🔼: [[⭐️ Life Curation]], [[💡 Thoughts]] ###### 🔑 Our mind is directly influenced by our surroundings In the same way that our [[⭐️ Body|bodies]] are largely made of the food we eat, our minds and [[💡 Thoughts|thoughts]] (which influence our bodies, as [[🔑 Psyche and Soma are not separate|🔑 they are not separate]]) are in large part dependent on what we take in through our other senses. Our outer context molds our inner content. Our environmental context tends to cue certain [[💡 Habits|habits]]. Many of us have heard the phrase "Out of sight, out of mind," dozens, if not hundreds of times. Its opposite – *in sight, in mind* – is also true, even if we aren't [[🕯️ Mindfulness|🕯️ mindful]] enough to notice. The people, places, and things in our life can become so commonplace that they become almost dormant to our awareness, but much like our unconscious [[💡 Exiles|Exiles]], they *still* have an impact. > [!example] Examples > - An advertisement is essentially a manufactured sensory experience designed to inspire thoughts and influence behavior. We don't think about buying something we don’t know exists. > - If we're trying to break a [[💡 Habits|habit]] or recover from an [[🛡️ Addiction or Dependency]], one of the best and most common pieces of advice is to not expose ourselves to anything that might provoke it. Some people choose not to go to bars if they’re trying to quit drinking. Instead they give themselves new hangouts to lower the likelihood of cueing habitually drinking or thinking about it. > - The more often we see something, the more common we believe it to be. If we see story after story of a particular kind of tragic accident, we start to believe it happens all the time even if in reality it’s exceedingly rare. This is why representation in media (or lack thereof) is so important – it normalizes. > - The end-beep of a microwave and similar audio-visual cues and reminders are thought-triggers – sensory experiences designed to provoke certain thoughts, which provoke certain behaviors. They are the reason an entire song might play in our mind when we hear only a few notes of the tune or a spoken sentence which matches the lyrics. It’s why commercials end with a jingle. > - Psychologists at Yale had people hold hot or iced coffee as they filled out a questionnaire on their assumptions of strangers, like whether they’re likely to be generous or selfish, happy or unhappy, good natured or irritable. The study found that when participants held a warm cup of coffee, they assumed strangers were generous, happy, and good natured (warmer).[^1] > - When someone is "rising to the occasion." they're in a setting that evokes something inside them that would otherwise still be dormant. > - We wouldn't be considering the possibility of sensory experience influencing thought if we weren't currently reading this. But the same is true for what *isn't* around us. We may not be all that [[⭐️ Relationships|relationally]] skilled or have a sense of what [[🕯️ Love]] looks like because those things were absent during our formative years. [[🔑 Put great care into who you surround yourself with]] [[🔑 Our inner and outer worlds are not separate]] [[🔑 Everything is connected to everything else]] [[🔑 Everything we come into contact with leaves something behind]] [[🔑 Art can be dangerous]] - [[Favorite Food Exercise]] - [[🧘 Pratyahara]] [^1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1162548