Priming. Do you start with love or hate....

I love you, I hate you. Those are two great ways to start a podcast. I’ll explain why I’m saying those two things. It’s all about priming. Not to be confused with paint, but that’s basically what it comes down to. You use priming , for example, when you’re painting, to help the paint adhere better. We as humans are also primed to make things stick.

Research on priming

Let me give an example of a study I read in the book Thinking fast, thinking slow - our fallible thinking by Daniel Kahneman. It's about crime in a fictional city. A fictional city, with fictional problems. That's what the story was about that two different groups were reading. It was about crime in that city.

They were two identical stories with one difference. In one story, crime was compared to an animal, and in the other to a virus. The two groups were asked to come up with a solution against crime.

The group that had read that crime was like a beast had come up with more repressive solutions. Retrospective solutions, in other words: lock up the beast, higher penalties, harsher sentences, detention, longer incarceration, things like that.

The group that had read the virus story had more preventive measures. What can you do to prevent it? Those had solutions like, for example: we need to address the young people more, make more community centers, more social control, all that kind of thing. So the solutions were highlighted from two completely different sides, by changing one word in the text.

After six months, they had both groups read the same story again, only they had left out the word "beast" and "virus. So neither group was primed but, after six months the same ideas as a solution were still in it .

So you can find out how long an idea sticks and how it thus limits you from thinking in other solutions. So if you've read the beast story, even after six months you won't come up with preventive solutions. Conversely, if you've read the virus story, you don't come up with repressive measures. That's interesting to think about.

Unconscious control

How are you primed, that is, how are you unconsciously directed? There are a lot of priming factors, we are all primed, continuously. We are very impressionable people. Some people say, 'yes, I'm not impressionable.' Well, if you think that, then you are just a plaything for that kind of thing, because you don't even want to acknowledge your blind spot. It's not to scare you, that's not the point. It's just to make you aware of the fact that we are constantly being influenced.

You might think, “I can just read and watch everything without it affecting me,” but that’s simply not true. It does affect you, just like that story. It influences the way you think, the way you make decisions, and your ideas.

You may find that reading the Telegraph, or watching the news, makes you more fearful of society. You may actually become less religious and more distrustful by being exposed to that kind of priming. Of course, it's hard to make a correlation between a piece you read three months ago and your emerging distrust toward humanity. That correlation is very difficult to make, you've forgotten all you've read, but that correlation is there. So be careful what you start priming with.

There was also a study where they took tests in a room where there were all pictures of famous, smart people hanging. Da Vinci, Einstein, you name it. What turned out: those people sitting there performed 15 to 20% better on the test. 'Nonsense' you might think, but it's just science. It has been studied several times.

You’re also primed when you’re given a medication. Of course, it contains some kind of active ingredient, so it works. Provided you’ve read what it’s for—otherwise, it gets tricky. If I tell you, “This is a painkiller,” okay, then it works better. I prime you by making you believe it’s a painkiller. If I’m wearing a white coat and you think I’m a doctor, this medication works 15 percent better.

All of that has been studied, too—that, too, is priming. Yes, you could say, “That’s the placebo effect”—and it is—but it’s also priming. Your environment, photos, things you read, things you hear—all of these prime you for your next thought and decision.

Start your morning off right: Prime yourself

So it's super important to start your morning with the right things, and it doesn't have to be long at all. Doing, reading or listening to something inspiring will have an immediate effect on the rest of your day. So make sure you start primping yourself properly.

If you start your day right away with NOS.nl or NU.nl, you prime yourself for the rest of the day. Yes, it depends on what it says, but most of the time it's misery. Then you prime yourself to look at the world through a lens of misery, not consciously and maybe you don't even feel it. At least you think so, but really, it affects your decisions. This has really been studied several times.

Just take this information and make sure you start your day with something inspiring, with joy or with gratitude. Either way, put a positive spin on it. After that you can still watch the news, because you would like to keep up, then you will still be primed of course. But anyway, then you have had something positive first and you have already unconsciously been set on a different path.

This is super important to do first thing in the morning. In fact, my advice is: (and of course you don't have to take this) follow the news as little as possible. You won't escape it because you'll get it on the radio or wherever anyway. The news is all about priming you, or maybe it is about selling news, and misery sells well.

If you look at the facts, we live in one of the most secure societies, worlds and times in history ever. In that respect, what you all read is not true, in the sense of the average then, on average things are actually going very well. Only you don't get to see that, you often read that things are going badly. So you get primed, so you get more fears, so you get more distrust.

Imagine if we never received all these stimuli and we just lived our lives. That's not possible, but imagine if it were, you would only have your own environment as a frame of reference.

I have never seen a fight, a murder or a war in my neighborhood. In our neighborhood we are doing fine, maybe in your neighborhood not, that's possible, but in my neighborhood we are doing fine. If I were to rely solely on what happens in my neighborhood, it's fine. That doesn't mean you can't get depressed there. I mean, there are a lot of factors to that, but at least you don't get those stimuli from the rest of the world.

In summary, start your morning with: I love you, with love, with gratitude, with happiness. I started the blog with "I love, I hate you. When you start with hate, by reading how bad things are in the world, you get so primed. You start seeing the world through the glasses you put on. Do you put on your own glasses or do you have those glasses put on by reading negative things?

Sometimes you can't help it, you just read something or suddenly there are pictures hanging in a classroom, things like that all create priming. It makes you look a certain way, you put on certain glasses but, in the morning you have a choice. You can think when you get up already, "This is what I'm going to listen to, this meditation of gratitude. In that moment you are primed, you put on glasses of love and then you look at the world differently. Try that out for yourself, just one or two weeks and notice the difference. Really go test that for yourself. Keep track of that and see how much effect it has on the rest of your day.

Be sure to listen to the podcast as well:

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