The Neuroscience of Changing Your Reality: Intention, Attention, and Repetition
Silhoutte of a person gazing up at the night sky filled with stars and the Milky Way.
Last month, I celebrated my birthday and it felt as if I had created a portal to a new reality. I spent months dreaming about what I wanted this day to signify. I reflected on my journey and all the lessons learned from the past year and in the last decade. I dreamt about where all that knowledge and my passions could take me. This intense focus helped me create a powerful symbol and once the day arrived, I meditated and welcomed myself to my new future. Since then, I’ve been practicing the following 3 steps to let go of habits that don’t support this new reality and surround myself with the environment that supports my desire.
I’m sharing this because I often hear people struggle to create change and build healthier habits, so I want to introduce you to my strategy for transformation—and how neuroscience supports it.
Intention. Attention. Repetition.
This is the formula that helps me align with my desires, embody new habits, and build a reality that feels both empowering and deeply authentic.
Intention
Intention is the starting point of all transformation. You could also think of this as a planning or contemplation stage where you define the WHAT, WHY, and HOW you’d like to change. From a neurological perspective, setting a clear intention activates your prefrontal cortex—the region responsible for goal setting, focus, and conscious choice. When you decide what you want to embody or create, you send a powerful signal to your brain to filter out distractions and improve focus on your desired outcome.
Spend some time visualizing the goal as vividly as you can. What does it feel like to already have met your goal? Try to feel into it with as many senses as you can including imagining how relationships and the world around you would change. Notice the internal sensations, perhaps a warmth in the heart, energy coursing throughout the body, a smile on the face.
When you vividly imagine a desired outcome, the brain simulates it as if it’s real. The default mode network helps integrate that imagined future into your self-concept: “This is who I am becoming.” The more emotionally vivid the rehearsal, the stronger the encoding and activation of the lymbic system. Emotion acts like a highlighter pen for the brain.
Try: Rehearsing your intention daily, whether through visualization, journaling, or speaking it out loud, strengthens your brain’s belief that this outcome is both possible and real. The more vividly and emotionally you connect to the intention, the more compelling the brain finds it.
Attention
Focused attention is what transforms a intention into embodied change. Neuroscience tells us that neuroplasticity—your brain’s ability to form new neural connections—depends on where you place your attention. Every time you consciously direct your awareness to a thought, behavior, or sensation, you're reinforcing that pathway in the brain.
This is where the reticular activating system (RAS) comes into play. Think of it as your brain's gatekeeper for attention. Once you name your desire, your RAS begins scanning your environment for anything that relates to it—like conversations, opportunities, people, or intuitive nudges. Your brain literally starts reorganizing its filters to support the new direction.
This is why mindfulness is such a powerful tool encouraged by many disciplines. Practices that cultivate presence, like breathwork, meditation, or even intentional sensual touch, activate brain regions tied to self-awareness, emotion regulation, and stress reduction. They also help quiet the default mode network—the part of your brain involved in overthinking and self-criticism—so you can tune in more deeply to what matters now.
Try: Starting small. Bring mindful attention to one daily ritual that supports your intention—like how you pour your tea, how you move your body, or how you greet your lover. Let your attention become sacred.
Repetition
Change won’t happen without action and becomes sustainable when it becomes a pattern. Repetition is what wires new behaviors into your brain’s architecture, especially within the basal ganglia, the habit center. Each time you practice a new behavior—whether it’s choosing a nourishing thought, creating a boundary, or initiating intimacy with presence—you’re strengthening the neural groove.
Repetition also benefits from emotional reinforcement. When you feel good after practicing something new (like the calm after a meditation or the joy after a deep conversation), your brain takes note. These emotional rewards help "lock in" the habit more quickly and make it easier to return to next time. As you make progress towards the goal, the dopamine system will activate encouraging continued pursuit, motivation and bias toward opportunities aligned with it.
Try: Pair your new actions with sensations that bring you pleasure or calm. Let your nervous system associate the practice with ease, not struggle.
Example: Creating More Physical Intimacy with Your Partner
Let’s say your desire is to feel more confident in your sexual expression and deepen physical connection with your partner. Here’s how you might apply the three-step process:
Intention
You begin by setting a clear, emotionally resonant intention:
“I want to feel safe, free, and expressed in my sexuality, and I want to cultivate deeper physical intimacy with my partner.”
You write this down in your journal, speak it aloud during a morning ritual, or light a candle to anchor it energetically. You visualize moments of closeness—skin-to-skin connection, playful touch, meaningful eye contact. This begins to shift your brain’s attention toward experiences and resources that support this desire.
Attention
Next, you bring mindful attention to moments of connection throughout the day. You notice how your body responds when your partner reaches for you, or when you pull away. You practice staying present with sensations—softening tension, allowing pleasure, or noticing desire arise without shutting it down.
You might set a daily micro-practice like placing a hand on your heart and one on your womb or pelvis for 2 minutes and simply breathing. This helps you regulate your nervous system, build body awareness, and tune in to what intimacy feels like in real time.
Repetition
Then you commit to repeating small, meaningful actions that align with your intention. This could include:
Initiating a 5-minute cuddle session each night before bed
Sharing one sensual compliment with your partner each day
Practicing a weekly eye-gazing or tantric breathing ritual
The repetition of these practices—especially when infused with presence and emotional reward—rewires your brain to feel safer and more receptive to intimacy. Over time, they create a new default pattern: one where sexual expression is no longer tied to performance or fear, but rooted in connection, authenticity, and pleasure.
In Summary
The Prefrontal cortex holds and plans the goal
Default mode network simulates and integrates it into identity
Limbic system emotionally tags it as meaningful
RAS filters perception toward congruent cues
Dopamine pathways increase motivation and salience
Basal ganglia begin automating aligned behaviors
The more vivid and emotionally embodied the visualization and frequent the engagement with observations and behaviors that support the intention are, the more these systems synchronize. Emotion + repetition = neuroplastic reinforcement.
Creating change isn’t about forcing or fixing—it’s about aligning. When you guide your brain and body through the gentle, consistent rhythm of intention, attention, and repetition, transformation becomes natural. You don’t have to strive endlessly. You just have to show up with presence, again and again.
This is how you become the portal to your own healing, expansion, and embodied pleasure.
If you’d like support with this process and learning different ways to improve mindfulness, visualization, and connection with yourself or your partner(s), I’m currently accepting new clients.
