Hi All!
I hope you’re having a great week so far. As always, here are your weekly tips and tricks to keep you on top of your goals.
1. Your experiences of the past shape your perceptions of the present.
Past experiences greatly influence how you interpret things. Say you make a new friend and make plans to hang out, but they end up cancelling last minute. You are going to perceive the situation according to previous experiences of abandonment. Perhaps you think it’s not their fault because they are busy. Or maybe you think they are not interested and avoid you on purpose.
The way you understand certain people, things, and situations depends on past encounters, assumptions, and feelings. Your mind essentially constructs your experience of reality according to the information your brain has stored in the past. This information, however, might not always be correct; A friend cancelling on you might actually have a great deal of work to do and feels sorry about not being able to make it.
2. Throughout the day, we get more input from our five senses than the brain can process, putting you at risk for sensory overstimulation.
The five senses of smell, sight, hearing, touch, and taste help understand and perceive your environment. They allow you to learn from new situations, and make adjustments to current behaviors, so that you can navigate the world safely. Though sensations, in and of themselves, are a good thing, things become problematic when we experience sensory overload.
Finish eating a burger from a fast-food restaurant and you will experience cravings shortly after. Complete watching a thrilling late-night movie on Netflix and you will feel more alert. When the reward and fear regions of your brain are activated, it takes time for you to return to a normal state, and so you might struggle to unwind, recharge, and fall asleep.
Your Weekly Digest: False Perceptions
This week’s article on MikevanderPoel.com is titled, “Perception and Reality: How Marketers Shape Your Experiences.” It draws a difference between how you experience things (perception) and how things actually are (reality), and explains how the gap between your perception and reality provides opportunity for marketers.
Marketers can change how we look at their products and services by tweaking aspects that relate to our five senses. On top of that, they use imagery in advertisements so powerful that it overrides the mental models that are subconsciously shaped by our life experiences. In much of the advertising material we are exposed to today, the appearance of something is often changed so much that it does not resemble what it actually is. Are you seeing something for what it actually is or is it a false perception?
Until next week,
Mike van der Poel
Previous: Stay on Track: Comparison, Self-Esteem, and Overstimulation — Aug. 13, 2021
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