Today was one of those mornings…car won’t start, arrangements for our few days in Germany going to pot, non-existent ‘customer service’ from Netflights (very happy to name the ******s), kitchen scissors disappeared again, breakfast sausages still frozen… aaarrrgggghhhhh!! Why does it all happen to me!?

Do you recall the old sore “Bad things always come in threes”? How come the opposite does not apply “Good things always come in tens”? Well, it’s to do with perception, not reality (and OK for those of you who want to say that there is no reality, just perception – I Agree).

It turns out that us humans are very selective in what we notice about the world – have you ever noticed how mums- and dads-to-be suddenly start recognising other pregnant women or baby shops, when you last bought a new car did you suddenly notice rather a lot of them on the road…? My wife could tell you more about it, but we have this part of our brain called the – are you ready for this? – Reticular Activating System, which essentially pre-programs our brain to notice certain things and, by implication, ignore others.

Try this now – look around the room you are in and notice as many blue things as you can in 30 seconds. Surprised? Now, how many red things did you notice while you were looking for the blue ones? Weird eh? Your RAS programmed your brain to notice one thing (blue items) and implicitly ignore others (red ones).

Now this goes on all the time. We notice what is important to us or on our minds at the time (babies, blue things, churches, beggars, stuff going wrong…) and fail to notice all sorts else. This just has to happen. If we were to pay active attention to all the verious data streams impacting on our senses at any one time we really would need a brain the size of a planet and would be in a state of constant confusion.

I wonder what good stuff was happening while I was noticing all the **** this morning?

It has been suggested that the most effective long-term mental state is one of “pessimistic optimism” (of which, more in a future blog), so next time you find everything going to pot, remind your RAS to look out for the good stuff as well. And, equally, next time all is going swimmingly just be sure to put a tiny bit of your attention on what might go wrong – to recall what us Boy Scouts were always told “be prepared”.