Your subconscious mind is EXTREMELY POWERFUL and makes up around 90% of your total brainpower. It handles everything your body needs to function, from eating and breathing to storing memories.
The remaining 10% is your conscious mind, which has the sole purpose of interacting with the physical world.
Think of your subconscious mind like a powerful secondary system that runs everything in your life. It’s like a data-bank for everything that’s not in your conscious awareness. It stores your beliefs, experiences, memories, and skills.
Your subconscious mind remembers everything you have ever said, done, seen, and experienced.
To visualize the scale of your subconscious mind, imagine an iceberg. Your conscious mind would be the small part above the water, and your subconscious mind would be the vast bulk below the water.
The famous neurologist Sigmund Freud often used this iceberg metaphor to describe the scale of the human brain’s two significant aspects.
Sigmund Freud didn’t invent the idea of the conscious and subconscious mind. But he brought the concept to mainstream attention, which was one of his main contributions to psychology.
We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exist in our subconscious.
Sigmund Freud
Let’s look more in-depth at the differences between the conscious and subconscious mind:
Your Conscious Mind
- Critical thinking
- Logical thinking
- Short term memory
- Willpower
Your conscious mind sets goals and judges the results.
It can also think abstractly. For example, thinking about wealth or happiness is an example of abstract thought. These thoughts could mean very different things to different people.
Your conscious mind is what you are using to process these words as you read. You say the words in your mind, and as you collect meaning from them, you establish how the meaning relates to you.
Your conscious mind is linear, sequential, logical, and prefers everything to make perfect sense.
Scientists can measure the processing power of your conscious mind with great accuracy.
Your conscious mind allows you to multi-task between one and three events at the same time. Its processing power averages around 40 bits of information per second.
Many self-help methods and personal development strategies focus on the conscious mind. These methods and techniques can be effective for making small changes on a conscious level. Yet, they rarely address the issue entirely, especially when the subconscious mind does not align with the change.
Let’s look at your subconscious mind:
Your Subconscious Mind
- Beliefs
- Creativity
- Emotions and feelings
- Habits
- Imagination
- Intuition
- Long term memory
- Values
Your subconscious mind has some very different characteristics compared to your conscious mind.
For example, your subconscious mind can process information at a rate of 4 Billion Bits per second. The conscious mind’s processing power (40 Bits per second) seems insignificant compared to the subconscious mind’s processing power.
Your subconscious mind is a massive library that has been storing and sorting absolutely everything you have ever seen, heard, or experienced.
By the time you are 21 years old, the amount of data stored within your subconscious mind is the equivalent of over 100 x the entire content of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That’s 32 volumes containing 32,640 pages, with over 42 million topics covered x 100!
The vast majority of all brain activity takes place on a subconscious level. Neuroscience estimates that just 10 percent of all information you are ever exposed to will reach the conscious mind.
Your subconscious mind is like the hard drive on a computer. It Processes and saves all information without bias. It doesn’t discriminate between information that is useful and useless, it simply keeps everything.
Forming Habits and Beliefs
Your subconscious mind forms your habits and beliefs through repetition. If fed with the same information many times, it will eventually embed the information, which will end up as one of your core beliefs or habits.
Once information is repeatedly delivered and accepted by the subconscious mind, it’s challenging to remove.
For example, imagine taking a piece of paper and writing, “I can’t do anything.” Now overwrite on top many times. The more you overwrite the words, the more bold and heavy the text becomes and the harder it is to erase.
Another good example is when you first learned how to ride a bicycle. At first, you found it difficult to balance correctly. But you kept on trying, and eventually, your balance improved in increments. First, you could balance for 5 seconds, then 10, then 15, etc. Finally, you could maintain your balance for long periods. Through repetition, your subconscious mind embedded what it takes to maintain balance.
Once the information is learned and embedded, the subconscious mind will fall back on this information as and when required.
The next time you ride a bicycle, your subconscious mind will automatically select your default bicycle riding program. The action of cycling has now become a subconscious action that requires minimal conscious awareness.
Interestingly, if you learned to ride the bike incorrectly or in a defective manner, you would indeed keep riding the bike incorrectly.
When your subconscious mind processes and repeats information many times, the information can become embedded. Once information is deeply embedded, it becomes a habit or belief. When a habit or belief becomes established, it’s challenging to remove.
This is the reason habits can be so hard to break. Erasing or adjusting embedded habits or beliefs is possible but requires a lot of effort and persistence.
Removing Negative Subconscious Mind Patterns
Here are some methods to help you remove negative and limiting beliefs and habits that are embedded deep within your subconscious mind:
Hypnosis
Hypnosis allows you to change core beliefs and habits embedded within your subconscious. By entering a hypnotic state, you can bypass the conscious faculty and communicate directly with your subconscious mind.
During the primary years of your life, your mind operates at a low vibrational frequency similar to being in a hypnotic state. As a young child, your mind is like a sponge, soaking up and accepting everything it’s told to be true.
Hypnosis allows you to adjust existing habits and beliefs and embed new beliefs to help you achieve your goals.
For more information on hypnosis and self-hypnosis, please read our article: Self-Hypnosis: How it Works, and its Many Benefits.
Visualization
A simple and effective way to convey something to your subconscious mind is by using visualization.
Visualization is the art of seeing a goal as already accomplished in your mind’s eye.
When you visualize goals as complete, it causes conflict in your subconscious mind. This is a conflict between what you are visualizing and what you currently have. Your mind is hard-wired to resolve this type of conflict by creating a reality that matches the one you visualize.
Visualization stimulates the creative power of your subconscious mind by motivating it to create solutions.
For more information on visualization, please read our article: Visualization and the Many Benefits.
Positive Affirmations
Regular use of positive affirmations is another very effective way to install positive messages into your subconscious mind.
Positive affirmations are the practice of writing or saying out loud positive statements or phrases in the present tense.
Evidence-based scientific research has shown us that positive affirmations, like prayer, can actually reprogram your brain on a cellular level.
Your subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between what is reality and what is fantasy. This is what makes positive affirmations such a powerful tool.
Through repetition, positive affirmations reinforce your intentions by creating new neural pathways in your brain.
Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.
Earl Nightingale
For more information on positive affirmations, please read our article: Positive Affirmations.
Practice Appreciation and Gratitude
Applying appreciation and gratitude instead of fear or other negative feelings will shine a light on everything positive.
Feeling gratitude and appreciation for the good things you have in life rewires your brain. By doing this, you will notice more of what you have and less of what you don’t have.
Gratitude is the healthiest of all emotions. The more you express gratitude for what you have, the more you will have to express gratitude for.
Zig Ziglar
Subliminal Tuning
Subliminal Tuning uses a science-based approach to remove negative subconscious patterns and replace them with positive alternatives.
The Subliminal Tuning System uses a proprietary blend of technology, including:
- Self-Hypnosis
- Visualization
- Positive Affirmations
- Brainwave Technology
- Binaural Beats
- Subliminal Stimulation
References:
John A. Bargh and Ezequiel Morsella: The Unconscious Mind
Benedict Carey: Who’s Minding the Mind?
Dr. Saul McLeod: Freud and the Unconscious Mind
