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The Conscious Mind Vs. The Subconscious Mind

Your mind demands a vast amount of energy to operate, particularly when you have to concentrate and think. Problem-solving or making decisions not only use more brain energy, but conscious change can also be a slow process. Your mind attempts to preserve power by developing efficient ways of operating, and one method is by forming a conscious and subconscious. Let’s look at these structures of the mind – the conscious, thinking part of the mind and the subconscious, feeling part of the mind. The conscious being what we are aware of at any point in time, and the subconscious mind being everything that we register and store in our mind, but are not consciously aware of.

Your conscious mind is your thinking mind, and it’s here where all the information received from your outside world enters. Your conscious mind makes the judgment to allow or deny the concept of entering your subconscious mind. Imagine it like a filtration system, and once the conscious mind accepts the information, it’s impressed into the subconscious.

When you need to think about something in order to do it, it is a conscious process.

But when we practice something over and over again, the conscious mind downloads that information to the powerful subconscious mind, which then handles all those sorts of things and they become almost automatic - an easy, habitual, behaviour.

So you learn something, you practise it, you relegate it to the subconscious mind, the subconscious takes over that function for you - and then you get access to it on automatic pilot.   Now some of these habits and behaviours are useful - like driving a car, locking your doors, or reading and writing. But some of those habits and behaviours, of course, are not useful - such as smoking, or overeating, or phobias, or panic attacks.

Your subconscious mind is responsible for all of the body’s automatic functions and runs the majority of your life for you. It handles all of the learned behaviours so that you don't need to think about the things that you seem to do on auto-pilot. All your habits, life-lessons, principles, beliefs, values, morals and more have been processed by your subconscious mind throughout your whole life. 

Your subconscious mind sometimes locks in patterns of behaviour when it has observed some sort of benefit for you (e.g. a cigarette that helps you breathe slowly and deeply when you are stressed or in shock, a shot of vodka to calm your nerves, etc.). Whatever we program into the subconscious mind will become an automatic function that is no longer under our conscious control, even when we want to regain that control.

You may have tried previously to change unhealthy habits or unwanted programmed responses with conscious willpower; but how hard is that?

You see, the reality is we become hardwired to actually protect those old habits, because it’s the job of the subconscious mind to hold onto them. It doesn’t easily forget, or let go of something, that has been locked-in. It holds onto our behaviours to protect us, make our lives easier, and keep us alive. You don’t unlearn something that you have programmed in without affecting the subconscious mind. And the subconscious mind does not analyse whether it is a good or bad habit, response, or program (because that is more a conscious value judgement). It simply observes and accepts how that behaviour made you feel at the time, and runs that program and holds onto the habit to protect us.

The subconscious mind never forgets. That's why when you consciously try to break a bad habit, the subconscious mind holds onto it. And it feels like there's a battle, or a tug-of-war, going on inside. Because that is virtually what is happening - an inner conflict between the conscious and the subconscious mind.

Whenever you try to stop smoking or lose weight, or break any of those unwanted habits or responses, the conscious mind may be trying to release it – but the subconscious mind holds on. So it naturally follows that when you want to make changes to these programmed patterns and behaviours – the changes need to be made at a subconscious level. And this can be most effectively and efficiently achieved through hypnosis.