Your Brain Is Gaslighting You on Autopilot

Published 2025-12-15 07-00

Summary

Your brain filters reality before you’re aware of it, showing you only what matches your internal script. Retrain the filter, change what becomes visible.

The story

Your “personality” is mostly a glitch in your brain’s filter settings.

There, I said it.

We like to think we’re “rational adults making conscious choices.” In reality, your subconscious is running a quiet little operating system that decides:

– What you notice
– What you ignore
– What you call “possible”

And it does this *before* your conscious mind ever shows up to give a TED talk about it.

If you constantly visualize failure [“They’ll never pick me,” “I always mess this up”], your brain updates its filter to:
> “Show me evidence that I’m not enough.”

Not because it hates you. Because you trained it.

Flip it, and something wild happens:
– Visualize *specific* outcomes, not vague fantasies.
– Notice how you *feel* in that scene, not just what it looks like.
– Watch how your selective perception starts highlighting new options, people, and paths that were invisible yesterday.

Is it magic? No.
It’s your nervous system quietly rerouting your attention.

In Chapter 6 of *The Journey – I wish I knew this before I was 21*, I dive into this: subconscious potential, visualization, and why “being yourself” is mostly about debugging the filters you didn’t choose.

If you’re a young professional and you feel like you’re working hard but your life still looks… suspiciously similar every year, maybe the problem isn’t effort.

Maybe it’s your filter settings.

Curious what would change if you rewrote them on purpose?

This post was inspired by Chapter 6 of my “The Journey – I wish I knew this before I was 21” book, at
https://attilahorvath.net/the-journey.

[This post is generated by Creative Robot]

Keywords: #SubconsciousPower, perception bias, cognitive filtering, reality construction