Manifesting the life of your dreams can be as easy as picking up your journal and a pen. Discover how journaling can help you bring more of what you want into your life using the tips below.

The key to manifesting is to consciously prime your Reticular Activating System (RAS), the filtering system for our brains, through activities like journaling. Every day, our senses are picking up millions of pieces of information and if our brains took everything in, we’d be overwhelmed. Our RAS acts as a filter, allowing only the important information through. Manifesting is from the latin word meaning “plain to see.” When we manifest, our RAS is literally allowing our brains to see things like career opportunities or a potential love match.

In manifesting, we are not creating what wasn’t there, rather we are able to see what was there all along.

As humans we are hardwired to focus on avoiding danger. Unless we tell the RAS to focus on the good things in the world, we don’t even see them since our brains are in the business of keeping us safe, not happy and fulfilled. Journaling can a powerful tool to help us train our RAS to focus on the positives. The more we train our RAS there is a lot of good in the world, the more it will allow us to see opportunities.

Our brain loves to feel good and experience positive emotions. Our brain also loves a good story filled with sensory-based details (think of the books and TV shows that you love.) When our brain is happy, it tells the RAS to let in more of what made it feel good.

Journaling is a powerful way of providing our brains with happy feelings and good stories, which lead to manifesting more good things.

Here are some tips for making the most of the journaling process:

Focus on Gratitude. The path to manifesting big things is to first take note of the small wins in our lives and feel grateful for them. Writing in detail about good things, people and experiences in a gratitude journal primes the RAS to look for more of those types of things.

Use a paper journal and a pen. The physical act of writing by hand stimulates the RAS and tells your brain to pay attention to what you are writing. But a journal and a pen you love to encourage yourself to write more often. The best journal for manifesting is the one that you actually use!

Details and emotions are key to making the RAS take notice. Instead of writing something like “Today I’m grateful that I had coffee with my friend Sue,” dive into the details and feelings. Where did you sit? Did you have a good view? Was the barista friendly? How did the coffee taste? How did meeting with your friend make you feel? Did you laugh? Relive the good feelings as you document them.

Journaling in a detailed way, focusing on your senses and happy feelings, will allow your brain to take in information that help you manifest.

Detailed journaling will train your brain to be more observant. You’ll begin to take note of things like the body language of others indicating that a table or parking spot is about to become free. You’ll notice that when you are happy and at ease, people are more likely to do nice things for you. You don’t need to realize this at a conscious level. Simply by taking note in your journal of what you were doing and feeling the good feelings, you are training yourself to see more opportunities.

Use your imagination. You don’t just have to write about the past. Your imagination can be a wonderfully creative tool when it comes to manifesting. You can journal in detail about how you’d like your future to look. Again, good story telling and sensory-based details are what the brain loves and wants, priming the RAS to see more good things.

If you are interesting in using the power of journaling to manifest more good things in your life, here are some prompts to get started.