Our minds are wonderfully chaotic places — busy, buzzing, overflowing with thoughts, feelings, memories, worries, half-finished plans, and the occasional “Did I switch off the iron?” panic. Somewhere between life’s noise and your morning coffee sits a tiny but powerful system quietly organising your entire reality. It decides what you notice, what you overlook, what you believe, and ultimately who you become. And once you understand how it works, you suddenly realise just how much of your life you can influence simply by shifting the way you think.
This little behind-the-scenes powerhouse is called the Reticular Activating System — the RAS — a slim network of neurons parked deep inside your brainstem. It’s not glamorous, it’s not trending on social media, and it will never sell out stadiums, but it quietly holds the keys to your attention, your perception, and your sense of possibility. The RAS is the mental bouncer of your internal nightclub: steady, selective, and fiercely loyal to whatever beliefs and expectations you’ve fed it over time. Today on Coffee, Culture & Curveballs, it’s getting the spotlight it richly deserves.
At its simplest, the RAS is a filter — a necessary one — because if every sound, sight, thought, and emotional ripple entered your consciousness at once, you’d be on the floor before lunchtime. Imagine your mind as a bustling venue hosting thousands of sensory inputs, all demanding space and attention. If every one of them squeezed through the door, you’d have chaos, overwhelm, and the irresistible urge to hide in a broom closet until further notice. The RAS steps in as the gatekeeper, deciding which bits of information deserve your attention and which can remain outside. That’s how you’re able to sit in a noisy café, surrounded by clattering cups and conversations and steaming machinery, and still focus on the work in front of you. Your brain is protecting you from overload because without that filtering system, you would experience everything all at once, and you simply wouldn’t cope.
What makes the RAS particularly fascinating is the way it decides what belongs on your mental VIP list. It listens, but not to your grown-up, carefully worded, polite intentions. It listens to your beliefs — especially the old, deeply rooted ones you’ve rehearsed for years. It pays attention to your expectations, your fears, your self-image, and your sense of what is and isn’t possible for you. Whatever narrative you repeatedly live with becomes the script your RAS uses to sort the world. If you have quietly taught yourself that you’re bad with money, the RAS will amplify every financial wobble while filtering out the moments you handle things well. If you have internalised the belief that you are unlucky in relationships, it will spotlight every awkward or difficult moment and dim the light on the healthy ones. If you’ve convinced yourself that opportunities rarely come your way, your RAS will dutifully downplay or even hide the ones that do. It is not sabotaging you — it is simply following the instructions you’ve unknowingly been giving it for years.
This explains why the old saying “Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right” is far more than motivational wallpaper. It is biology in action. When you genuinely believe something is impossible or “just not for you,” your RAS filters out any information that might challenge that belief. As a result, you see fewer ideas, fewer openings, fewer solutions, fewer pieces of evidence that could prove otherwise. Conversely, the moment you believe something could be possible — even slightly — the RAS begins allowing in everything that supports that possibility. You notice helpful people, interesting ideas, useful conversations, supportive resources, and the subtle nudges that were always present but previously slipped past your awareness. It’s the same mechanism that makes you suddenly spot the car you’re thinking of buying everywhere you go. Those cars didn’t proliferate overnight; your brain simply decided they now mattered.
This brings us to one of the most empowering truths about the RAS: it is programmable. The less convenient news is that it is already programmed, often by childhood beliefs, old narratives, and inherited ideas that you never consciously chose. Many people still carry background scripts such as “I’m not creative,” “Success is for other people,” “I always make mistakes,” or “I don’t really deserve good things.” These old beliefs quietly shape the RAS, influencing what it allows in and what it keeps out, ultimately narrowing the world in ways people don’t even realise. Feeling stuck is rarely about capability; it is more often about having a mental filter designed to keep confirming a story that no longer fits who you want to be.
The most exciting part is that you can rewrite that story. Dreaming about a new direction, a new identity, or a new possibility is not fluffy, airy-fairy escapism; it is literal neurological training. The clearer your vision of what you want, the stronger the signal you send to your RAS. Your thoughts begin to change. Your attention shifts. You notice different things. You make different choices. You take different actions. Slowly or suddenly — depending on the intensity of your belief — your external reality begins aligning with the internal picture you have repeated often enough.
Retraining your RAS is surprisingly straightforward, even if it does require consistency. You begin by deciding what you truly want to believe about yourself, not what feels safe or familiar, but what feels expansive and right for your future. Then you reinforce that belief through repetition — through journaling, visualisation, affirmations, or any method that keeps feeding the new message to your mind. Next, you behave in ways that support the belief, even in small, almost symbolic steps, because behaviour tells the RAS, “This matters — let in more of this.” Finally, you start paying attention to the subtle shifts that appear. A conversation becomes more meaningful, an idea suddenly feels bolder, an opportunity stands out more clearly, and the next step reveals itself. These were not late arrivals; they were simply hidden behind an older filter your brain has now begun to adjust.
In the end, the RAS can be your greatest ally or your most silent limiter. It can protect you or restrict you. It can reinforce the outdated story or help you build the one you actually want to live. The extraordinary part is that you get to choose the beliefs it filters by. If you choose growth, possibility, creativity, courage, and transformation, your RAS will highlight every stepping stone that supports that path. If you cling to the belief that you cannot change, it will quietly block anything that proves you wrong. Your brain will follow whichever script you hand it — so hand it the one that aligns with your future, not your fears.
Once you choose the belief — and choose it wholeheartedly — your mind begins organising your world accordingly.
And the wildest part?
You get to choose the beliefs it filters by.
If you believe you can grow, adapt, evolve, build, rise —
your RAS will highlight every stepping stone.
If you believe you can’t —
it will dutifully hide anything that proves you wrong.
So choose wisely.
Choose bravely.
Choose the version of yourself you want to become.
Because once you believe it — really believe it —
your brain will start making it true.
Coffee, Culture and Curveballs 
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