Why Everyone Responds Differently To 1 Situation

It’s Friday night and you’ve made plans with a bunch of friends to have some drinks after work. You’re super excited about it and can’t wait till it’s 6 o’clock. This morning, you carefully selected your favorite shoes, and those new pair of pants you’ve been dying to wear – because showing your coworkers that you’re fun outside of work is an absolute necessity, so the outfit must reflect itself as such. All of this gives you such a joyful feeling.
At work you see some of your friends and talk about the new place you guys are going to visit at the end of the day. In your head, you’ve already envisioned the good things that are waiting for you. By the way, have you ever noticed that by remembering all the good things from a previous experienced event you already increased your good feeling? You have your own happy brain ‘machine’ inside you, how cool is that?
Anyway, you look at the clock and it’s almost 6, you finish your last tasks and leave together with your friend to the new, cool place to have some drinks. You laugh together and you feel the great connection and energy between all of you.
The person who gave you the address of that place should get a big thank you because it rocks. There’s nice little sitting areas with comfortable couches and chairs, dim lights and trendy music. This is exactly what you envisioned the night to be like – a true happy place.

After an hour of so you hear a lot of noise coming from the left side of you. Because of all of the different noises in there it’s not clear to you what it is yet, but you feel a light tremble in your chest. As the sound comes closer to where you and your friends are, you clearly see who’s making all the noise. A drunken man stumbles towards your group and waves his hand, clenched in a fist, and he’s being obscene, cursing out loud. His face is so angry, you can tell by the frowning of his eyes and his mouth that are wide open.
You feel the tension in your body and can hardly say a word while you look around at your group of friends. Some are laughing and talking back to him. Others stand up and walk a way. One even tries to reason with the guy who is not responding at him at all. And there you are, frozen in your chair. You want to sly away but somehow you can get yourself in motion. The drunken man has no control over his movements and drops on the floor just in front of the table.
Security comes over and takes the man away.
What’s most surprising is the fact that every single one of your friends is reacting totally differently! Some are just continuing with their drinks and conversation, some are talking about what just happened and others wave it away, looking like it didn’t bother them at all. And here you are sitting in the chair with tense muscles, headache and a racing heartbeat so loud that you’re sure that if the music was turned down everyone could hear it. The great feeling you had all day, and into the night vanishes after this situation and what came in return was fear, anger and a feeling of loneliness.
My point is: The drunken man did not physically touch or hurt you, and yet you feel so miserable, how come?
The way in which we react physically depending on what we observe is completely controlled by our subconscious brain. But how does that work? Our subconscious brain is like a huge supercomputer. It follows strict rules in processing incoming and outgoing information. It processes (on average) about a million times more signals (data) then you will ever become consciously aware of. Actually, this huge subconscious process is responsible for having awareness.
Everything we have experienced in our life is stored in our subconscious ‘database’ as comparison material to identify future events that are similar. If we would not store what we experience, then we would never be able to remember or learn anything. We would have nothing to compare present observations and events to, and would have to experience every detail of life like it was a completely new experience every time. Makes sense, right?
But how our subconscious comparison material identifies the things we see, hear, taste, smell and touch is one thing. Actually, a computer can do the same analyzing process. However, there is one thing a computer cannot do, and that is feel! As a human being we can analyze too, but what makes us human is the fact that we can feel. Our subconscious does not just store the details of what we see, hear, taste, smell and touch, but also what we feel about these details.
For instance, when you thought about the time with your friends, the words ‘friends’, ‘new place’, ‘fun’, ‘Friday’ activated all kinds of details about previous experiences with other friends that were stored in your subconscious. If most of those ‘going out with friends’ details are stored with a very positive feeling, you will experience a positive feeling when you think about it. This is what gave you that boost of energy you experienced in the morning of that specific Friday. But because the ingredients of the incident with the drunken guy activated other previously stored events in your brain. These activated experiences were not as fun for you, and consequently, are loaded with negative feelings. Because these feelings are so strong, and often connected to fear, they will always overrule your positive feelings. However, if you have no negative comparison material form your past about drunken people with clenched fists, angry facial expressions, etc., your body will react totally differently. The feelings in our body cause us to create beliefs about what we observe. Our actions are based on those beliefs we hold or create, and that’s why everyone will respond differently when in the exact same situation.
In my future blogs I will address (step-by-step) how your feelings, belief systems and behavior are controlled by your subconscious. And what is even more important, how you can change negatively stored experiences into positive ones. I promise insight in how this works will change your life forever! But for now, if you’re immediately interested in how this works there’s a fantastic book in Solutions & Tools called Desirable Power that discusses the scientific background behind this information.
There is so much more to tell about our subconscious, how it works and how we can use these insights to change our health and behavior for the better. I just want to provide some insight, and let you know that whatever you experience in your body and behavior, or the reactions you express, you can change it! Deep down you know how you feel, and know when you do things that do not serve you. There are answers and solutions for that, and if you allow me, I will give you possibilities to change them for the better – and forever.