It’s my new thing lately.
Telling my brain what to think.
What to notice.
How to feel.
What to ignore.
I do it quick, really quick, and then I forget I ever said it.

You would think it’s nothing.
But it’s not nothing.

The thing is, the brain listens.
It’s kind of wild.

I started thinking maybe attention is not something you have to babysit all day.
Maybe it’s got a little engine of its own.
You give it one clear sentence and it kind of keeps going,
even after you forget you ever said anything.

Most of that self-help stuff says you have to stay aware all the time.
Like, keep your mind on a leash.
But I keep forgetting.
I find it way more practical to point once and let go.
Like setting a destination on Google Maps and throwing the phone in your pocket.

I don’t need to be sharp every second.
I just need to point my brain in the right direction.

So now I give it little instructions. Stuff like:
Notice subtle kindness.
Ignore panic expressions by people around you.
Feel safe till the evening.
Don’t absorb other people’s urgency. Let their stress stay theirs.
When someone acts weird at dinner, don’t make it about you. Let it pass through.
Look for beauty in ugly rooms. It’s there.

It works. Not perfectly. But it works.
And the more it works, the more I do it.
And the more I do it, the better it works.
Like a loop that trains itself.

A psychiatrist in Hadassah once told me your brain is basically a search engine.
You tell it what to scan for, and it runs that search quietly in the background.
So if you tell it: look for signs you’re not good enough – it will.

And yeah, apparently there’s science for this.
Selective attention. Reticular something system. Priming.
You can Google it.

All I know is, I tell myself: stay peaceful at this dinner party –
and I forget I said it –
but then someone at dinner is losing their mind and I’m just… not caring.
Not letting it in.

Three reasons this matters, if you care:
1. It lowers the bar for change. You don’t need perfect discipline.
2. Even when you are tired, something in you is still doing the work. So it honors unnoticed inner work – something in me continues to care, even when I don’t.
3. Forgetting doesn’t mean you failed. That’s the whole scam.

Anyway.
I like thinking of it as emotional technology or something.
Say it once.
Then let your brain do the noticing.