Why Anchoring Positive States is Useful

Anchors are one of the more important concepts taught in NeuroLinguistic Programming or NLP. They explain how we’re constantly being influenced by things (and people) in our environment.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
— Henry Miller (1891—1980)

Anchors are one of the more important concepts taught in NeuroLinguistic Programming or NLP. They explain how we’re constantly being influenced by things (and people) in our environment; how we can have some control over those influences, memories, and emotions; and how we can use anchors to intentionally help other people experience states that may be useful to them.

It’s all about learning how to take what’s happening constantly in the “background” — our unconscious processes, triggered by sights, sounds, smells, words, places, etc. — and move them into the “foreground” where we can have intentional control over them.

For years, I hauled around a black leather chair from business to business. I bought it at an auction back in the early 1970’s when I opened one of my first companies, and every time I sold one business and started another that chair went with me. Whenever I sat in it, I got an immediate feeling of competence, capability, and enthusiasm. I once had another chair — a rocking chair — that was associated for me with feelings of tranquility and meditation: I meditated in that chair for years, and wrote about an experience I had in it in my spiritual autobiography The Prophet’s Way.

When I first learned meditation in the 1960’s, in fact, I was told to always meditate in the same place, sitting on the same chair or cushion. “That way your sitting area will become invested with spiritual vibrations, which you can feel whenever you go there and sit down to meditate,” my meditation teacher said. He was right.

I also remember my Grandma’s antique store in northern Michigan. My Norwegian immigrant craftsman grandfather had a cabinet-making shop in the back, and the front of the store was piled so high (in my childhood memory) with antiques, nick-knacks, and brick-a-brac that you could hardly navigate through the narrow aisles. The place smelled musty, of old wood and wax and books.

Today, whenever I walk into an antique store or Salvation Army store, the smell brings back a flood of pleasant memories of my childhood summers at my grandparents’ place.

These sensory inputs — the feeling of the chair, the appearance of the meditation area, the smell of Grandma’s store — are called anchors. They’re deeply associated in my brain with old feelings, and when I encounter them the feelings rush back. You have them, too: anchors are part of everybody’s life.

The concept of anchors was first discovered by the pioneering Russian behaviorist Pavlov, who found that he could cause dogs to anchor the sound of a bell to a sensation of hunger. For some weeks, he rang a bell each time just before he fed his dogs. Eventually, the bell became such a deeply seated anchor that simply ringing it would cause the dogs to salivate.

When you think about it, that’s really a pretty radical thing. The dogs’ internal neurochemistry — millions of chemical reactions, levels of various hormones and digestive juices, their level of blood salinity and saliva production — all changed in a few seconds. And that change was in response to a sound which, in and of itself, had nothing whatever to do with food.

Anchors can, of course, be negative or positive. Some people had such a painful experience of school, for example, that even going to a school play for their child, or a meeting with their child’s teachers in a classroom after hours, evokes a sense of dread. Others enjoyed the circus or carnival so much as children that they become age-regressed and gleeful when they visit such places as adults.

We create and respond to anchors constantly. Many have to do with place — sitting at our desk, our dinner table, and on our bed all bring up different emotional states. Some are associated with smells —the smell of a library, or grandma’s house. Others have to do with what we hear — a particular song that evokes memories and emotions, or a tone of voice which makes us reactive.

The strength of an anchor depends on how intense its first impression was, and how many times it was revisited after that. All the anchors I mentioned above derived their strength from having been repeated over and over, a process often referred to as stacking anchors.

On the other hand, I was in a near crash in a commercial jet a few years back, and it took quite a while for me to not feel a sense of dread and terror whenever I walked onto a plane. That anchor was installed in less than ten seconds, but the installation went very deep because of the strength of the emotions I experienced when we all thought we were going to die.

Removing anchors

Several of the methods discussed earlier to change the charge associated with negative memories can also be applied to negative anchors. In particular, the “fast phobia cure” method works quite well for this.

It’s also possible to create or remove anchors associated with aspects of “ADHD-ness” as part of an overall strategy of personal behavior modification. Consider the things you’d like to do more of or do better, and consider ways to positively anchor them; consider the things you’d like to discard and start associating them with negative anchors, or remove the positive anchors that are holding them to you.

Another way to remove old anchors is to re-associate them with something else. After my frightening experience on the plane, I always carried with me onto a plane a book that I really wanted to read. Enjoying reading is a more powerful anchor for me than being afraid of flying, and after a few flights with a good book I was able to relax on a plane…so long as I had something interesting to read. Adding a glass of wine to the flight — another positive and pleasant anchor for me — caused me to flip in a few months (ok, about a year) from dreading flying, to not particularly liking it, to looking forward to it.

The anchor of the plane had shifted from an association with dying to an association with escapist reading and feeling a warm glow from a glass of wine.

Installing anchors

Anchors can be quickly installed, even in highly artificial situations. For example, have somebody sit in front of you and ask them to close their eyes and remember a time when they felt really, really, really good. Just as their smile reaches maximum intensity, squeeze their knee. Have them repeat the exercise, and do the same thing, stacking that knee-squeeze anchor three or four times. Then ask them to just sit with their mind blank and think of nothing particularly important.

While they’re in that place, fire off the anchor by squeezing their knee: you’ll see an immediate smile.

Because we lay down anchors constantly, which re-effect us when fired off again, it’s important that we be intentional about our anchors. For example, there are, literally, thousands of anchors you’ve connected with your home and place of work. What’s the feeling you get when you’re called into the boss’s office? At lunch with others? At the place where you do most of your work? In the car when you’re driving to or from work? When the phone rings?

For each of us, these anchors will have different meanings. Some people love the boss’s office, while others dread it. And on and on.

To a large extent, our motivation strategies effect our workplace anchors. Negative motivators (avoiding pain) become progressively more and more negative about their place of work: often they’ll change jobs “just to escape the pain” which they’ve largely inflicted on themselves by repeatedly bringing up negative motivating images to kick-start themselves at work.

Positive motivators (moving toward pleasure) are continually anchoring their workplace as well, but they’re creating progressively more positive and happy anchors. Such people often spend twenty years or more at the same job, and miss it when they retire.

Because the workplace is a minefield of anchors, one useful policy for management is to always have one room for “positive and motivational” meetings to be held in, and another, separate room for “difficult or punishing” meetings. If the same conference room or office is used for both, it’ll become so anchor-confused that highly unpredictable results may come from the meetings you hold there.

This proves the wisdom of the old motherly advice to newlyweds to “never go to bed angry.” If you fight with your spouse in your bed, the bed itself becomes an anchor for negative feelings. Repeat that a few times and the negative feelings may become so intense that it’s difficult to recapture the original feelings of trust and love and even sleepiness which a marital bed is normally associated with.

Instead, define a place in the house or outside the house which is where you’ll go to fight, and only use it for that purpose. Don’t fight in the kitchen or living room or car: those places will become anchored to that state. Use the garage, or the basement, or some other place that can be used only there for that purpose.

You can also create anchors for other people. Use a particular tone of voice, set of words, posture, touch, or facial gesture whenever they do the behavior you want to anchor, or whenever you do the behavior you want them anchored to. (We all do this unconsciously all the time, particularly in parenting, teaching, and spousal relationships.) Occasionally fire off the anchors to test them. Now, they’re there for when you need them.

Processing negatives

In order for a thought or emotion to be anchored, it must first appear in consciousness. Oddly enough, one of the best ways to bring something to consciousness is to tell somebody not to think about it.

For example, for a moment don’t think about a herd of bright red horses rampaging down the middle of the street in front of your home. Don’t think about them at all.

Or don’t think about the fact that in the 24 hours since this time yesterday 54,000 people on this planet have died of starvation. Don’t even imagine that each and every one of them died as an individual person, and that 38,000 of them were children.

It’s impossible to perform a mental negative. If I say not to think about pink flamingos, first your brain must bring up an image of them so it’ll know what not to think about.

Even more interesting — although probably beyond the scope of this newsletter — is the old Ericksonian hypnotic technique of concatenating negatives. If none of your sentences never contain not even three or four negative commands — or at least not not-positive ones — then the result is that the listener’s conscious mind goes “tilt” and turns off its discriminating function for a few moments because it can’t keep track of all those negatives. You get that, don’t you?

During that time the person is in a state of confusion, you can deliver powerful hypnotic commands, which bypass the conscious mind and go directly into the unconscious.

Consider that there was a time when you didn’t know anything, but you didn’t know what you didn’t know, because you were not all that conscious about what you could know and what you couldn’t know. Soon after that, as you became a bit older, you discovered that there were lots of things you didn’t know, but you didn’t know what they were, other than that they were, so you didn’t know what you didn’t know, but you also knew that there were things you didn’t know, even though you didn’t know what they were.

Then you became a teenager, and for a brief while there was nothing you didn’t know. And now you probably don’t know at all what you don’t know, don’t know what you missed knowing, and don’t know what you don’t want to know, because then, of course, you’d have to know it first to not-know it, and you don’t want to know that, do you? Maybe and maybe not.

Out of confusion comes clarity. Every single time you have learned something new in your entire life, it was at first confusing. But then you learned it, and it became clear, strong, understandable. You can do that now with the material in this series.