The kitchen was dark. Light came in from the hallway, enough to find the mug on the counter, not enough to see inside it. I was standing there, not quite awake, and I took a sip.
Something was in my mouth.
It was plump and smooth and round, sitting snug against my tongue. My first thought arrived calm and reasonable: a piece of coffee bean must have slipped through. That’s what you’d expect to find in coffee, so that’s the answer my brain handed me.
I didn’t swallow. Instead I spit it into my palm, turned toward the hallway light, and looked.
It was a pincher, an earwig.
I shuddered. My whole body answered before a single thought showed up about germs, or how long it had been floating in there, or why of all the mugs in the world it picked mine. A shudder from the spine out, and then a long rinse at the sink while the rest of the coffee went cold.
I would have swallowed it. My body flagged that pincher as wrong before I had a word for it, and still the first word my brain offered was “coffee bean.” I was one second away from accepting that answer and getting on with my morning.
Two things were running at once. One caught the intruder. The other told me a comfortable story about it.
Primed before you act
In 1951, long before anyone was selling morning routines on Instagram, a neuropsychologist named Karl Lashley published a paper called “The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior.” The popular view back then treated behavior like a row of dominoes. A stimulus knocks over a response, that response knocks over the next one, and so on down the line.
Lashley didn’t buy it. He argued that the brain organizes behavior ahead of time through central plans, and that the state of your nervous system predisposes you toward certain responses before anything happens to trigger them. Researchers who trace the history of priming, the idea that one thing prepares you for the next, point back to him as the person who introduced the term in this sense: something that makes a response more likely before you ever make it.
Here’s how I’d put it if we were sitting across a table with coffee (one we had both looked into first):
You are primed before you act.
My brain was primed for “coffee bean.” Every cup I’d ever drunk had trained it to expect coffee, so when something strange landed on my tongue, the expectation answered first.
The priming happens either way. Nobody sat me down and installed “coffee bean.” It piled up on its own, one ordinary morning at a time. So the real choice is whether you decide what you’re primed for or inherit whatever accumulated while you weren’t paying attention.
Attention research points in the same direction. You’ve probably heard the pop version: buy a red car and suddenly red cars are everywhere. That story usually gets pinned on a single structure in the brainstem, and it’s tidier than the evidence. The actual finding is quieter and more useful. Your attention is selective, and something upstream of your awareness decides what reaches you.
The script you run on yourself
I studied psychology as an undergrad and spent a lot of hours in a research lab running participants through experiments. Every one of them heard the same instructions from a standardized script, word for word, in the same order. We guarded that script carefully, because a small change in what people heard first could tilt what they did next.
I have rarely been that careful with the script I run on myself.
When you tell yourself you’re a person who writes, your attention starts working on your behalf. All day it collects material without asking permission: a line overheard in a meeting, the way someone’s voice changed mid-sentence, a pincher in the coffee. It arrives already tagged as usable. You don’t have to hunt for it.
The opposite works just as efficiently. Tell yourself “I’m too busy to write” and your brain goes to work on that, too. By noon it will hand you a flawless case: the meetings, the dishes, the email that needed an answer by five, the ride someone needed. Every piece of evidence will be real, and by evening you’ll be completely convinced, and technically correct.
You find what you’re scanning for.
It compounds, too. Once you’ve loaded yourself as someone who writes, every finished page becomes evidence, and your brain goes looking for more of it. Each page makes the next one more likely. I know this as the morning I sat down to write and found the sentence already waiting.
None of this requires magic or a vision board. It asks for one small, deliberate act before the day gets loud: choose what you’re scanning for, on purpose.
I’m going to look into my mug from now on. That part is settled. The bigger change is what I say to myself on the way to the kitchen, because by the time the mug is in my hand, my brain has already decided whether I’ll write today. It’s going to decide before breakfast either way.
I’d rather get there first.
What did you almost swallow this week, the comfortable answer your brain handed you before you looked? Tell me in the comments. I read everyone of them!
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P.S. Want to decide what your brain is primed for before breakfast? That’s the work we do in the Courage to Create Academy, with a live Future Scripting™ workshop every month plus every recording and workbook. A year costs $77. Join here
Loved this Magdalena. And the lovely thing is that writing itself can change how we see ourselves. We don't necessarily need to convince ourselves we're writers first. Sitting down and writing gives us something real to base that belief on.
Comfortable answer is that "I am tired today"