Ever been curious about those voices in your head?

A few years ago, we'd be carted off for mentioning those little voices in our head, you know, the ones that chat to us all day long. But these days, it’s all out in the open, and we’re much more aware, particularly when it comes to that pesky inner critic.  But have you ever wondered how that inner voice really affects us. What does it do at an emotional level? or even....... a cellular level?

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about emotions, because whether we like our emotions or not, emotions are a feedback loop. They tell us when something isn't quite right. So we can be curious about our emotions and see what they have to teach us.   The inner voices make up that internal chatter that runs continuously in the back of our mind, often on a loop. What if we could see the physical impact of that self talk in a way that was so powerful that it stuck in our mind as a reminder? A reminder that encouraged us to change the story. 

 Welcome to the Rice Experiment! 

 Over the past few months, I’ve been been talking to 3 jars of rice and I'm not the first! Many years ago it actually became a bit of a craze in Japan. Masaru Emoto found a way of proving that sound can impact the molecular structure of water. 

He played beautiful music to water and then froze it and photographed it. He was astonished to find beautiful formations in the frozen water but when he repeated the process with aggressive music the formations were distorted. He noticed similar patterns with words, "thank you" created beautiful structures and "you fool" created distorted patterns. He even extended this to thoughts.

Masaru used complex equipment for his experiments but kindly found a way for mere mortals like me and you to try this at home, so of course I did!  Taking three jars of boiled rice, one received positive chatter, the second one was ignored and the third received angry words (courtesy of my husband! I do not need that negativity in my life!!) 

We spoke to the jars for about a minute per day for around 90 days. For a few weeks nothing of interest happened but we kept going until some differences started to show.

The biggest surprise ... in the jar we ignored, the rice and water parted company and the rice turned into yellow mush. Now I will explain why this is relevant to humans, but to sum up our results, the positive rice faired ok, and stayed white and fluffy with a little water separation. I did have a lot of fun with this jar. I practised gratitude and took it for a stroll around the garden. The negative jar showed no water separation and actually began to dry out. It lost its softness and its colour began to turn black and yellow.

The point of the experiment is to show the impact of an hour and a half of self talk on water because the human body is made up of billions of cells and each one is 50-70% water. So next time you’re have a chat with yourself, think about how it sounds! If you want to find out more about how we put this together and see those results for yourself, you can view the full video on our YouTube Channel, The Emotional Hustle.