Let’s keep this simple. Our mind works in much the same way that a DVD player works. And a DVD player is useless without DVDs. But luckily the mind has its own DVD library, a place where all of our memories are stored just waiting to be accessed by us or being trawled through to provide the experiences on which we depend to complete the tasks we face.

Each DVD is moved from this DVD library (our subconscious mind) and into our DVD player (our conscious mind) where we are able to access them in full. We know that we are doing this when we think about something such as a swimming pool for example. Did you think of a swimming pool? If you did, a third, and for our purposes a final part of the process kicked in and filtered through our DVDs and found a swimming pool for you to think about. This filter, reticular activating system to you and I, has the enviable task of working through our DVDs in order to find what it believes is the most appropriate one for us at any given time.

Our mood is determined by the DVD or memory or thought that we have in our DVD player currently so getting some control over this whole process is extremely important.

Constantly playing negative DVDs will lower the mood and programme the filter to look for negatives, but fortunately the opposite is also true.

Read more in Think Yourself Happy by Rick Norris (our core text)

Many of our blog entries will refer to DVDs.