Transcript of The Truth About Worry: Why 85% Of Your Fears Never Happen | Mel Robbins Clips

Can you explain what manifesting is? How do you think about it or describe and teach it to people around the world? Doctor.

So, as you know, with manifestation or that terminology, there's a lot of woo woo in pseudoscience. And a lot of people take advantage of that. And, it turns unfortunately into a money making opportunity for some people. The reality is, though, that actually the ability to manifest is fundamentally based in neuroscience. There is no woo woo.

There's no magic. There's no law of attraction. Based on the history of it back in the 1st 2nd century, the Hermetics came up with this idea and it's been propagated through different prosperity gospels and all sorts of other things as if if you have positive energy and you put that energy out in the world, you will be able to manifest the Porsche, the Ferrari, the mansion. But if it doesn't happen, it's your fault because you didn't care enough or you didn't do it the right way or just buy another book and I'll tell you the real way to do it. But fundamentally, it's based on neuroscience.

And what I mean by that is the way in which you manifest, and I'll define manifestation, is the ability to take an intention and embed it into your subconscious in a manner such that it has the greatest likelihood to occur or to manifest. And what I mean by that is what people don't appreciate is every second, we have about 6 to 10000000 bits of information coming to us from our sensory organs. That's what makes us who we are. That creates our reality. But on a conscious level, we can only deal with 50 to a 100 because 99.9% go to maintain our bodily function.

That 50 to a 100, though, you have control over.

50 to a 100. A 100

bits of information.

Bits of information.

So how do you deal with that? Well, you take the tools And what I mean by that is the tools to embed something into your subconscious. K. The best way to do that, and I'm sure you've heard the term, what fires together wires together.

But can you explain that for the person listening? What does that mean? Sure.

So if you create habits, this results in the creation of neuropathways. And if the mere repetition of those habits actually lays down the circuitry that then gets embedded and then actually makes things happen. And I'll explain it as follows. When you are able to use all of your sensory organs or abilities to embed that intention and do it repeatedly, that is when you're creating these neural pathways. As an example, if you have an intention, you take a pencil, you write it down, you're actually doing something physical, tactile, then you read it silently, then you read it aloud, then you visualize that, and you do that over and over and over again, what that will do is then embed that into your subconscious.

And then these different cognitive brain networks get activated.

Now can we unpack that just a minute? Sure. Because everyone that listens to this loves to make sure that they just got the instructions from you, doctor Doty, because I'm, like, hanging on every word. And so there were a couple steps to that because you had the physical pencil, you had the act of writing, you had this moment where if you're watching on YouTube, you saw it. But if you're listening, let me describe it.

He he sat back in his chair. He put his hands kind of in prayer at his chest, closed his eyes, and he started talking about repeating the thought. Is that the chain of events and that you do to encode it in your mind?

Yes. Absolutely.

So we so what is will you walk us through it 1 more time?

Yeah. So, again, what you wanna do is to use all of your sensory organs as much as possible to embed that intention. So by writing it down, by reading it aloud, by visualizing it, that creates the process where this gets embedded into your subconscious. And what happens is once you get this embedded, it activates different parts of your brain. And without getting too technical, 1 is something called the default mode network.

Is that the same thing as the reticular activating system? No. Okay.

But they're related.

Okay. So the default mode network.

Yes. So this is what happens when your mind wanders, or you're daydreaming. And it's self referential because it's internally focused, but it's where you create the narrative of who you are or what you want.

So if you have negative self talk, if you ruminate, if you are like, I'm never good enough, nothing works out for me, Things like that don't happen to a person like me. I can never get it right. That is in the default

mode ever. And that gets really activated and results in rumination for some people.

Can I ask you another question? Because 1 of the things that you said at the very, very beginning is you painted this gorgeous picture of the ability to leverage the remarkable power of your brain to help you get what you truly desire in life to help you live in heart mode, and you said it's just about believing it. And part of the reason why we have trouble believing it is because of the default mode network and all of these stories you've repeated over and over and over again. Is that is that fair to say?

No. That's exactly, correct. And and

Can we can reprogram, or we can lay down a new track?

Oh, absolutely. And it's available, 247, and it doesn't matter what's happened to you before. You know, so many people get fixated. Well, I don't deserve this because of. We all deserve it.

So once this gets embedded and you create the narrative of who you want to be or how you see yourself, what you're doing is you're creating salience. Okay?

What's that word mean?

It means making it important. Okay? Once something is important, this activates what we call our task positive network. And the task positive network has 3 parts. It has the salience network.

It has the attention network, and then it has the executive control network. And once something is salient, what you're basically saying is this deserves my attention. And by doing it in a very specific way, then that becomes important to you. That gets embedded into your subconscious as something to pay attention to. Once that is defined as something important to you, then that activates your attention network so that then you cognitively focus your attention on whatever that intention is.

Once those are activated and, I use the analogy in the book, it's as if you have a file cabinet and you put this file into the file cabinet that says important stuff. And once that is there, then the attention network is activated which is, as an example, a Bloodhound that says, okay, now there's something there. I need to track this down and figure out what's going on here. Then you activate the Bloodhound and then that gets released. And then once that attention is focused, then it starts looking around through all the possibilities in your environment.

And as soon as it identifies 1, then your executive control network is activated which in some ways is the thing that chases down what is in your subconscious. And, this is how it works. There is no magic here. This is fundamentally basic neuroscience and is something that we all have the ability to master by just doing these techniques whereby you are able to embed your intention, you do it over and over. And it's not as if 1 and done.

And what I mean by that is some people wake up and this is like a New Year's resolution. I'm going to do this, January 1st. And then January 1st comes and you already failed the 1st day. You have to not have excessive expectations at first. What I mean by that is these are based on habit.

What happens with habit? You start small. You don't sit there and say, I'm gonna lose a £100 in the next month. You say, I'm going to try to modify my diet where I'm not drinking sodas. That's the first little 1.

And each of these little wins strengthens you to actually then do the big thing ultimately. So you don't start by running a marathon on day 1. You start by getting up out of bed and walking around the block. With manifestation or that terminology, there's a lot of woo woo in pseudoscience. Actually, the ability to manifest is fundamentally based in neuroscience.

There is no woo woo. There's no magic. There's no law of attraction. What people don't appreciate is you can't wait for somebody to magically take care of everything.