Every moment of every day, your brain is flooded with information. Sounds, sights, sensations, thoughts, memories, emotions — far more than you could ever consciously process.
If your mind didn’t have a filtering system, daily life would be overwhelming.
This is where the Reticular Activating System (RAS) comes in.
The RAS is a network of neurons located in the brainstem that acts like a gatekeeper between your conscious and subconscious mind. Its job is to decide what gets through to your awareness and what gets filtered out.
How the Reticular System Protects You From Overload
At any given moment, your five senses are taking in thousands of pieces of information:
-
Background noise
-
Peripheral movement
-
Bodily sensations
-
Internal thoughts
-
Emotional signals
You’re not consciously aware of most of this — and that’s a good thing.
Your reticular system filters this information so you can focus on what seems relevant, important, or meaningful to you. Without it, concentration would be impossible.
For example:
-
You don’t notice the feeling of your clothes until you think about it
-
You tune out background noise until someone says your name
-
You can focus on one conversation in a busy room
The reticular system decides what matters.
What Decides the Filter?
Here’s where it gets really interesting.
Your reticular system doesn’t filter information randomly. It filters based on:
-
Your beliefs
-
Your values and morals
-
Your past experiences
-
What you’ve learned is “important,” “dangerous,” or “relevant”
In other words, you don’t see the world as it is — you see it as your mind expects it to be.
If you believe you’re confident, your mind filters in evidence that supports that.
If you believe you’re not good enough, your mind filters in proof of that too.
The system works to keep your internal world consistent — even if those beliefs are outdated or unhelpful.
How Childhood Experiences Shape Adult Beliefs
Many of the beliefs that guide this filtering process were formed early in life.
As children, our reticular system was already doing its job — but with:
-
Limited life experience
-
Limited emotional understanding
-
Limited perspective
A child might interpret events in very simple ways:
-
“I was criticised, so I must not be good enough”
-
“I felt scared, so the world must be unsafe”
-
“I failed once, so I’m probably not capable”
Those conclusions made sense at the time — but they were formed through a child’s lens, with a nervous system still developing and very little context.
The problem is that many of those beliefs continue running quietly in the background into adulthood, still shaping what the reticular system highlights and what it ignores.
Why Challenging Beliefs Matters
If your reticular system is filtering life through old beliefs, it will keep showing you more of the same patterns:
-
Evidence that supports self-doubt
-
Situations that trigger anxiety
-
Reasons to avoid or procrastinate
-
Confirmation that change feels difficult
This can make habits, emotional reactions, and confidence issues feel automatic and out of your control — when in reality, they’re learned responses reinforced by attention.
Change often begins not by forcing behaviour, but by updating the beliefs that guide the filter.
Where Hypnotherapy Fits In
Hypnotherapy works by helping you access the subconscious patterns that influence attention, emotion, and behaviour — including the beliefs feeding into the reticular system.
In a calm, focused state, it becomes easier to:
-
Question outdated assumptions
-
Reduce emotional charge around old experiences
-
Introduce new, more supportive ways of interpreting situations
When beliefs shift, the reticular system naturally starts highlighting different information — and people often notice that life feels calmer, more manageable, and more within their control.
Seeing Differently Changes Everything
The reticular system isn’t something to fight — it’s something to understand.
Once you realise that your mind is constantly filtering reality based on learned beliefs, you can begin to ask better questions:
-
Is this belief still true for me now?
-
Is this how I would see the situation if I felt confident?
-
What else might I be overlooking?
Sometimes, changing what you notice changes everything.
If you’re curious about how hypnotherapy could help you update old patterns and responses, I offer a free telephone consultation to explore what you’d like to change and how this work may help.
