How do you ‘store’ and recall a chosen emotional states at will? And why would you want to do this in the first place?
Imagine standing in front of a large crowd about to give a speech and your about to faint with anxiety. You wake up to the most important business day in your life and the only thing you want is to stay in bed. How about being able to change to a positive state at will?
This is what ‘Anchoring’ is about. Anchoring is a process of stimulus-response (remember Pavlov’s dogs?), a link between an intense state and a stimulus that, when triggered again, will bring the state back.
A state is about how a person feels internally, their emotional ‘state’. It is connected to their internal representation of the world and their physiology and governs his behaviour (that’s important!) It is a combination of physical, emotional and cognitive conditions. State is important because the concept of state helps put one at cause of feeling a certain way. It affects our capabilities and interpretation of experience.
We can anchor states to gestures, music, tastes, smells etc… to a certain feeling (usually positive) and ‘fire’ (or trigger) the anchor to recall the feeling. Anchoring is used in advertising all the time!
Watch this TED video below of classical musician, conductor and speaker Benjamin Zander, who beautifully demonstrates how to associate a state to a piece of music (toward the middle of the video, he plays a beautiful piece by Chopin and asks his public to think of a loved one. A classical example of anchoring!)