One of the things I talk to clients a lot about and even mention here quite regularly is how to rapidly change states using the NLP method of anchoring.

However, I don’t think I have ever written an in-depth post explaining what anchoring is and how you set your own anchors for feelings and emotions like confidence, calm, enthusiasm etc.

I even mentioned the importance of anchors in my post on how to break bad habits, but the explanation was cursory to keep the post from getting too long.

So if being able to tap into a state at will is something you’d like to do and you are up for a little bit of work, then you’ve come to the right place.

What Is An Anchor?

An anchor is no more than a conditioned response, sometimes also called a condition reflex. Think Pavlov’s Dog and that is what an anchor is.

There was no reason why Pavlov’s hound should have got so excited and started salivating when the bell was rung sans meat.

Except that is, for the fact that his poor canine brain had formed neural connections between the two separate events of bell ringing and eating meat and it was a purely an involuntary response.

So simply put an anchor is  A = B without there being any real connection between A and B except the one we unconsciously create.

As little as 20 years or so ago nobody really understood how conditioned responses really worked. There was lots of anecdotal information leading scientists to believe there was more to them than mere suggestion, but what exactly was unknown.

Then in the early 1990’s fMRI’s (functional magnetic resonance imaging) started to change the landscape of our understanding of how the human brain works.

fMRI’s (which incidentally are not the same as MRI’s) work by detecting changes in blood flow in the brain and can be used to study slices of the brain just as accurately and a lot less painfully than removing somebody’s brain and chopping it up.

What fMRI”s showed in the case of anchoring is that neurons in the brain were physically wiring themselves together when actions were repeated simultaneously enough times and/or with enough intensity.

The expression “neurons that fire together wire together” had been around for over half a century after Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb postulated a theory.

Hebb believed (quite rightly) that the brain has the ability to rewire itself and that individual neurons could indeed weld themselves together,

The burgeoning scientific field of neuroplasticity has since embraced this theory and no scientist this side of Creationism theory seriously doubts that the brain is  to all intents and purposes, plastic.

Why am I telling you this you maybe wondering? Why not just tell you how to set anchors and let you be on your way?

It’s because I want you on-board with the theory and to know that what I’m about to tell you HAS to work IF you do it properly.

If you just think it’s woo-woo bollocks dreamed up by unicorn huggers and dolphin strokers then you’re probably not going to take it seriously or do the work to implement your own anchors

Examples of Anchors

Before I go on let me give you some examples of anchors so you can get a clear understanding of what we’re talking about and hopefully spot your own conditioned responses and have a better understanding of why you may react ‘weirdly’ in certain circumstances.

Anchor: If I turn on the vacuum cleaner and my wife is in the bedroom, even if she’s wide awake the response will be highly unfavorable.

How was it set: When Helen was in her late teens and early twenties she would do what many women of her age would do on a Saturday night. Go out and get hammered until the early hours!

To counter this outrageous behavior her mum would then decide to do the vacuuming at 7.00am on a Sunday morning. Hey presto! A few weekends of that and an anchor was born.

Anchor: I really struggle to have a bath and not have a beer at the same time. To the point that on weeks I’m not drinking I simply avoid having my evening bath.

How was it set: A few years ago when I was at my most stressed out working in sales I would relax after work with a warm soothing bath and a beer (sometimes 2 it has to be said).

Over a 10 year period I must have done this hundreds of times to the point that grabbing a beer became an unconscious rather than a conscious action each time I ran a bath.

My brain had decided to associate warm bubbly water with cold fizzy beer.

Anchor: I cannot hear a family member mention a pub/hotel called The Inn At Whitewell or my sisters ex-dog Toby without me smiling and thinking of my mum.

How was it set: For the last couple of years of my mums life she had Alzheimer’s and my journeys home were in large part listening to my mum tell me the same stories over and over again.

One of her favorites was about the time she checked in at her favorite Pub/Hotel where her and my dad would sometimes go for long weekends.

Only this story was slightly more unusual, because when she got there my sisters Border Collie, Toby, had already checked in and was waiting for her.

Ok, so I’m fairly sure that this never happened as Toby couldn’t drive, had no credit cards and rarely checked into hotels unaccompanied, but that’s beside the point.

The fiftieth hearing of this story probably drove me nuts, but now knowing I’ll never hear it again, it makes me smile and have warn feelings for my mum who I miss a lot

You Have Lots of Anchors

Above are just 3 anchors, but we all carry a great many more than that around with us and you will probably have dozens. Some you will now be aware of, others are maybe a tad to subtle to unearth.

The one thing I do know is you’ll probably have a lot more negative anchors than positive ones and there is good reason for that.

You’re wired up to be on guard for danger first before seeking pleasure. Therefore your brain takes a lot more notice of things that present danger than it does anything else.

So if you go out and drink 20 Tequila slammers and are way through your alcohol tolerance before you realize it, worry not, because your brain is on the case to help you avoiding acting like a twenty year-old on Spring Break again.

After you’d had your stomach pumped and were back to normal and I shoved a glass of tequila under your nose, all those negative feelings would come rushing back. And I mean literally, not metaphorically.

Your brain would recreate the sensation of extreme nausea as a conditioned response and an attempt to avoid you killing off any more of it’s precious cells.

What Isn’t An Anchor?

At this point I want to clarify what is a real bugbear for me and that is people (usually NLP trainers) pretending they have set anchors on students when they haven’t.

A typical example would be the trainer inviting a willing participant on stage to demonstrate this powerful technique that is one of the cornerstones of NLP.

He would then maybe ask the subject to think of something that makes them laugh. When they do conjure up the image and they are genuinely laughing the trainer would touch the attendees shoulder or any other part of their body that wouldn’t result in immediate arrest.

He may do this 2 or 3 times, but rarely more than because of time and boredom for the audience constraints. Then everybody would scuttle off in groups to replicate what he’d done.

Only he hadn’t anchored a damn thing except himself to a lack of credibility.

Sure he may touch the subject shoulder again and they burst out laughing, but that’s because of suggestion and not because any structural change in the brain has occurred.

Few people like to make a fool out of a trainer by refusing to play along (although I did once but that’s a whole other very amusing story) and in any case they will often think it’s themselves that did something wrong and don’t want to look bad in front of others.

So there is an illusion that an anchor has been formed, even if it the anchor is about as useful as carrying a 100lb real anchor around and expecting that to work.

Anchoring Is All About Repetition

To get an anchor to set properly you have to be committed and prepared to repeat the exercise I’m about to share with you as many times as it takes.

How many will that be you may be wondering?

I have no idea because it depends on a great many variables and varies from person to person. I’ve known clients form great anchors after two or three days and others that it took a month or more.

The one thing I do know is that most people quit before they get it working. Hopefully because you know about the science behind the process and the fact that this cannot possibly fail if you do the exercise correctly, you won’t be one of them.

Setting An Anchor For Calm

1. Get Comfortable

Make sure you won’t be disturbed and then relax and close your eyes in a comfortable situation, preferably lying down.

Last thing at night or first thing in the morning when you’re in bed can be great times as your unconscious is more likely to be open and receptive.

2. Decide On Your Required State

Think about the specific state you want to anchor and thus be able to tap into when things aren’t going according to plan. For our purposes we’re going to go with calm because it’s one of the easier states to anchor

Having said that, you can anchor almost any state when you learn the process although ones such as calm, motivation and enthusiasm work best because they are very easy to create and have very obvious characteristics.

I talk a lot about anchoring confidence as it’s a state many people would like to be able to access more often. The downside is that confidence is a very subtle state and people often confuse it with arrogance or chest thumping.

By all means you can definitely anchor confidence, you just may have to work a tad harder and get a deep understanding what confidence really feels like for you.

If you don’t know what any state feels like to you, then you cannot replicate it and therefore you can’t anchor it.

If you do struggle with creating confidence in the next stage but want more of it nevertheless, I suggest you try for ‘calm’ because calmness usually triggers confidence.

3. Visualize

Using as many of your senses as possible (not just visual, the word visualization is a misnomer) really step into that state and allow the feelings to build and build.

Feel yourself becoming more and more chilled and calm as you imagine a place or setting that is always likely to create that state in you.

4. Set The Anchor

When you are fairly sure you have almost peaked and couldn’t be any more chilled, set the anchor.

To set the anchor, choose a small action that you can do any time to associate with the feeling. You could maybe tug your earlobe or put your thumb and forefinger together, etc.

As long as it’s something you can replicate each time and not something you have a tendency to do habitually it’s fine.

Hold it for 2 or 3 seconds and then let go

5. Break Your State

Now do a break state which involves thinking of something completely unconnected to the process to take your mind off what you just did.

The reason why we do that in so many NLP processes is because otherwise you will have some residual feelings of calm that you carry over and we want a fresh start each time.

6. Fire The Anchor

After 30 seconds or so of wondering whatever happened to Milli Vanilli, fire the anchor.

You do this by replicating the action you chose for your anchor exactly as you did it when setting it.

Under normal conditions I’m not big on faking it till you make it approach for reasons I’ll not go into now, but in this case it can be really useful.

Fake the response that you are looking for to speed up the process because to begin with the anchor will either be weak or nonexistent

7. Rinse and repeat

Now do the entire process again and again and again until eventually your unconscious mind starts thinking:

“Hang on a minute, that gesture means we now feel clam so let’s chill out boys and girls because apparently there’s no need to worry.”

Note: Smells can make incredibly strong anchors, it’s just that they are not easy to use when setting anchors.

This has been a long post and as such if you have got this far I’m guessing you’re in a very small minority, so congratulations!

That tells me you’re also more committed than the average blog reader and as such much more likely to try this out. I certainly hope so.

Words of Warning

When you set an anchor you will always create the most powerful state you are experiencing at that time.

Therefore if you are aiming for clam but have had a bad day and can’t get rid of that sense of anxiety, do NOT set an anchor, because you will be anchoring the underlying and more powerful state.

And also remember anchors won’t work very effectively against extreme negative emotions. So triggering an anchor for calm after you realize your parachute hasn’t opened at 10,000 feet probably won’t work very effectively.

Finally, anchors are for occasional use and can also wane in intensity in time.

Therefore, don’t go nuts firing your confidence anchor 50 times per day. Also make sure you repeat the exercise every now and again to reinforce your anchor or anchors (yes you can set more than one if you use different parts of your body.

A Video Explanation Of Anchoring