How You’ve Been Trained Like a Dog Without Noticing It

The Bell That Still Rings...

There’s a sound you’ve been hearing your whole life.

You don’t even notice it anymore.

But every time it rings, you move.

That’s when it hit me: Pavlov’s dog isn’t just a dusty psychology experiment from the 1800s.

It’s the story of you.

Pavlov rang a bell, fed the dog, rang the bell, fed the dog. Eventually the food wasn’t needed. The bell alone made the dog salivate. No choice, no decision — just programming.

Now, swap the dog for you.

Swap the bell for your alarm clock.

Or your phone ping.

Or that red dot glowing on your screen like it’s calling your name.

Same result.

Same programming.

And here’s the insult: you didn’t even notice it happening.

The Invisible Bells of Everyday Life

I used to think the tragedy of Pavlov’s experiment was that dogs salivated at a bell. Turns out, the real tragedy is that we do the same thing.

Every. Single. Day.

The bells are everywhere.

They don’t look like brass anymore.

They glow, they buzz, they vibrate. They slide into your life disguised as “normal.” But the effect is the same: stimulus, reaction.

Think back. It started in school. The bell told you when to sit, when to move, when to stop creating because “time was up.” That rhythm wasn’t yours — but you obeyed anyway.

By the time you graduated, you didn’t even need the bell. The program was already installed.

Fast forward, and the bell got an upgrade. The ding of an email, the vibration of a phone. One sound and your body reacts. Your chest tightens. Your hand moves before your brain catches up. You call it being “responsible,” but let’s be real: you’re salivating at the sound of a modern bell.

And not all bells even make noise. Some are invisible. The cultural script that whispers: go to college, climb the ladder, buy the house, play it safe. Step out of line and you’ll hear the judgment bell — subtle disapproval from peers, parents, society. That’s enough to keep most people marching to a rhythm they never chose.

Life isn’t just full of bells. Life is ruled by them. And every time you answer automatically, you reinforce the program.

The Hidden Costs of Reaction

Here’s the part no one likes to admit: every time you answer a bell, you’re paying for it. Not with money but with your sovereignty.

At first it feels small. Harmless. But the cost compounds.

The first cost is fragmentation. You get pulled apart by tiny jolts of reaction. A ping here, a task there, a judgment hanging in the background. Your mind stops flowing as one current and splinters into pieces, each one belonging to someone else’s signal.

The second cost is exhaustion. You think you’re just “keeping up,” but your nervous system is burning fuel on every cue. Each buzz floods your body with urgency. You live in low-grade fight-or-flight, and wonder why you’re tired before the day even begins.

And the third cost? That’s the deepest cut. You lose authorship. You mistake reaction for decision. You tell yourself, “I chose this,” when really the bell chose for you. That’s the cruelest lie which is the illusion of freedom while living in a cage.

B.F. Skinner proved how easy it is to shape behavior with rewards and punishments. The like button is a pellet. The rejection email is a shock. Culture dangles approval, fear, validation, until you can’t tell whether you’re living or just performing for the next cue.

Think about what that’s stolen: the book you never wrote because a notification dragged you away. The intimacy you never had because your best energy went to a glowing screen. The ideas you buried because the script said they were too risky.

This isn’t minor. This is your life.

And if that doesn’t make you indignant, it should.

From Pavlov’s Dog to Sovereign Choice

If Pavlov proved anything, it’s that reaction can be trained. Which means it can also be untrained.

The dog never had a choice. You do.

And that single fact changes everything.

The programmed life is reactive: a cue appears, you obey.

The sovereign life is directive: you move because you chose the direction before the bell ever sounded.

That’s the shift.

From obedience to authorship.

From salivating to choosing.

It starts with awareness & seeing the bell for what it is.

It sharpens with interruption & refusing the reflex when it rings.

And it solidifies with authorship & building your own signals, cues you designed to serve you instead of enslave you.

This isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s reprogramming. You’re not just rejecting the old operating system. You’re installing a new one.

The dog reacts.

The sovereign directs.

Choice is the difference.

And the moment you reclaim that choice, you’re no longer Pavlov’s dog.

You’re the one holding the bell.

Creating Your Own Signals

Refusing the bell is only the beginning. Sovereignty isn’t just resistance... it’s replacement.

Because if you strip away the old signals but never install new ones, you drift back into the program by default. Nature hates a vacuum. The nervous system craves direction.

So the sovereign doesn’t just silence bells. They create their own.

A breath can become a bell & each inhale pulling you back into presence.

A morning ritual can become a bell where writing, meditation, movement that anchor you before the world demands obedience.

A question can become a bell such as “What was I born to live?” ringing louder than any ping, pulling you back into authorship.

That’s the paradox: you don’t escape conditioning by removing cues. You escape by choosing them. By building an architecture where every signal reinforces who you chose to become.

The program makes you a dog in a lab.

Sovereignty makes you the architect of your own conditioning.

The Invitation

You were never born to live like a dog, salivating at someone else’s bell.

You were born to choose. To direct. To author.

The program will keep ringing & that’s its nature. Bells don’t stop. Notifications won’t vanish. Scripts won’t dissolve on their own.

But your power isn’t in silencing every bell.

Your power is in hearing them… and still deciding for yourself.

Imagine a life where every breath brings you back to presence. Where your mornings begin on your terms, not the algorithm’s. Where your choices flow from clarity instead of reflex.

That’s sovereignty.

Not a life without signals but a life where the signals are yours.

And it begins the moment you decide to stop obeying bells that were never meant for you, and start ringing the ones that call you forward.

The question isn’t whether the bells will keep ringing.

The question is: which ones will you answer?

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Always in your corner,

Alan

Founder, TheCodexx

Author of The Passive Power Manifesto