It’s 3 a.m. on a weekend night. You should be in bed, sleeping, but there you are, sitting on the couch, slurping a pint of ice cream (at least it’s the really good kind; you’re not a philistine), and feeling sorry for yourself. And then it happens. You see a commercial for a miracle pill that promises to make you lose weight while you sleep. No exercise required. No dieting necessary. You don’t have to change a thing, except take this little pill, and all your troubles will go away. And even though your logical mind has crossed its arms and is looking at you with shocked disdain, you pick up the phone, whip out your credit card and order a 3 month supply. What the hell is wrong with you?

We’ve all been there. We’ve all been suckered into some kind of false promise or another. Perhaps it was a piece of exercise equipment that we just KNEW we’d use. Um, sort of. Or, we put all our hopes on some diet that couldn’t possibly work from a nutritional perspective; except we’d make it work, damn it. We’ve all had moments when we throw rational thinking out the window and put our faith in some snake oil, even when we know it’s not going to work. Why? Are the sales techniques so spectacular that they cause us to briefly lose our minds? If that’s the case, shouldn’t they be illegal or something?

If we look at this from a law of attraction perspective, however, it actually begins to make sense. And then we can do something about it.

What makes us susceptible to getting scammed

We never get taken for a ride on a subject, unless it involves something we desperately want, that we don’t think we can have. Extra weight is one of the big ones, but so is making money, preventing baldness or re-growing hair (remember the spray on hair? That was a million dollar product), and enhancing the size of your Oscar Meyer W…ell you get the idea.

When we want something desperately, we have a strong desire for it, so the intensity of our vibration on the subject is going to be very high. We’re emanating a massive vibration of “I’ll never be thin. I’ll always be fat and ugly!!!” Now, Who We Really Are knows that this thought is not true, and continues to hold on to the vibration of “I’m beautiful and I can weigh anything I want.”

The discord between these two thoughts causes us to feel horrible, and the fact that the frequency we’re holding on to is vibrating with such great intensity, means that we feel intensely horrible.

So then, this commercial comes on, or we see an ad about a product that promises to make it all better. They show us before and after pictures, and use “doctors” to tell us it, like, totally works, dude. And then we get this glimmer. Just for a second, we access this thought:

“Maybe I can be thin and beautiful.”

And we begin to imagine ourselves losing the weight, effortlessly and easily. We can see ourselves wearing those skinny jeans that have been taunting us for years from back of the closet. There we are, falling in love with the perfect man, whom we go jogging with (we’ve never jogged before, but once we’re skinny, we’ll totally start).We suddenly have a convertible sports car, and a gorgeous house. And we bake cupcakes for the kids, but thanks to the miracle pills, we’ll never gain weight. What a beautiful vision!

And it is. That’s why it’s so enticing. That thought – “Maybe I can reach my goal; maybe I can be happy”, feels good. And in comparison to how we have been feeling, it’s like a huge breath of relief. It feels like we’ve been pulling a freight train with a bungee cord and we’ve suddenly let go. And when that kind of relief floods in, we’ll do pretty much anything to hold onto it – even suspend all logic and reason and buy a completely useless and potentially harmful product.

What we’re really chasing

We haven’t actually lost our minds. We’re not really convinced that this miracle pill will do what it promised, but we don’t care. Because what we’re really chasing is that feeling we got a brief glimpse of. We don’t want to feel the discord of wanting something desperately and not thinking we’ll ever get it anymore. We just want that pain to stop. And anything that allows us to access those thoughts will do.

Hijacking our reality creating skills

What’s ironic is that we’re making use of one of our most basic creative tools – the ability to connect with the energy of things that we can’t yet see in our physical reality. We have the ability to fantasize, so see things as we want them to be instead of how they are. Daydreaming, visualizing and aligning with the frequencies of that which we want to manifest is a crucial skill in changing our physical reality.

If you we keep focusing on what is, we keep creating what is. But if we can focus on what we want, without offering conflicting frequencies, we can create what we want. How do we know if we’re offering conflicting frequencies? We can tell by the way we feel. If a thought closely matches what we really want, what our inner being is holding onto for us, we feel great. The further away it is from what we want, the worse it feels.

So, thinking a thought that makes us feel good, aligns us with what we want and allows it to come into our physical reality.

When we catch a glimpse of that relief, the thought that maybe, just maybe it is possible for us to reach our goals, we’re briefly connecting with the frequency of what we really want, even though our physical reality may be nowhere near that goal. This would be great, if only we could hold onto that frequency. The problem is, when we’re filled with desperation, we generally can’t.

Once the euphoria wears off

We don’t really believe that the miracle pill will melt off the pounds as we sleep. And as soon as we begin to focus on these thoughts, the thoughts of how we’re actually going to accomplish this effortless weight loss, the euphoria wears off. And then, the embarrassment sets in.

How could we have been so stupid? We feel worse than ever. Of course we do. Not only did we briefly feel the amazing frequency of what we really want, causing the original painful frequency we were holding to seem even worse in comparison, but now we’ve added horrible feeling thoughts about our own gullibility and stupidity. Nice.

Deliberately feel better

But none of this is necessary. Once we understand what actually happened, that all we really wanted was to feel better, and if we get the fact that we can always choose how we feel, we never have to fall prey to scams again.

The fact is that all we really want is to feel better. We just think that we have to lose weight or grow back our hair or get bigger boobs in order to do it. But that’s not the case at all. We can feel better right now.

Just as the possibilities of the miracle pill gave us a brief glimpse of a better feeling thought, we can access those kinds of thoughts anytime. And we don’t have to use ridiculous scams as an excuse to do it. All we really need to do is to deliberately focus on thoughts that feel better.

The paradox is that the closer we get to consistently matching the frequency of our thin selves (by thinking thoughts that makes us feel awesome), the more we begin to actually match that vision of ourselves. We begin to lose weight painlessly. A man may not re-grow his hair, but he might well discover a new haircut that makes him feel great (bald is the new sexy, after all). And while he may not necessarily be able to add a couple of inches to his trouser snake, he could easily attract a lover who makes him feel like an anaconda (yes, I went there). Because once we’ve achieved the feeling that we wanted all along, the Universe will bend over backwards to keep giving us reasons to feel that way.