How Setting Intentions Can Change Your Brain

Today, I want to talk about what setting positive intentions actually does to the structure of your brain.

The field of neuroscience has produced an incredible amount of evidence pointing towards this concept called neuroplasticity which means that your brain is changing and evolving all the time. It never stops! But here’s something that you should know. When you are in a negative state of mind like when you’re stressed out and anxious, you are exercising and using the neural pathways in your brain that help you feel like crap. And the more you utilize them, the stronger they get with more energy and resources allocated to them by your brain. You become adept at feeling miserable. That’s not so good, right?

The good thing is the opposite is true. In our society, we often think we have to take action to have a positive experience, but what we’ve discovered through research is that purely setting a positive intention will create a shift in your brain. And so, let’s say I set a positive intention that today when I go to work and I deal with that difficult coworker, I want to have an attitude of gratitude. Maybe, instead of being in a state of anxiety with my partner about where our relationship is headed, I decide today that I want to embody trust that we are going to work things out to figure out a solution together. Setting that kind of positive intention will start to sprout a new neural pathway in your brain, and then resources will go towards supporting it. The more positive intentions you set, the stronger and more capable you become at being able to access those positive experiences— not just on an emotional level, but literally when it comes to the neurological structures of your brain!

Here’s the second thing which I want you to know! We all have the ability to set an intention about what energy we want to embody. Your energy is like a radio frequency. You can get up in the morning and say, “Am I in the mood for jazz or am I in the mood for country today?” However, that nob on the radio dial gets bumped all the time, and if you’re not paying enough attention to it, it may get stuck on some kind of frequency that you don’t intend and that’s not going to produce good results. So, it benefits us greatly to make a conscious decision about where to choose to set energy each day— to dial our frequency to that setting. And what if we do that at the beginning of the day before we step out the door and interact with a lot of people?

CLICK here to find out more about setting positive intentions with our online class, Get Clarity®!