by the way, isn’t sponsored. I just really like those.

When I’d need more motivation to go to the gym, I’d play her health affirmations. When I’d have a long, triggering day of feeling particularly unlovable, I’d listen to her self-love affirmations.

Then I took this one step further while working with a client of mine.

She was having a lot of career success, but she was feeling really unfulfilled and lonely in her love life. We looked at her astrology, we talked some things through, and it became really clear that there was a core belief that she was not worthy of love.

Even though she’d been working so hard on her mental health and self-esteem—going to the gym, going to therapy, journaling, doing all the things—this was a block that just would not budge. As a result, she kept attracting non-committal or emotionally unavailable people.

So I sent her one of the sleep affirmation tracks and asked her to listen to it for a couple nights. She said she woke up feeling less depressed and less lonely, and she started listening to it sporadically when she needed a little boost.

Not long after, she met somebody special, and last month they just celebrated one year together.

Seeing this in action through another person helped me realize how often we’re trying to break through blockages with action or movement, but sometimes all we actually need is to reprogram our subconscious mind to clear the path for what we want to come to fruition.

The other thing I wanted to talk about in this episode is how fragmented and flawed our own perceptions of ourselves and our self-concept can become under the guise of capitalism.

Living in capitalism, as we do in the Western world, has an underlying message in everything that we consume. And the message is: You are not enough.

Inherently, you are not enough. You can prove your worth through money, success, achievement. You are not enough as you are.

I personally believe this creates depression, repression, and internal conflict much quicker than a lack of Vitamin D or serotonin can.

Speaking of capitalism, if you live in the United States, you may be desensitized to just how many subconscious messages you receive every single day through advertisements alone.

Two very easy examples of this are the pharmaceutical industry and the beauty industry.

Prescription drug commercials are actually illegal in almost every other country besides the U.S. and New Zealand. We grow up making fun of the way they list off all the side effects at the end of these commercials. But what if these are subtle seeds being planted that normalize illness?

As for the beauty industry, women are constantly being sold to as not enough—not thin enough, not curvy enough in the right places. Your skin isn’t clear enough. Your lips aren’t big enough. Your lashes and your hair aren’t long enough.

It’s honestly exhausting to even think about.

We all know the beauty standard is impossible to keep up with, but I believe the media has purposely made women insecure because it’s much easier to profit from an insecure woman than a confident, secure one.

We are constantly being brainwashed. And this isn’t some intense, lock-us-up-in-a-room type of situation. It’s subtle. It’s daily. It’s constant, consistent, repeated exposure.

So my thing is…

Please brainwash yourself.

If you’re already getting brainwashed, you might as well throw in some things that will actually benefit you.

I personally recommend starting with improving your self-concept. Like I said in the beginning of the podcast, children are literally sponges. So ask yourself: what were you absorbing growing up? What are you choosing to absorb now?

Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode and it got you thinking, feel free to DM me to continue the conversation, shout me out on social media, or leave a comment down below. All of my links are going to be in the show notes.

I hope this got you thinking about how you can claim some of your own power back.

I’ll see you next week. Bye.