Using Your Subconscious Mind
I want to talk to you about your subconscious mind and show you how you can use its power.
The human mind is made up of 2 parts – the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious mind is the part that you’re aware of – it handles our day-to-day activities of living such as checking emails, attending meetings, creating schedules, shopping, cooking dinner, practically organising our lives etc. However our subconscious is constantly operating in the background, influencing our short and long-term habits, perceptions and responses to the world around us.
According to neuroscience, the subconscious mind is around 500,000 times more powerful than the conscious mind with a capacity to process 20 million bits of information per second!
Our subconscious mind is a deep reservoir of thoughts, memories, beliefs and emotions that exist beneath our conscious awareness. You can think about it as a hidden engine – a supercomputer working tirelessly in the background shaping our thoughts and influencing our behaviours and decision making. And our subconscious never sleeps – it’s awake 24/7/365 constantly assimilating and processing information – even while we sleep.
It’s the part of the mind that takes place outside conscious awareness. Estimates suggest that 95% of brain activity is subconscious, and that this activity influences many aspects of our lives, including decisions, actions and behaviours.
So for anyone at all, understanding the subconscious can be very helpful for sustainable wellbeing. Our subconscious can either be a valuable ally in helping us to successfully manage our lives, or a formidable adversary contributing to mental fatigue.
I wonder, why aren’t we making more conscious use of our subconscious? We’re certainly able to do so, and in doing so it can benefit us enormously. However, tapping in to its resources isn’t common practice, and as far as I know, it’s certainly not taught in schools!!!!
Let me describe to you a way to actively use subconscious to your benefit:
Have you ever had the experience where you’re stuck with a problem and you just cannot come up with a solution to solve it? Finally, you decide that you’ve done enough thinking about it for one day and you’ll just simply go off to bed and ‘sleep on it’. Then the next day you waken up and miraculously, you have a lightbulb moment! You have a solution! You know exactly what you can do to remedy the problem! You even start to ask yourself why you didn’t see this answer before?
This phenomenon occurs when you’ve been over-thinking in your conscious mind and unable to create space amongst the clutter of thoughts to see a logical conclusion. However, when you’ve lain down to sleep and allowed your conscious mind to relax, this gives space for your subconscious mind to process the information, assimilate it, disregard the chaff, identify solutions and come up with an answer for you.
However, here’s a way that you can actively call on the power of your subconscious – if I have an issue that I can’t resolve, before I go to sleep at night, I consciously hand it over to my subconscious – I identify the problem and ask it to process the problem overnight as I sleep and bring me answers in the morning or during the day. It’s important to precisely ask the subconscious in this way.
In my experience, it invariably does, but I know that some people have tried this method and found that it didn’t work. So I want to give you my considered wisdom in this matter – you may have thought this technique didn’t work for you because:
- You didn’t clearly instruct your subconscious mind and ask it to give you solutions.
- You weren’t listening so you missed it – you forgot you’d set the question and you just started about your day.
- You did get an answer but you were doubtful of this method so you shrugged it off.
- You got an answer you didn’t want!!!!!!
However, getting an answer you don’t want can inspire you to consider an alternative point-of-view and may actually be very helpful in a roundabout way in reaching your solution. Or on reflection, you realise that the answer you didn’t want is actually the solution!!!!
The mind works in miraculous ways!!!
Are you struggling with challenges in your life? Fed up with the repetitive pattern of negative thoughts & behaviours? Get in touch for a free discovery call.