You can change it when you know how

The purpose of your Auto-Response System is to keep you safe and make your life easier by automating your behaviour.

In the same way that your Auto Immune System is constantly monitoring and automating physical inputs into your body and creating reactions to anything that it perceives to me harmful, your Auto Response System monitors your everyday world, working out how you should respond. Most of the time it works brilliantly. Sometimes, just like your immune system, it doesn’t. That's what's behind things like road-rage and phobias: your Auto-Response System has just gone into overdrive, if you'll excuse the pun.

Your Auto Responses will be driven by what you have in your current ‘Existing Knowledge’ base - regardless of how accurate it is.

Two Minds

Your brain works at two levels at once, consciously and automatically.  These two levels we call the Conscious Response (CR) and the Auto-Response (AR).

Your Conscious Response System is logical and reasoning:  

• I need to fix that window before the winter.
• That is only a toy.  
• Spiders don’t hurt people in the UK, they just look ugly.
• I need to remember this information for the exam.

Your Auto Response System is working away processing everything you’re thinking that you don’t know that you’re thinking right now:

• Am I comfortable, happy and safe?
• Am I confident or apprehensive?  
• I need the loo!
• I’m hungry!   

Your AR System is constantly monitoring your present state, and your environment and communicates with the Conscious Response System when it deems necessary. It operates thousands of times faster than the CRS but is much less refined.

Your AR System helps you learn and act on that learning efficiently. It is constantly assessing, checking, filtering, comparing and organising the mega-quantities of information you are processing every minute.

Psychologists believe that the Number One task of your Auto-Response System is to keep you safe and alive. Number Two task is to do whatever else it has been programmed to do.

We now know you can be in control of that programming.  Find out more.