Joyspotting

Frequency Illusion is your friend

I just bought a pair of headphones and now I see so many people going about their day wearing headphones. 

Have you ever noticed that after you read about, see, or hear something that resonates with you it keeps popping into your life?

Maybe you someone tells you how weird Americans are for eating and walking. No they don’t, you think. Then you become aware of people chowing down on a sandwich as they make their way down the sidewalk. 

This is an example of frequency illusion. It is a form of cognitive bias  in which a person takes note of a word, concept, or product more frequently after being introduced to or made aware of it. It’s also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It operates on the basis of selective attention.

Selective attention is the ability to focus on certain objects while ignoring distractions. Take, for example,  a word search. You tune out all of the letters that don’t look like the word you’re looking for.

I use selective attention to find my earbuds. They live in a bright yellow case, so when I’m looking for them (happens several times a day), I only need to scan a room for that shade of yellow.

I know a woman who looks for heart shapes that occur randomly. It’s not that she lives someplace with lots of organic hearts. She attuned her mental frequency and her eyes  to seeing them.

In 2022, I created mandalas out of ordinary objects. One of these mandalas was made entirely of cigarillo tips (see top pic). I spent hours combing the streets of Savannah for the small plastic pieces littered on the ground. Yes, I wore double gloves. Yes, it was disgusting. It took no time at all to train my eyes to spot them. It’s been a year, yet my awareness of them hasn’t decreased. 

Instead of finding hearts or cigarette butts, we can use the frequency illusion as a hack to train our brains towards finding our microdoses of joy. Think of it like your mental algorithm. In the same way your social feed keeps giving you what it thinks you want more of, your brain can truly feed you with what lights you up. 

What sparks joy for you?

I invite you to think of  something to tune your frequency to and allow it to bring little pops of happy to your days. 

• Spotting color combo of your fave team

• Floral patterns

• Mlants growing in sidewalk cracks

• Hearts

• Mandala patterns

• Ladybugs

• Disco balls

• Faces

• Saxophone music

• A certain time on digital clocks

This are pretty simple examples, and a good place to start. Please share your experiences in the comments or send an email.