Subconscious Mind Power Explained
Subconscious Mind Power Explained
Your subconscious mind is like a huge memory bank. It permanently stores everything that ever happens to you, and its capacity is virtually unlimited.
By the time you reach the age of 21, you’ve already permanently stored more than one hundred times the contents of the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.
Under hypnosis, people can often remember, with perfect clarity, past events that happened many years before.
But why don’t we actively recall everything our subconscious minds hold?
While your unconscious memory is virtually perfect, it is your conscious recall that is suspect.
The exciting news is 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 to achieve all of our life dreams.
Let me show you how.
What Is Your Conscious Mind vs. Your Subconscious Mind?
The conscious mind can be described as whatever you are currently aware of. What you are feeling, doing, seeing, touching, and experiencing. You are conscious of it or aware of it.
Consciousness does not involve stored information. It is what is happening now. It does involve thinking and making decisions. It is easy to control your conscious mind because you are able to use it to make choices.
In contrast, your subconscious mind is always working in the background, but you are not necessarily aware of it. Sometimes called the unconscious mind, your subconscious mind contains all of the stored information of everything you have ever experienced.
Because of this, it influences how you react to things, such as why you are shy, lazy, eat too much, or have an addiction. On the positive side, your subconscious mind also affects things like why you are motivated, confident, successful, cheerful, hopeful, and so on.
The key is using your consciousness to positively influence your subconscious thoughts. Learning how to use the two together is a powerful tool.
How Your Subconscious Mind Operates
Every moment that you are awake, your five senses are taking in a constant stream of information. These experiences are stored as memories, like a computer stores data. But we do not need to actively recall most of this information. In fact, we probably forget 95–99% of our daily activities.
However, 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 have shape the way we think and act, especially in our early childhood. Although you do not remember most of your life data, the unconscious data in your head influences 90 to 95% of your behavior.
Your subconscious mind can be compared to flying a plane on autopilot. It is constantly running programs to control how we walk, sit, breathe, talk, and so on. We don’t have to think about these things; they just happen because the information to do them is stored in your brain.
Your subconscious mind has what is called a homeostatic impulse. It keeps your body temperature at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, just as it keeps you breathing regularly and keeps your heart beating at a certain rate.
Through your autonomic nervous system, it maintains a balance among the hundreds of chemicals in your billions of cells so that your entire physical machine functions in complete harmony most of the time.
Your subconscious mind also practices homeostasis in your mental realm by keeping you thinking and acting in a manner consistent with what you have done and said in the past.
Your subconscious mind causes you to feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable whenever you attempt to do anything new or different or to change any of your established patterns of behavior. The sense of fear and discomfort are psychological signs that your subconscious has been activated. But it’s been working to establish those behavior patterns in the background long before you’ll ever notice such feelings.
The tendency to commit to these patterns is one reason why habits can be so hard to break. However, when you learn to purposefully create such patterns, you can harness the power of habit and purposefully instill new comfort zones to which your subconscious will adapt.
You can feel your subconscious pulling you back toward your comfort zone each time you try something new. Even thinking about doing something different from what you’re accustomed to will make you feel tense and uneasy.
This is why forming new habits that will help you reach your goals, such as following time management tips, may be tougher to implement at first, but once they become habits or routines, they will stay in your comfort zone. In doing so, you’ve reprogrammed your subconscious to work in your favor.
Changing Habits: Using Your Conscious Mind to Properly Program Your Subconscious Mind
Since your subconscious mind has such a great amount of control over your positive and negative behaviors, the key is to train your brain to produce more positive behaviors.
This is where your conscious mind comes in. You can use your consciousness to reprogram or retrain your subconscious mind to do things that are more beneficial to your world now and for your future.
Do you have goals you want to reach, habits that seem impossible to overcome, hopes for a dream job that would change your life, or a vision of the future that looks very different from today?
Using your conscious thoughts to program your subconscious mind can bring you the success in all areas of your life that you are looking for.
It starts by following these four steps:
1. Recognize the Roadblock
First, you need to identify what is holding you back from achieving what you want to achieve.
What are your limiting thoughts or fears?
For example, if your desire is to write a book, but you just can’t seem to get started or finish, what is keeping you from doing that? Do you think no one will read it or you don’t have enough time or you’re not a trained writer?
All of these thoughts are what you imagine to be true, but they are not necessarily true. Your unconscious mind has been programmed to respond that way, and your conscious choices will follow.
Roadblocks can also be physical barriers. Perhaps you want to lose weight, but you allow your habit of scrolling through social media for 30 minutes a day to fill the time that could be spent exercising.
Think about your goals and dreams and find out what thoughts, habits, ideas, or barriers are keeping you from achieving them.
2. Let Go of Limiting Thoughts
Once you know what your limiting thoughts are, accept them, embrace them, and then let them go.
Sometimes this requires you to bring pain to the surface, into your conscious mind, so you can face it and then release it.
Perhaps you struggle with the ability to develop a trusting relationship, for example, but you realize you did not have that modeled for you in your childhood. When you understand what is causing your emotions, you can address it and find a better way to respond.
3. Set Up the Intention With Your Conscious Mind
Now it is time to unleash the power of positive thinking and reprogram your subconscious.
Your conscious thoughts and actions can reprogram your subconscious mind in a heartbeat. A positive message can reprogram how you feel, heal trauma, and change habits that make our lives stagnant into fulfilling lives that focus on the things that matter most.
Use your conscious mind to set an expectation of what will happen in your life.
For example, when faced with your roadblock, say to yourself, “Even though I’ve done this in the past, I no longer do it now.”
Your subconscious mind will listen, just as it has listened to all of the other input it has ever received. Over time, your subconscious mind has no choice but to follow. It is no longer interested in old habits because it has found a new habit.
The key is visualizing what you want to happen, having a plan for how you will react to your roadblocks, using your conscious mind to stay aware and recognize what’s going on, and choosing to follow your plan in the moment.
4. Let Your Subconscious Mind Take Over
The point is to eventually allow your conscious relax and let your subconscious take over. Once you have given your unconscious the other way to respond, it will assume that is the way it should respond.
With the right word, action, or idea, you have created a new way for your subconscious mind to search its databanks and find a positive, uplifting, and empowering 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 on a daily basis. Be proactive by incorporating them into your routine. Here are some of the most successful ways to harness the power of your subconscious mind with your conscious efforts.
Positive Affirmations
Your subconscious mind makes everything you say and do fit a pattern consistent with your self-concept, your “master program.”
This is why repeating positive affirmations is so effective—yyou can actually reprogram your own thought patterns by slipping in positive and success-oriented sound bites.
Start every day with a positive affirmation. Say one each time you are faced with a roadblock or challenge.
Inspirational Quotes
Reading inspirational quotes is so impactful for people committed to positive thinking. By focusing your thoughts on uplifting words and ideas, your subconscious will begin to implement a positive pattern in your way of thinking and your outlook on life.
Apply the same principle by reading an uplifting article each day, reading helpful books relevant to your life goals, listening to educational or inspirational podcasts, and watching a motivational video or film.
Pareto Principle
In life, 80% of the outcome of anything you do is usually the result of 20% of your total effort. This is commonly called the Pareto Principle, and it’s very powerful once you understand it.
Follow this principle by making sure the things you do each day are those that will have the greatest impact on achieving your life goals. When you make these actions a priority, they no longer fall through the cracks, fall prey to procrastination, or are overtaken by other activities.
SMART Goals
All your habits of thinking and acting are stored in your subconscious mind. It has memorized all your comfort zones, and it works to keep you in them. This is why it’s so important to make writing SMART goals a regular habit. Over time, staying productive and focusing on all of your goals will become part of your comfort zone.
Power of Positive Thinking
Your subconscious mind is subjective. It does not think or reason independently; it merely obeys the commands it receives from your conscious mind.
Just as your conscious mind can be thought of as the gardener planting seeds, your subconscious mind can be thought of as the garden, or fertile soil, in which the seeds germinate and grow.
This is why harnessing the power of positive thinking is important to the foundation of your entire thought process. Your conscious mind commands and your subconscious mind obeys.
Consciously choose to feed your subconscious with positive, empowering thoughts.
Habits of Highly Successful People
For those looking to expand their realm of comfort zones, I highly recommend considering the habits of successful people, as they are the patterns commonly adopted by the minds of great leaders and thinkers. Unlocking the power of these behaviors will put you one step closer to being able to make the same things happen in your life.
These habits include planning your day the night before, numbering your priorities on your to-do list, and completing your most important task first.
Train Your Subconscious Mind to Create Your Best Life
Learning techniques to reprogram your subconscious mind will help you believe in yourself because your confidence will no longer be challenged by fear of the unknown. But more importantly, doing so will train your brain to be in line with your true desires, dreams, and life goals.
