When you have a sleep disorder, you naturally feel estranged. It can feel like everybody else has it so good while you have it shit. Imagine being a high school teacher holding your math classes and suffering from narcolepsy. Or realizing on your way to work that you sleepwalked again last night.

Sure, you may feel weird. But sleep disorders are nothing uncommon so get it out of your head that something is fundamentally wrong about you. Nothing is.

It’s a disorder. Something you can do something about. Something that, while it may elude you to find a permanent solution, you are not powerless to change to something a little bit better.

We all grow up developing belief systems based on our environments. How we were raised, how the people around us behaved and how we were expected to act all played a big role in our personal predilections.

At some point, many of those beliefs we’ve developed and held on to will no longer serve us. How will a complete set of beliefs molded from a little child with little knowledge and experience of the world serve a full-grown adult?

Some of those beliefs change over time with either little or no conscious action on our part. Most times though, we recognize non-useful belief systems and wish to remove them and put something logically more useful in its place. Yet, despite the awareness, we always tend to fall into the same patterns and the same behavior stemming from them.

I’ve always wondered how to consciously install new beliefs. I’ve tried myriad of ways. Sometimes, I succeed, most times, I fail. A few specific techniques I’ve used :

Affirmations. The classic Emily Coue line was vital to me. It cheered me up many times when I was a depressed teen. “Every day in every single way I am getting better and better.” Over the years, I’ve tried affirmations many times as a way to install new beliefs. While they worked to a certain extent, mostly to plant the possibility of the new belief, they did nothing to relieve doubt. And with the new belief contradicting what my physical reality is, anything planted is quickly eroded in times of emotional weakness, such as stressful situations and unfamiliar circumstances.

Visualization. Visualization is like gambling for most people. There’s always beginner’s luck. I wish I had visualized a million dollars the first time I did it. Like everyone else, I visualized what concerned me most at the time I first applied it.

I was 19 and shy. I loved women but meeting new ones always came few and far between. I wanted to meets lots of beautiful women. So…

I spent three days, about two hours each, visualizing girl after girl after girl approaching me at campus and asking me where the computer lab is. On day 4, I was sitting in one of the project rooms on campus working on a Foxpro Report, when a girl knocked on the door. I opened it and she promptly asked me where the computer lab is, because she needed her papers signed. I walked her out while we talked, down the hall about four doors down, where the lab technicians were. I didn’t give it much thought until about the third girl came. A total of 11 women asked me for the computer laboratory in the span of an hour and a half.

I know visualization works. Freakishly.

But how do I use it to remove limiting beliefs and install new ones? How do I use it to effect a new paradigm?

Fake it till you make it. When I was younger, I once told a businessman we interviewed I wanted to be successful. He put his hand on my head, tapped it a bit hard (pissed me off a wad,) and said “There! I christen you successful. Now go out and do what successful people like you do.”

It was a weird thing to hear and I had a laugh with my friends about it.

I’ve never been a fan of the “fake it till you make it” school of thought. It’s so easy to see through fake beliefs, fake rhetoric and fake emotions. Don’t we generally avoid people who are that way?

The basic premise is that if you perform the actions and manifest the behavior of someone with the belief system you are trying to implement, your internals will sort itself out and eventually achieve congruence with it. There is imminent truth in this process. Didn’t we learn to play basketball by going to the court and playing with other kids even when we didn’t know how?

For some reason, this process has never felt natural to me. I have tried “faking it” intermittently over the years. The result is always the same: huge conflicts in my head, frustration, and a disdain for lying to myself and others. It creates a conflict between what you do and what you feel inside you and leaves a bad taste in the mp

Mindlining. More sensibly known as reframing. I prefer the term because of the book by Michael Hall (Mind-lines: Lines for Changing Minds) which listed the different ways to reframe, out-frame, and superframe ideas and beliefs. It’s the easiest way to expose the holes of any belief system in a completely logical manner and render it impossible to defend. It also serves as a good reinforcement for new beliefs you want to install, assuming you can make a solid framing case for them.

I’ve gone on a couple of hypnosis experiments too but the effects seem to be less than ideal in terms of long-term stickiness.

For some reason, no matter which technique is employed, beliefs seem to get installed without our direct control. What I mean is, while you make the conscious choice to install a belief, integrating it successfully is something out of your immediate influence. If you stick to any of the above activities, over time, the belief will start manifesting in your behaviors and actions but it always does so in its own time and space.

The problem is while you are in the process of integrating, there is an inodinate amount of dissonance throughout. You literally feel the incongruence and, many times, you will tend to question your own choices. You begin to doubt your new path and, many times, this same doubt will cause such mixed emotions that we end up taking the easy way out. We give up.

So how to consciously install a belief?

1. Reduce chances of dissonance

My personal way of doing this is to start with the direct opposite of the new belief I want to install. Start by writing down the reasons why the old belief “can” be “valid”. Then disprove it one by one. The reframing process from Mindlines work amazingly well for this.

Then move on to the new belief. Start with the reasons why they “can” be “invalid”. Then disprove them one by one. Then make the case for its validity and refine it until it can’t be disproved.

You can also use Steve Pavlina’s guide to choosing beliefs from his website as an additional metric.

2. Set an end date

I like setting an end date for integrating a new belief. I like to use the industry-standard 21 days. If it doesn’t seem to manifest itself yet in my behavior and dealings, I review and decide what changes I will make. Three months ismy final cutoff. If it doesn’t stick, I usually give it up. Maybe it’s not yet time.

3. Immerse yourself

For the time period alloted, I like to immerse myself in it. I flood myself with thoughts of the new belief. I direct my actions with it in mind. I spend an inordinate amount of spare time affirming it and visualizing it.

4. Avoid negative influences

During the immersion period, I try to stay away from point of views that contradict it. If I’m trying to establish that I can run a 25k marathon, I’m not gonna read stories about guys who can’t. I’m not gonna listen to people whining about being short of breath. The belief is very fragile at this point and you want to strengthen it, not open it up to doubt.