The Epigenetics Of Beliefs

Central to our life is our belief system. No matter what we go through, our external life events always get filtered through our internal beliefs to create meaning. 

One way we see our beliefs get expressed is through our mindset. When you have the pattern of thinking a certain way, you start to attract a certain result. And that’s not because you change what happened itself but because you change the way you see it and the meaning you assign to it.

It’s the reason why one person can be the ‘victim’ of a negative life event while the next could see themselves as the beneficiary of it… Or why someone can feel the fulfillment in a major personal achievement while someone else feels empty.

Our belief system is very complex. Some beliefs we’re born with, most we learn as a child, and others adjust over the course of our lives. And to make things even more complicated, different beliefs are expressed at different times within different conditions.

This is why I want to talk about what I’m claiming is the ‘epigenetics of beliefs’. Epigenetics is the emerging understanding that our genes get expressed in different ways when in different environments. What this suggests is that we aren’t strictly hard-coded to be a certain person genetically, but that who we become is actually very variable in nature.

I believe the same is true about our beliefs. 

And in particular, I think one of the biggest contributing factors to which belief gets expressed, and therefore the way we relate to life events, is our physiological state. The theory is that the better energized we are, the more positive our unconscious outlook becomes.

Take someone who is ‘hangry’. If someone cuts them off in traffic, they’re more likely to outburst. In part this could be because a belief that “people have bad intentions” surfaces. Whereas the same person who’s fully fed and physiologically cared for, the same stimulus might promote a belief that offers more grace, assuming good intentions in others.

Whether the mechanism of the difference is based in belief or something else, it’s an interesting idea to explore. And if anything, let this serve as a reminder of how influenceable we are as humans - consciously and unconsciously - and our responsibility to design our lives around that.

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