The Magnetized Man

Have you ever watched a whirlpool or stirred something into a liquid only to watch the particles whiz rapidly to the centre? If so, you’ve witnessed centripetal force. Centripetal force is a type of force that pulls things into the centre in a circular motion. If you can understand centripetal force, you can understand magnetism. 

Consider the times in your life you’ve watched someone have a tantrum (out of control energy) or, conversely, you’ve watched someone work on something obsessively (overly controlled energy). In both cases, the individuals are stuck in a cycle that makes them oblivious to their surroundings or how they’re affecting the people around them. As a result, they repel certain entities and draw in complementary ones. 

What the tantrum-thrower magnetizes (at different ages)

A child having a tantrum will suck in the people who feel equipped – or obligated – to handle it, and as a result, they’ve magnetized exactly what they need to calm down, such as a parent or a teacher. An adult who didn’t have the early interventions necessary may continue to have tantrums and magnetize people who feel equipped or obligated to handle it, such as the police or an extralegal, more dominant aggressor. A tantrum-throwing adult may have specialized skills and be spotted by someone who recognizes those skills and decides to use that tantrum thrower’s energy to their advantage. 

In all three cases, the individual has a centripetal force that pulls exactly what it needs into its orbit to either calm it, satisfy it, control it, or distract it. 

What the Obsessive Magnetizes 

The same goes for someone who is deeply focused on accomplishing a goal. They keep cycling back to the same thing over and over and over again. At first, people may pass them by, not entirely convinced by the usefulness or sustainability of their efforts, but over time, their centripetal force keeps pulling helpful people and things into their orbit. External parties see that their contributions won’t go to waste, and they also know that their contribution will be appreciated and met with gratitude, not through platitudes or thank yous but by enthusiastic use and multiplication of it. 

Magnets have a centripetal force and they draw in their opposite

Magnets operate the same way. The thing that makes them magnetic is the movement of their electrons. Electrons have something called “spin” (a misnomer for “angular momentum”). This angular momentum is what gives electrons their magnetic field. Usually, electrons are paired and when all of the electrons in an atom are paired, their magnetic fields cancel each other out and the material that they make up is not magnetic. When these unpaired electrons all have the same spin or angular momentum, the material they make up is magnetic – they are aligned and they attract charged particles towards them. These charged particles travel in a circular manner, perpendicular to the magnet’s centripetal force. So when people say you should be magnetic, it means to align your electrons, so you can bring more charged particles (those things in your life that you want) into your life.  

This is where it’s helpful to introduce a metaphor. Think of your core self or core beliefs as that mysterious centripetal force and your electrons as every thought or feeling or idea you’ve had. Think of charged particles as people, ideas, and opportunities from across the board. 

Your brain operates like the winning lottery ticket numbers are in the same movie and watches that movie over and over again

In an earlier article, we talked about how psychosocial stress can cause activation of your brain and body’s negativity, pulling in things that feel familiar and safe while pushing away things that feel scary, even if those things might help you. The same thing happens in terms of bringing in things that you actually want. 

How does this happen? It’s important to first understand three ideas:  

1. Your brain is a prediction engine. It is less metabolically expensive for your brain to predict and act rather than wait and adapt to new circumstances. 
2. Dopamine, which supports movement and reward, helps you get up and do things.
3. Finally, remember that excitement and anxiety – in fact, most types of arousal – are physiologically similar. It’s our brain that tells us a story and creates differences and contrasts about what is actually happening. 

So now let’s take these three ideas together. 

Your brain can do less work by just using what’s happened before as fodder for what to do now. Dopamine feels good, and your brain knows that with a specific amount of tried-and-true actions – a few keystrokes to get to Uber Eats or Netflix –  it can get a predictable dopamine hit. On the other hand, your brain knows that if it takes action on a goal, it’s going to have to do some trial and error to figure out how to get a desired outcome. This feeling of not knowing, wasting time, looking like a fool, or potentially wasting resources creates psychosocial stress that activates the HPA axis…which in turn makes you crave things to make yourself feel better. 

So let’s suppose you have a specific goal to go to the gym or to study or to be kinder to that person instead of losing your temper. These things don’t have definite feel-good outcomes from your lived experience. They’re unpredictable and not promised. You could go to the gym and not know what to do and still feel like crap because you don’t build muscle in a day. You could study and not understand a thing. You could be kind to that person and have them mock you or take advantage of you. 

On the other hand, there are things you can do with definitive feel-good outcomes even if they don’t build towards a specific goal. You could order in food that tastes wonderful and at least it’s a guaranteed feel-good outcome (even if it’s also a guaranteed bad health outcome). 

You could watch an episode of a show you enjoy on Netflix or play a video game because there’s a defined feel-good outcome since narrative TV is designed to play with your emotions in a formulaic way and video games are designed to be challenging but ultimately winnable. 

You could fight with that person and because you have probably fought with this person before you know just how much to say to get the emotional release you want (and the abdication of responsibility you seek) before going back to your corner. 

Here’s what happens though. Each time you repeat an activity, that pathway in your brain grows stronger. Pathways in the brain grow through action potentials, which is when the electrical charge in a pre-synaptic neuron builds up and then bursts, releasing neurotransmitters that bind to receptors in the post-synaptic neuron. And remember: your brain is always looking for the easiest thing to do, so when you pave a path through the forest of your mind, your body’s energy just keeps flowing through that easily paved pathway. Remember that energy takes the path of least resistance. 

This interaction between pre-synaptic and post-synaptic neurons is also how dopamine is formed. Dopamine is formed in specialized neurons in the brain. These neurons are triggered by pleasurable stimuli like eating food, having sex, interacting with others, or taking a drug. Consider that all of these things are worth getting up for because they help us get closer to togetherness, grow, and connect to God. Food helps us survive and support each other. Sex allows us to have more children and continue to help souls come into the world to learn and grow. Interacting with others helps us find common ground and bring our energy together to find solutions and create things that are greater than the sum of their parts. Even taking drugs – though dangerous without the proper professional support and supervision – can help people transcend their brain’s practiced thought patterns and gain a higher perspective on life and meaning. And so it makes sense that there’s a neurotransmitter specifically focused on helping us move towards those things. 

And doing those hard things all help us get these pleasurable things. We just wind up working harder for them and as a result, wind up building a more meaningful life. 

For instance, when you set a goal and you move carefully towards it, you signal to others what you’re about, and that gives them a safe way to interact with you. You also signal to yourself that you have a contribution to make that is outside of your likability, your past, or your mistakes, and that makes you feel good about yourself. These two things – the internal and external validation – leads to more resources and potentially more intimate partners. 

On the other hand, when you don’t have a clear purpose and it’s not clear what you’re all about, people use you for your energy for their own purposes or as a distraction from their own pain. They almost always leave you in the end, because eventually the relationship becomes codependent. They know that all they’ve offered you in return is their energy – not an explicit offer of a share of their rewards or their continued presence – and they want to go give that energy and use the fruits of your shared labour to pay for the presence of someone else. 

You, sensing this, become resentful and angry, but you can’t account for what you gave since what you gave was your unconditional energy. When you can’t imagine generating that same energy again, you get depressed. When you feel like that energy has been stolen, you get angry and vengeful. In both cases, you can’t account for what you want returned or what you want to seek out. (The way out of this is to accept that all energy comes from God, not from people.) Unconditional exchanges of energy can happen when people are aware of what they’re giving or when two people have a shared goal and that shared goal can be either negative (attaining material and social power through manipulative means) or positive (getting closer to God, raising a child, supporting a specific cause, serving others).