Have you gone Radioactive?

Do you remember that there was a time when you just used to perform tasks without really going into the details of what triggered you to do that task and how your brain is processing while you perform the task? Do you remember when you first read an article or a book or watched a video on stuff like how the human brain works, how habits are formed, what is muscle memory, how your brain perceives emotions, how can you control your emotions, how can you influence people, how can you stay focussed, any other self-help or behavioural science book. This isn’t being taught to us in schools, at least not to me. There is so much stuff put up on the internet about all this. It will be hard to believe if you never happened to step upon even one suchlike.

Can you see what’s that peculiar thing which is common to all such stuff? Well, It has made you think about the thoughts your brain is producing and to be aware of it.

Well!! we all had a time in our lives where we just used to think about life in terms of going to school, studying, getting admission into college, getting a job, etc. And in between, something happened, when we stepped upon one such (going to name it soon :P) stuff and a new dimension was opened. A new dimension with new desires, new possibilities and new problems. This is when our brain starts producing thoughts about our thoughts. And now, we have emotions landing into the picture and somehow becoming prominent. Now, we want to be happy. We want to be satisfied. Our highlighting problem is lack of motivation. We want to control anger. We see the possibility of a better future if we can tweak our brain to stay focussed.

This is an unconventional way of thinking about life. And this is what I call a Radioactive stage. I went radioactive after watching the classic ‘Inside out’. (Technically, radioactivity is a decay process, here it’s not really a decay. Let’s not go into that technicality). Your brain enters the radioactive stage when it starts giving f**k about your thoughts. This is the stage when you start looking at the real world problems in terms of some psychological or behavioural upset. And to fix these problems, your mind starts digging into more radioactive material. Your thoughts are unstable. And overwhelmed by some particular emotions, you wonder, how you (your physical existence) is being tossed by multiple emotions inside you. You want to put control to those emotions but you are not able to.

And once your brain becomes radioactive, it’s hard to ignore your thoughts and harder to find stuff to satiate your brain.

Now, let me explain to you one simple approach that is being taken in some of the good radioactive stuff including ‘Inside out’. And I believe if you understand it, you will be able to devise your own theories to satiate your brain.

Before that, let me give you a small example.

Suppose, you have your final exams next day and you are studying, to be precise, trying to study, with two of your friends. And over the years of knowing your friends, you have realized one peculiar thing about each one. One of your friends is very hardworking and always encourages you to do what’s best for your future though it involves taking the difficult path. While the other friend of yours knows all the synonyms of chillaxing and isn’t really bothered about the complexities like ‘future’. Now (back to your study room), while you study, one of your friends says — “Guys, let’s ditch the study and let’s watch a movie”.

Will you watch the movie if you know that this thought has come from your ever-chillaxing not-worried-about-future friend?

I guess not.

Because somewhere in your brain you know that doing so might not be good for your career.

Let’s park this thought for a while. And watch this video on procrastination by Tim Urban.

Watched??

For those who haven’t — This video explains how and why our brain procrastinates the tasks.

According to this, our brain is a ship, whose captain is a rational decision maker. There is also an instant gratification monkey who often takes charge of the ship from the rational buddy whenever it sees something difficult, something non-interesting. The monkey hates stress and it tempts you to watch videos when you have your exams next day. It makes you fantasize about all the post-exam fun just one day before the exam. And then there is a panic monster that kicks in whenever you are close to deadline and you are not doing sufficient to deliver the task on the deadline and it forcefully takes the charge from the monkey and gives it to the rational buddy.

Do you see what the speaker has done here? It has personified your emotions. And each personified character has a name depicting its only emotion. Now, since you know that this monkey is your ever-chillaxing not-worried-about-future friend, and if the next time you run into a situation where you have to deliver a task on a deadline and you are tempted to watch a movie, this example will be triggered in your radioactive brain. You will instantly relate that the monkey is distracting you and mostly you will make a better choice for you this time.

I feel that this way of personifying the emotions is quite impactful because now you can start seeing all these emotions of yours as your friends (good as well as bad friends) and now you can control them by simply saying a ‘No’ to those friends whose advice you don’t wanna take, for the good of your own obviously.

This article was an attempt to explain how radioactive things work. Currently, there are no definite explanations or guidelines on the behavioural processes and how we can teach it, but I wonder how the generation will be, if we start them teaching such radioactive material right from the beginning. Will they be able to train their brain better or will they be confused as hell?