There’s been a lot of buzz lately in the Law of Attraction world about Limiting Beliefs, with everyone offering to expose, remove, re-program or otherwise eradicate them from your mind in order to allow you to have the life of your dreams.

But what are Limiting Beliefs?

Where did they come from?

Are they all bad?

Today we begin a multi-part series that delves into those questions in an attempt to provide you with a better understanding, not only of Limiting Beliefs, but of yourself.

To understand Limiting Beliefs, we first need to look at how our brain works.

The human brain is a complex organ, capable of performing multiple operations simultaneously. While you are reading this, your brain is processing the input from your eyes, converting the image into ‘language’, monitoring your heartbeat, regulating the chemistry of your blood, maintaining your breathing, keeping an ear out for the phone, and much more.  And all this is happening at the same time.

But consciously, you are only aware of the words you’re reading.  Everything else is happening in the background, without your conscious interaction.

But how does the brain know what to do when I’m ‘not there’?

This is where the subconscious comes in.  The vast portion of your mental activity is controlled by the subconscious part of your mind.  At birth, the subconscious mind basically functions based on genetic knowledge.  In other words, knowledge passed down genetically from your parents and their parents, and so on.

What do you feel when you see the image at the left?

Most people feel a slight sensation of fear or apprehension at the site of a snake, though few have ever had any reason to feel afraid of one. So where did you learn this?

Research has shown that some fears, like fear of snakes, spiders and falling, may all be linked to ancestral memories.  For our evolutionary ancestors, these things were real threats.  So much so, that they became encoded in our genetic knowledge.

These primitive fears also have great control over our actions.  When we encounter a snake, for instance, our subconscious mind immediately goes to work.  It activates our ‘Fight or flight’ response in our brain, adrenaline is released that dilates blood vessels, inhibits activity in the frontal cortex of the brain (where our conscious reasoning happens), and begins to enact a learned response.  This learned response may be aggressive (as in, Grab the club!).  Or you may just run, all depending on how your subconscious views the situation and the response it has learned.

The University of Florida performed a test of this using a rubber snake and a rubber turtle.  They placed each of them in the center of the road and watched how motorists reacted to them.  For the turtle, almost everyone tried to avoid it, even when placed in the middle of their lane.  However, the snake did not fare so well.  The vast majority of drivers attempted to run over the snake, even veering off to the side of the road to hit it when it was placed there.

But this isn’t a bad thing (unless you’re a snake).

What the subconscious programming is really doing is attempting to protect you. The conscious brain processes a few thousand bits of information every second, while the subconscious mind processes around 40,000 bits of information every second. Thus the subconscious mind is much more in tune with the environment.

Think of the last time you drove down the road and something jumped out in front of your car. If you’re an experienced driver (and not on a cell phone), I guarantee you that by the time your brain registered that something was in the road, even before you consciously identified what it was, your foot was firmly pressing down on the brake.

How did that happen? Your subconscious reacted to a preconditioned stimulus and acted according to a conditioned response. It decided, without your conscious intervention, that the movement (which wasn’t even an object yet, since your brain was still pattern matching to find out what it was) was analyzed and determined to be sufficient for response.

A complex wave of nerve impulses was sent down the spinal cord, which interpreted them and caused thousands of impulses to travel instantly to all conditioned areas of your body. The location of your foot was mapped based on locational sensors, and the destination was then determined (where is the brake pedal relative to the foot’s current location and position?). Muscle groups were triggered in a complex timed response to lift the leg, bend the knee, rotate the ankle, move the leg, straighten the knee, and steady the ankle, as the pedal is depressed.

But that’s not all. ‘Sub-processors’ that control the orientation of your eyes are triggered to follow the object. They send signals to focus the eyes. The motion of the eyes triggers other processors that cause the head to turn to follow the eyes. Meanwhile, your conscious mind just received a “red blinking light” to tell it to pay attention. Threat levels are determined in the fight/flight response center and adrenaline is proportionately released into the bloodstream. Within seconds, this will increase activity in muscles, deaden pain receptors, shut down digestive function, and dilate blood vessels through major motor and nervous system areas.

The brain continues to close down processing, focusing on immediate recognition of the threat. Sound receptors are now picking up the squeal of tires, but aren’t being monitored yet.

Now another response center is triggered by the emergency. Immediately it recognizes danger and begins posturing the body. Hands tighten on their grips, chest and abdominal muscles tighten, as do neck and back muscles.

The brain has just now determined consciously that something is in the road that must be avoided, some where around the 1/2 second mark.  It’s a rabbit.

It’s over, your car is standing still, and you’re watching a rabbit bounce across the road. When you try to explain what happened, the only thing you remember is that something darted out so fast that you hardly had time to stop.

How did your mind know to do that?

Your subconscious mind doesn’t only rely on ‘genetic memory’ but is continually learning, constantly ‘looking over your shoulder’ and watching what goes on in your life.

Over time, it learns from these experiences, and learns what is the best action when they happen again, its intent being to protect you and keep you safe.

Bad Dreams

Have you ever had a really bad experience, so bad that you had nightmares about it for weeks?  These nightmares are one way that the subconscious learns how to react to events.  By replaying portions of the event in our dreams, the subconscious mind is able to view different reactions and possible outcomes, thus learning the best way to deal with the event if it happens again.

Limiting Beliefs

But what happens when it learns the wrong response?  Or when the response that was helpful in the past, is no longer helping us?

That is where the Limiting Beliefs begin.

While swimming in the water can be a wonderful activity for many, for someone that nearly drowned as a child, it can be terrifying.  Not because they have consciously chosen to be afraid of the water, but because subconsciously, they have learned to associate water with an over-powering fear of drowning.

It is in these ‘learned responses’ that Limiting Beliefs are born.  For a child that was alone near the pool, a fear of the deep water can be helpful.  But for the adult wanting to learn to swim, it can be a hindrance – it can become a Limiting Belief.

Next time we will discuss how perception can alter our experiences and our reactions to those experiences.  But until then you have an assignment.

Your Homework

Look at the things you do everyday as they are happening, and acknowledge those things that are happening without your conscious control.  These could be things like:

• Answering the phone
• Driving
• Taking a shower
• Cooking

As you begin to observe your subconscious at work, you will begin to not only understand the impact it has in your daily life, but also how it can both help and hinder your life as well.

And remember…

As Carl Sagan would say, “We are all Star Stuff.”  The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but how those atoms are put together.  So in the gathering of this Star Stuff, crafted together to become us, the vast cosmos has created a means by which it can now know itself.

P.S. We’d love your comments on this article, so please let us know what you think!