You ever walked into a room and suddenly felt anxious for no reason? Or scrolled Instagram and five minutes later you hate your body, your face, your life, and wonder how you’re still breathing without being a CEO with abs? Or heard someone complain about how unfair life is, and suddenly you’re spiraling too, like the whole world’s rigged against you? Yeah. That’s not just you being sensitive. That’s your environment quietly priming your brain..
It happens so fast, one second you’re fine, and the next, your brain’s gathering every memory of injustice or frustration it can find. And I’m here to tell you, it’s been doing that your whole life.
I didn’t wake up one day magically free of that. I used to be the emotional sponge soaking up every toxic vibe in a ten-mile radius. But the day I understood priming, it changed everything. This isn’t woo-woo stuff. It’s neuroscience. Let’s get into it.
What the Heck Is Priming?
Priming is what happens when your environment triggers a thought, feeling, or behavior in you, without you knowing it. According to psychology, it’s your brain retrieving old emotional patterns and applying them to the present moment without asking your permission. That’s priming. It hijacks your mood using your own memory bank. It’s like your brain being whispered to behind your back.
Watch a sad movie? Suddenly you’re texting your ex. Walk past someone frowning? Now you’re convinced your best friend is mad at you. Wake up to a messy room, or your househelp is on chutti again, and your whole nervous system goes, “Life’s out of control!”
These triggers prime you, set you up, to act, feel, and think a certain way. And here’s the worst part: the more it happens, the more your brain wires itself to expect it.
You become someone who reacts to the world on autopilot. You’re not choosing your mood, your environment is.
My Wake-Up Call Was a Bunch of Kittens
There’s this mind-bending experiment that still makes me go aha!
Researchers Colin Blakemore and Grant Cooper at the Cambridge Psychology Laboratory raised two groups of kittens:
- Group A grew up in a room filled with only horizontal lines.
- Group B grew up in a room filled with only vertical lines.
That’s all they saw as babies. No toys, no movement. Just those lines.
When the kittens grew up, they were let out into normal rooms. You’d expect them to act like normal cats, right? Nope.
The horizontal-line kittens couldn’t see vertical things. They’d literally bump into table legs and chair legs like they were invisible.
And the vertical-line kittens? Couldn’t see horizontal surfaces like stairs or counters.
Their perception was shaped completely by their environment. They weren’t just blind, they were neurologically programmed to only notice the patterns they were raised with.
You’re Not Seeing Reality You’re Seeing Programming
Does thsi sound familiar?
Your brain has been living in a room of lines too. Only your lines are emotional.
Maybe you were raised with chaos, criticism, guilt, shame, perfectionism, or always feeling like you’re not enough. Maybe the voices around you, parents, teachers, society, kept repeating what life is and who you are. Over time, your brain just logged that as the truth. That becomes the pattern your brain starts to scan for in every situation.
You miss the good because your neurons literally can’t see it.
Like the kittens, we can walk past love, safety, kindness, and possibility, and not register it as real.
The World Is Priming You Every Day
You want the everyday version of the kitten study?
here it is:
You’re getting ready to meet a friend. But they take too long to reply to your text. Your brain doesn’t just go, “Maybe they’re in traffic.”
It goes:
- “They’re avoiding me.”
- “Did I say something wrong?”
- “They’re probably sick of me.”
Boom. Anxiety. Defense mode. Text withdrawn energy.
But it wasn’t them. It was your brain being primed by old lines.
Maybe you had a parent who gave you the silent treatment.
Maybe your friendships were always conditional.
Maybe someone cheated on you and it broke something deep inside, so now every time a new guy takes too long to text or acts slightly off, your brain screams, ‘He’s lying, he’s cheating, protect yourself.’
Or you watched women in your family shrink themselves for peace, so you start calling suppression maturity.
The point is, you weren’t responding to the moment. You were responding to your priming.
This is how most of us live. Reactions instead of responses. Emotional relapses instead of new choices. And it wires the same survival emotions deeper every time: stress, shame, guilt, fear.
Flip It: You Become the One Who Primes You
This is what I learned, flipping the script so you’re not reacting all day but intentionally choosing who you want to be before the world gets its hands on you.
Instead of the world priming your nervous system, you prime yourself before the world can get to you. This is you waking up your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that lets you pause, redirect, and choose differently. But most people are out here walking self-lobotomized, living fully from survival mode and calling it personality. You don’t have to be one of them.
Step 1: Mental Rehearsal
Every morning before I touch my phone, I close my eyes, slow my breath, and ease myself into alpha brainwaves, that calm, creative state between sleep and wakefulness. That’s where I rehearse the version of me I’m becoming.
I imagine walking into situations I’d normally feel awkward or self-conscious in, but with total ease. I rehearse saying the truth with calm. I rehearse seeing myself already loved, already safe, already whole.
It’s not fake. It’s not lying to myself. It’s neural training.
Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one. If you rehearse it enough, your neurons start to wire to that version of you. Your cells start to believe it.
That’s when your environment loses its grip.
Step 2: Feel It First
Don’t wait for peace to show up in your life. Prime it in your body.
Feel it now. Practice it on purpose. Create the chemical cocktail of confidence, gratitude, or joy before life gives you the reason.
This is not just self-help fluff. It’s epigenetics. It’s brain science. Your body responds to how you feel more than to what’s actually happening.
Step 3: Walk Into the Day Already Defined
When you do this, you don’t walk into the day like an open wound. You walk in with a calibrated nervous system.
- You’re not desperate for validation because you validated yourself in advance.
- You’re not thrown off by bad energy because you practiced being anchored.
- You’re not afraid of people’s moods because you remembered your power.
I’ve lived this. Still do. And one thing that helped me stay anchored was setting up cues for the day, reminders to check in with myself. Like a sticky note on my mirror or an alarm named ‘How you doin’?’ When I’d start losing my grip, I’d go back to the feeling I created that morning. Reconnect. Reset. Because it’s not about being perfect or fearless. It’s about not being programmable anymore.
What You Feed Your Brain First Thing Matters
Because the world is coming for you. People, algorithms, old traumas, they’re waiting to prime your system. And if you don’t prime it first, you’ll spend the rest of the day in reaction mode.
Every scroll. Every frown. Every email. Every Advertisement. Priming you back into the person you swore you’d outgrow.
There’s a powerful study where participants practiced playing the piano using only mental rehearsal, step by step, with vivid focus, and their brains changed just like those who physically played. Your brain literally rewires when you consistently rehearse the new you.
This is how real this is and how we break the pattern. Not by waiting for change. But by training for it.
Final Thoughts
You’re not a victim of your environment unless you let it be the author of your brain.
The kittens never got to choose their rooms. But you? You get to walk out of yours.
You can see what your nervous system used to miss. You can wire your brain for love, peace, resilience, and creativity, before life offers it. And then weirdly, life starts reflecting that back to you.
I walk this with my clients all the time. If you’re ready to stop being shaped by the past and start shaping your future self, my homepage has a spot to book a session. This is what we do together, build the new room, from the inside out.
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And come say hi on Threads. That’s where I drop all my raw, real, unfiltered stuff in-between the blogs. Let’s grow together.
Because baby, you’re not a kitten anymore. You’re the architect now.
