John Glanvill • Anxiety Specialist & Researcher • Anxiety • OCD • Bipolar • ADHD • Energy • Online Treatment Course • Sensible Spirituality

Should we trust (or trick) our senses?

In this 34-minute video, I explore how fallible and trickable our senses are. Knowing this can be a game changer for those with anxiety or OCD.

Goal of video

As we delve deeper into understanding how we humans really function, it is good to explore our primary tools for contact with the world, which are our senses. 

It is fascinating to discover how they work and to remember how very flawed and open to error they actually are!

But this is a good thing, because it means we can make use of their flaws and retrain their functionality to suit our goal of lessening anxiety and finding more calmness.

We also explore the importance of developing a new, more positive (conscious) internal dialogue because it’s not just what we say that helps us change but also how we say it and the language we use.

Key messages

Our senses are not necessarily the truth of what is happening outside of us.

We don’t look out of our eyes – light goes into our eyes, and the brain creates a virtual reality image at the back of the brain which looks like ‘our sight’ (but this can be flawed in many ways!)

Our beliefs, opinions and stories are added to that virtual reality and our brain ‘guesses’ what we should do next.

There is an objective world outside of us and a subjective world inside our heads – we need to learn how to ‘live’ in each of these different perspectives.

What we say and what we think create energy fields – positive and life-affirming thoughts are high energy and good for us, and negative thoughts are low energy and diminish life.