#9 The 5-Minute Mind Hack to Shift Your Health and Life

You’ve heard about visualization, but are you actually using them to reprogram your mind for healing? Most people aren’t — and it’s costing them their health and freedom. In this episode, I’m breaking down a simple 5-minute practice that can literally rewire your brain to work for you instead of against you. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How your brain’s RAS filters what you focus on — healing or fear.
• A simple 5-minute visualization practice to rewire your mind.
• Why consistency is the key to making it work.

Are you ready to stop letting your mind work against you and start using it to heal? Hit play and learn how this simple 5-minute exercise can change everything.

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Thanks for listening! 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Rebellious Healer, where we ditch the fear, decode the symptoms, and take healing into our own hands. I'm Jenny Peterson, a former holistic practitioner, turn symptom-free, mind body rebel. I help women break free from protocols and step into trust, confidence, and full body healing. If you're done with the rules, restrictions, and outsourcing your power, you're in the right place. Today's episode is all about a powerful tool that's been around forever, but is often misunderstood. The law of attraction and visualization. Maybe you've tried making a vision board or practicing positive thinking, but you're left wondering why isn't it working for me? Let me tell you, it's not about vision boards or fluffy affirmations. It's about understanding a powerful tool within your brain that's scientifically designed to help you get what you want. I'm talking about the reticular activating system, RAS. Once you understand how it works, you'll see how you can use visualization to heal, to shift your mindset, and to attract what you truly want. So let's start with the science. Did you know that your brain has a built-in filtering system that determines what you notice and pay attention to? It's called the Recticular Activating System, RAS. This small but very powerful bundle of nerves at the brainstem acts as a gatekeeper between your subconscious and conscious mind. Imagine it like a GPS system. You set the destination and the RAS recollaborates to get you there. If you're focused on fear, it will find more fear. If you're focused on healing, it will find more evidence of healing. When I was on my healing journey, my RAS was laser focused on fear. Every single morning, my mind instantly scanned my body for symptoms. What hurts today? What symptom is still there? And guess what? I found it every single time. But the day I decided to shift my focus, everything began to change. Instead of asking, what hurts today, or is that symptom still there? I started asking, what feels good today? It was small, but it started to reprogram my mind. I noticed the little things, like how my breath was calm, or how I could just sit for a bit longer without discomfort. Those small wins started to add up, becoming undeniable proof that my body was healing. So I want to ask you a reflective question. What is the first thing you focus on when you wake up? Is it the pain, your symptoms, the fears, how bad your day is going to be? What if you started each morning by asking, what feels good today? What signs of healing can you notice rather than focusing on what isn't working? You've probably experienced your RAS in action without even realizing it. Maybe you buy a new car or you're looking for a specific kind of car and suddenly you see that car everywhere. Or you're expecting a baby and suddenly every other woman you see is pregnant. Or how about when you're in a crowded place or you're at a place where there's a lot of people, maybe at a restaurant or a party, whatever it is, and you're talking to someone, but then maybe someone behind you says, Jenny, or whatever your name is, and your head whips around. Out of all the noise that's going on, your brain filtered out that one word, your name, because it's important to you. It's wired into your RAS. So we need to talk about the programming for your RAS. And you get to decide that. That's the powerful thing. You get to decide what your RAS focuses on. Your thoughts and emotions at light commands. So if you say, I am always sick, your RAS will find evidence to support that belief. If you focus on scarcity, never having enough money, you'll continue to attract that feeling and experience of never having enough. If you think, I will never heal, then your RAS will make sure you find proof to confirm that. You might go into Facebook groups or talk to other people that haven't healed. And it's just confirming your fear that you will never heal because they haven't either. But again, that is what you're choosing to focus on, and that is what your RAS is bringing to the surface to bring proof to confirm it. So I want you to think about this. I want you to take a moment and think about what you've been focusing on lately. Are you focusing on what you don't want? The pain, the symptoms, the fear, or are you focusing on what you do want? Freedom, confidence, health, and trust in your body. This is really important because your focus is going to be what your RAS is going to continuously look for proof to support. In our eight-week program and eight-month program, we use what we call messages of safety with our clients. It's essentially a list of things that they can say or do when their mind shifts to focusing on their symptoms. And visualization is one of the most powerful tools on that list. Sure, you could tell yourself, I am safe or my body is healing, but that still keeps the focus on your body and on healing. It's like the obsession about healing is still there when all you're doing is repeating, I am healing, my body is safe. We want you to shift away from that focus, away from the body, away from focusing on the symptom, and instead focus on the life you want to live, the experiences you want to have, the feelings you want to embody. When I was on my healing journey, I visualized my desired life practically all day long. I saw myself driving, playing with my son, going for bike rides, eating freely, smiling, being happy again, even teaching on Zoom, which I'm doing now. All of my visualizations came true. And this is also what I see with my students. They come in unable to eat certain foods, unable to drive, being in pain, unable to travel, unable to work. And then at the end, they're doing those exact things that they visualized. And it's so amazing for them to see that too, because it's oftentimes exactly how they visualized it. They'll come and say, it was exactly how I visualized it. I can't believe that word for word or scene for scene, it's the same exact thing. So I want to talk about vision boards because vision boards and visualization go hand in hand oftentimes. And vision boards, they're pretty, they're fun, but they're not going to be enough if you're doing it like most people are doing it. Your reticular activating system, your RAS, needs more than just pictures. It needs emotion. It needs repetition. It needs a full sensory experience. So you can make this vision board, which is fun because you're taking pictures, whether it's from, you know, the internet or a magazine or whatever and putting it on this board and making it a fun experience. But it's what are you going to do with this vision board when you're done? And a lot of times what people are doing is they're hanging it up and they never go and look at it again and just hope and pray that everything's going to work out the way they want it. Or they look at it and they go, Yeah, someday that will be mine. And they're keeping that thought in the future, like it's not happening right now. And you're not programming it when you're saying that to yourself of someday this will be mine. You're not programming your RAS to see it as it's already done. And that's what we have to do with our reticular activating system. We can't talk about, oh, this is in the future. We have to act as if it's happening now. You also just can't make this thing and then put it on the wall and then forget about it. You do have to engage with it daily. You got to feel the emotions of living it out, hearing the sounds, smelling the scents, you know, making it real. So I want to go through how you can get started with visualization. Visualization, to be honest with you, is super simple, but it requires discipline. And let's be real, it's often the simplest things that people overlook because they're not flashy or quick. Doing it once isn't gonna reprogram your RAS. You have to do it consistently every single day. People today are wired for instant results. We can blame our little phones for that. If they don't see a change after a week, they think this doesn't work. But that's not true. This does work if you stay committed to it. So here's the key to effective visualization. You need two things, the visual image and the feeling. Now you can use a vision board if it helps you see what you want clearly. Personally, I don't use one because I can easily visualize in my mind, but do what works for you. And I do want to make something clear here. Don't convince yourself that you can't do this. Everyone visualizes. The problem is most people are already visualizing the worst case scenario. You're probably already visualizing symptoms getting worse, things going wrong, or never getting better. So, yes, at first there may be resistance because your brain is not used to imagining what you actually want. This is where a vision board can actually help jumpstart that process and help you visually see a picture to place in your mind while that resistance is kind of still there. But don't give up just because that resistance is there. That actually is a sign that you are creating change. It's just that the brain is saying, hey, this is unfamiliar. So you're gonna start with step one when you're creating your visualization, and that is start by listing the things that you want to do or feel. I want you to think about the activities that you want to do that you aren't able to do. Maybe it's hiking, something simple as laughing, uh, traveling, eating out at restaurants, exercising, feeling calm, confident, and strong. You know, what are the things that you want to experience that you're not experiencing now, or what you believe your symptoms are getting in the way of you experiencing? Write that down. So step two, once you do that, is you write down how experiencing these things would make you feel. Would it make you feel confident, happy, free, calm? What is it? Write down the emotions. Okay. And then once you have those emotions written down, you want to create a visualization script. So you think of writing like a movie scene, except you're the main character and the director. You're not just stating facts, you're immersing yourself in the scene and you're actually writing as if it's happening. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are you smelling? What emotions are you feeling? And so you're gonna write this out like it's a movie, a script, and that you're going to play out in your mind. And then you want to record it. So when you record it on an you know, you can use any recording app, you speak it out loud, and you your own voice is really incredibly powerful to your subconscious mind. So you want to play out the scene of I am hiking, walking with my family, we are traveling, I can see the mountains around me, the air is so fresh and clear, I have a smile on my face, I've never felt so amazing before. Like, make it a story and add in the emotions of this makes me feel. And when you write that all out, you're gonna then record it. Like I said, your own voice is very important. And then you want to play it back to yourself at least twice a day, once upon waking and then once before bed. Those are the times that are best for programming your subconscious mind. Once you record this, this should not take you longer than probably even five minutes. A tip for when you do record, I do suggest that you record it slowly because you are going to be listening to it while you're visualizing. Um, that is helpful. Always if you go too quickly, it can be too fast and you're not able to get that whole experience. But this should not take you more than five minutes to listen to your visualization upon waking in the morning and before you go to bed. If you can't take five minutes morning and evening, I really want you to think about that. If if you're not willing to do that five minutes before you go to bed and upon waking up to get well, do you really want to get well? And then throughout the day, whenever you catch your mind spiraling into fear or focusing on your symptoms, I want you to shift back to your visualization. Just shift your brain to your visualization. It doesn't mean you need to stop the thoughts coming in, because stopping the thoughts is going to be not something that you can control. They're there because they're on autopilot. What you do have control of is when they come in, what you're gonna do with those thoughts about your symptoms or whatever negative thoughts that you have coming in about your healing symptoms, whatever it may be. When those come in, you use your awareness muscle to notice it. And then once you notice it, you have a choice of either giving power to those thoughts or shifting the focus. And when you shift the focus to your visualization, you're creating a new pattern in your brain that over time, if you keep doing this, will get much stronger than the old patterns that keep repeating themselves. And your RAS will say, ah, we have a different destination now. And this is what it's going to focus on. So you want to replay your visualization in your mind throughout the day or whenever those thoughts come up and use it as a way to interrupt those old thought patterns and make sure that when you're replaying that movie in your mind, you're also feeling those emotions of how it's going to feel experiencing what you have in your visualization. So discipline is what will make or break this practice. You have to stay committed, you have to stay consistent and watch how your RAS starts to shift and align with the life you're visualizing. And one other thing that's really important is you don't need to know the how. If you're caught up in how will this happen, you're trying to control the outcome. Let go of the how. Your RAS will handle that. Your job is to set the destination and feel it as if it's already there. So let's wrap this up with a quick summary here. Your RAS is like your internal GPS. You program it by focusing on what you want using strong emotion and repeating it consistently. You don't need to know how it will happen. You just need to direct your RAS toward what you want. Stay consistent and repeat this daily, minimally, morning and evening. Do it more as much through as you can throughout the day. So, my question for you is are you going to take the simple action to create the life and health you desire? Most people hear about visualization, they nod their heads, they say, oh yeah, that's a good thing, and then they don't do it. But the ones who get results are the ones who take consistent, disciplined action. You don't need to have it all figured out. And you don't need it to be perfect. You just need to start. Make the list, write the script, feel as if it's already happening, do it daily, no excuses. Be the rebellious healer, the one who refuses to settle for fear, symptoms, or excuses. The one who decides to take their healing into their own hands. Talk to you next time.