The Power of the Subconscious Mind
Your subconscious mind is like an oversized memory bank that stores everything that always happens to you, and its capacity is almost unlimited.
By the age of 21, you have already stocked more than 100 times the contents of the entire Britannica Encyclopedia. People under hypnosis often remember very clearly the past events that happened to them many years ago.
While your unconscious memory is almost perfect, conscious recollection is not; you don't clearly remember everything your subconscious holds. The promising aspect is that we can use our conscious minds to reprogram our subconscious minds and harness the power of positive thinking to overcome negative thoughts and bad habits and achieve our life dreams. This is what we will talk about in this article.
What is your conscious mind? What is your subconscious mind?
The conscious mind can be described as everything you currently perceive. Everything you feel, do, see, touch, or experience that you are aware of and cognizant of. Consciousness does not include stored information; it involves what is happening now; it includes thinking and making decisions; and it is easy to control your conscious mind because you can use it to make choices.
On the other hand, your subconscious mind always works behind the scenes, but you are not necessarily aware of it. Your subconscious mind—sometimes called the unconscious—contains all the information stored for everything you have ever experienced, which is why it affects how you interact with things, such as why you feel ashamed, lazy, overeating, or addicted. On the bright side, your subconscious mind also affects things such as why you feel motivated, confident, successful, cheerful, hopeful, and so on.
The secret is to use your awareness to influence your unconscious thoughts positively, and knowing how to use both is a powerful tool.
How does your subconscious mind work?
Your five senses receive a constant flow of information every moment you're awake, and these experiences are stored as memories like a computer that stores data. Still, we don't need to remember most of this information. In fact, we may forget 95–99% of our daily activities, but we know these thoughts and images are still in your brain because hypnosis can bring back deep memories.
Studies in the field of psychology on how the brain works indicate that the experiences we go through shape the way we think and act, especially in our early childhood; although you do not remember most of the data in your life, the unconscious data in your mind affects 90–95% of your behavior.
Your subconscious mind can be compared to a remote-controlled plane; it constantly runs programs to control how you walk, sit, breathe, talk, and so on, and we don't have to think about these things. They only happen because the information needed to do them is stored in your mind.
Your subconscious mind has a so-called homeostatic impulse, which keeps your body temperature at 37 degrees, keeps you breathing regularly, and keeps your heart beating at a specific rate. Through your autonomic nervous system, it keeps the balance between hundreds of chemicals in your billions of cells; your entire body works in harmony most of the time.
Your subconscious mind achieves balance in your mental world by getting you to think and act in a way that is consistent with what you have done and said in the past.
Your subconscious mind makes you feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable when you try to do anything new or different or when you try to change any of your established patterns of behavior. Feeling fearful and uncomfortable are psychological signs of activating your subconscious mind, but it has worked to create these behavior patterns behind the scenes long before you notice such feelings.
One of the reasons for the difficulty of quitting habits is the tendency to adhere to these patterns. However, when you learn to create such methods intentionally, you can harness the power of practice and establish new comfort zones as your subconscious mind adapts to them.
You may feel like your subconscious is pulling you toward your comfort zone every time you try something new, and even thinking about doing something different from what you're used to will make you feel stressed and uncomfortable.
This is why forming new habits helps you reach your goals, such as following time management tips, which may be challenging to implement at first. Still, once they become a habit or routine, they will be within the limits of your comfort zone, so you have reprogrammed your subconscious mind to work for your benefit.
Changing Habits:Using your conscious mind to properly program your subconscious mind
Because your subconscious mind has considerable control over your positive and negative behaviors, the secret lies in training your mind to produce more positive behaviors, and here comes the role of your conscious mind. You can use your consciousness to reprogram or retrain your subconscious mind to do things that are more beneficial to your world now and in the future.
Using your conscious thoughts to program your subconscious mind can lead to success in all areas of your life that you are looking for, whether you are aiming for specific goals, have habits that seem impossible to overcome, hope for your dream job that will change your life, or have a vision for the future that looks completely different from today.
This programming starts with the following four tips:
1. Identify what's holding you back
First, you have to identify the obstacle that prevents you from achieving what you need and recognize your limiting thoughts or fears. For example, if you want to write a book but it seems that you cannot start or finish, think about what prevents you from doing so. Perhaps you believe that no one will read your book, that you do not have enough time, or that you are not a trained writer. All these ideas are what you imagine to be true. Still, they are not necessarily so; your subconscious mind is programmed to respond in this way, and then your conscious choices follow these notions.
Obstacles can also be physical—you may want to lose weight, but you're allowing your 30-minute daily social media habit to replace the amount of time you can spend exercising.
Think about your goals and dreams, and discover the thoughts, habits, beliefs, or barriers that prevent you from achieving them.
2. Let go of limiting beliefs
Once you know what your limiting beliefs are, accept them with pleasure, and then give them up. Sometimes, this requires you to remember your pain and fears and bring them to your conscious mind so that you can face and overcome them.
You may be struggling with your inability to develop a relationship based on trust. For example, you realize that you did not have a model for such a relationship in your childhood, so when you understand the cause of your feelings, you can address them and find a better way to behave.
3. Identify your intentions with your conscious mind
Now is the time to unleash the power of positive thinking and reprogram your subconscious mind. Your conscious thoughts and actions can reprogram your subconscious mind in the blink of an eye. A positive message can reprogram what you feel, address trauma, change the habits that make our lives stagnant, and move us to a fulfilling life that focuses on the things that matter most.
Use your conscious mind to anticipate what will happen in your life. For example, when you face an obstacle, say to yourself, "Although I have done this in the past, I am no longer doing it now." Your subconscious mind will listen to this just as it listens to all the other inputs it has received previously. Over time, your subconscious mind has no choice but to comply, as it no longer cares about old habits because it has discovered a new habit.
The secret is to visualize what you want to happen and plan for how you will react to obstacles along the way. Use your conscious mind to stay informed, figure out what's going on, and choose to follow your plan.
4. Let your subconscious take over
The goal is to finally let your consciousness relax and let your subconscious mind take control. Once you give the subconscious another way to act, it will assume that this is how it should respond, whether by word, deed, or the right idea. You will have created a new way for your subconscious mind to search its data banks and find a positive, splendid, and powerful way to respond.
Positive tools to help you tap into your subconscious mind
There are many things you can do to reprogram your subconscious mind day after day. Be proactive by incorporating them into your daily system. Here are some of the most successful methods to harness the power of your subconscious mind with your conscious efforts:
1. Positive Affirmations
Your subconscious mind makes everything you say and does fit into a pattern that aligns with your self-concept (your basic system). This is why repeating positive affirmations is so effective. You can actually reprogram your thinking patterns by listening to positive and success-oriented audio clips. Start each day with a positive motivational statement, and say one every time you face an obstacle or challenge.
2. Inspirational Quotes
Reading inspirational quotes impacts people who are committed to positive thought. By focusing on inspiring words and ideas, your subconscious mind will begin to establish a positive pattern in how you think and view life.
Apply the same principle by reading an inspiring article daily, reading helpful books related to your life goals, listening to educational or inspiring podcasts, or watching a motivational video or movie.
3. Pareto Principle
Pareto's principle states that 80% of the result in anything you do is usually due to 20% of your overall effort, which is a powerful principle once you understand it.
Follow this principle by making sure that the things you do every day are the ones that will have a considerable impact on achieving your life goals, and when you make these actions a priority, you won't ignore them, forget them, procrastinate on them, or do other activities in their place.
4. SMART Goals
All your habits of thinking and acting are stored in your subconscious mind. It knows all your comfort zones and works to keep you in them. That is why it is very critical to make writing smart goals a regular habit. Over time, staying productive and focusing on your targets will become part of your comfort zone.
The power of positive thinking
Your subconscious mind is not objective. It does not think or logically analyze independently. It only obeys the commands it receives from your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is like a gardener who sows seeds, and your subconscious mind is like a garden or fertile soil in which seeds grow. That is why harnessing the power of positive thinking is critical to establishing the entire thought process. Your conscious mind commands and your subconscious obeys, so consciously feed your subconscious with positive thoughts that increase your strength.
The habits of highly successful people
For people who are looking to expand their comfort zones, it is important to think about the habits of successful people because they are patterns embraced by the minds of great leaders and thinkers; unleashing the power of these behaviors will bring you one step closer to achieving the same things in your life.
These habits include planning your day the night before, prioritizing your to-do list, and completing your most important task first.
In conclusion
Learning techniques to reprogram your subconscious mind will help you believe in yourself because your confidence will no longer be threatened by fear of the unknown; more importantly, doing so will train your mind to be in congruence with your desires, dreams, and real-life goals.