Episode 1: The Reticular Activating System and How to Train Your Brain for Good
- Tina Boogren
- 5 hours ago
- 6 min read
Description: The reticular activating system is the key to training your brain to notice more good. In this Season 7 premiere, Tina Boogren shares a simple daily practices that prime your brain to scan for what's going well instead of what's wrong. It's a small habit with a surprisingly powerful ripple effect.
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Transcription: Hi everyone, and welcome. It is season seven of the podcast. I am your host, Tina H. Boogren. This is Everyday Wellness, and we are back. And man, man, oh man, it feels good to be back. I thank you for your grace as we took a breather this summer, Adrienne and I, as it's my busy season, and so it felt good to just kind of take one thing off my plate during my season of sacrifice, and it feels really good to be back. So thank you.
Here's the deal, for this season, we're keeping things pretty much the same. We'd love your feedback, but from our point of view, what seems to be working for us are the short, kind of bite-sized episodes. There's a lot of really great interview podcasts out there, and I love them. But I purposely wanted this podcast to feel different because the purpose is a little different. Um, it's not really about interviewing others or experts. It's really about these little bite-sized invitations of things that we can try during our week to help us feel better, to help us bring our best selves to work, all of these kind of researched, backed strategies, hopefully delivered in a really pleasing, inviting way. As a reminder, it's always something I'm working on as well. And I wanted to keep them bite-sized in the hopes that you can listen on your way to work or on a quick walk, that you might be able to listen more than once throughout the week to kind of remind you what that thing is that you were going to work on this week. And so we're going to keep that format.
At various points, we're going to reach out and ask maybe what you're interested in, what you'd like to hear more about. My brain has been spinning lately with ideas of ways to bring this community together even more. I'm thinking book clubs. I'm thinking extra kind of community building events that we could do together. I'm thinking maybe online courses where we take a deeper dive. In fact, whatever you're interested in, if any of that feels good, or if you kind of do something like this with another group and feel like you'd love to do it with this group, tell me. Please, I would love to figure out additional ways to support all of you.
And I'm really going down the path of continuing to think about wellness and school climate, and climate in general, and women particularly in education and in all fields, quite honestly. The book that I'm working on right now, in fact, is thinking about women in education and it actually applies outside of education as well of these three kind of phases that we go through. And so I'm going to be talking more about that, and would just love to consider ways that we might be able to take a deeper dive together for those of you that are interested. So more to come.
Also, really excited to share that, , if you prefer to listen to your podcasts or this podcast on YouTube, Adrienne has been working so hard this summer to get all of our past seasons uploaded, yay, onto YouTube. So we're so grateful for that. We will include links for that. And now on to this week's invitation.
So this week's invitation is all about the reticular activating system. Let me say that again. The reticular activating system. Basically, what this is about is the idea that what you focus on grows, what you think about expands, and what you dwell on becomes your destiny. In other words, this is when we give our brain an assignment, it's going to take that assignment and run with it. So it doesn't care if the assignment is positive or negative. It's got no skin in the game. Basically, it just does what we direct it to do.
So if we are constantly thinking about things that are going wrong, our brain takes that as an assignment and now it is scanning the universe, our surroundings, our environment for everything that's going wrong, and it will feed that to us. Conversely, if we decide that we want to focus on what's going well, our brain takes that as an assignment, and it's going to scour the environment and our surroundings and look for things that are going well, and it's just going to reinforce that. I have been playing with this really, really intentionally, and it has been so powerful. I just am in awe. It's kind of like this like woo-woo manifesting strategy that really is working.
In the past, we've talked about this in different ways. I'm not sure I've actually used the phrase or the term reticular activating system, but this is the idea of when we did the invitation where we started a list of “good things are always happening to me,” and we started listing all of those good things, and doing morning journaling, where still to this day I wake up in the morning and I write, "Today is going to be the best day of my life," as the first thing in my journal. And what this is doing is it's just kind of prepping my brain to pay attention to the good.
This came in so handy during my season of sacrifice where I was traveling a ton and had lots of delays, and summer travel is always, woof, quite a, quite a chore. And it's always so easy for me to get stuck in kind of this negative place. But when I purposely primed my brain to pay attention to the good things happening or the way that I was feeling lucky or all of the easy, good breaks that I was getting, it just felt like they multiplied. Because again, my brain took that as an assignment, and so it's looking for that and feeding it back to me.
So I offer that as your invitation this week. As you move into a new school year, and I know some of you have been in for weeks, some of you are just getting started, but regardless, as we start this new 2026-2027 school year, let's start playing around with this idea of using the reticular activating system in our favor.
So in the morning, I want you to say, "Today is going to be a great day," or use my line, "Today is going to be the best day of my life." And return to your list or start a new list of all the ways that good things always happen to you. Maybe at the end of the day as you are reflecting in, as you're moving towards bedtime, if you're a journaler, pull out your journal and write down all the good things that happened to you during the day, those teeny, tiny little moments, and you fall asleep with that in your brain. What a great way to fall asleep, right?
This feels so different, once again, than turning the news on or getting sucked into doom scrolling, right? This is a way for us to just kind of change that perception and what we notice. And that small, tiny, little thing that, again, doesn't cost any money, doesn't take any time, can absolutely alter how we see the world, and that's just incredible. So play around with the reticular activating system this week and see what it does for you.
I'm cheering so hard for you. As always, we are so glad Adrienne is back with us, you guys. We're thrilled. I'm thrilled that you are back. I'm so happy that you are here. Please share the podcast with others. Reach out if there's something you would like to see this season or ideas of things you'd be interested in in terms of how we can bring the community together even more, what I could do to support you in bigger and bolder and braver ways. I am here for all of it. Oh, you guys, make it a great week. I'm cheering so hard for you. I love you.
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