Bruce Lipton once said: “Our thoughts are mainly controlled by our subconscious, which is largely formed before the age of 6, and you cannot change the subconscious mind by just thinking about it. That’s why the power of positive thinking will not work for most people. The subconscious mind is like a tape player. Until you change the tape, it will not change.” This article shows you the crucial difference between your subconscious and your conscious mind and how you can “train” it, so that it works for you and not against.
The conscious and the subconscious mind can best be compared to an iceberg.
Your conscious is the part of the iceberg that is above the water’s surface and that you can see.
Among other things, it is responsible for new experiences, learning processes, daily tasks, and conscious perception.
Yet, the larger part of the iceberg, your subconscious, lies below the water’s surface and is therefore invisible.
It stores your beliefs, your previous experiences, your memories, your skills. Everything that you have seen, done or thought is also there.
It is also your guidance system.
As soon as emotions have you under their control or so-called “trained programs” (compare it to computer programs which run, as soon as a certain button is hit) run through your mind, and your consciousness simply shuts off. Yep. Just like that. Your subconscious takes over the steering wheel for a time.
Let me give you an example:
As a novice driver, remember how you had to think hard about when to turn on the indicator, or how to change gears, or how long the braking distance will be? But after just a few weeks of driving, you began to have plenty of days when you didn’t even remember how exactly you got to work. Now, you can easily talk in the car without worrying about having to slow down or change down a gear while driving towards a red traffic light; you still do all the things you need to do to control the car, but the difference now is that your subconscious is active.
It controls your car while your consciousness can deal with other things, like a conversation with another person.
A humongous task to master
Without this control from the subconscious, you would have a humongous task to master, because every second around 40 million bits of information are reaching your brain!
These are transmitted to the brain by just as many sensory cells in the body. These include the sound of the engine, the click of an indicator, the honking of other cars, the visual perception of the approaching traffic lights and the intersection, your sitting position, your foot movement when releasing the accelerator pedal, your hand movement when downshifting and much more.
Your consciousness can only orchestrate a tiny part of that mental activity, because it can only manage around 20 bits simultaneously.
The rest has to be left to the autopilot, your subconscious mind, for sheer lack of computing power.
Those were a quite some numbers, but what exactly do they mean?
Well, let me give you a better picture:
Imagine you have a couple of rice bags and in each bag, there is 1kg which is approx. 2 pounds.
One of these bags has around 50.000 rice corns.
Yep, I counted them.
No, not really. 😉
But imagine you have 800 of these bags and you throw them onto one big heap.
Can you imagine that?
These are your 40 million bits of information that your subconscious receives EVERY SINGLE SECOND! That can be the temperature in the room, the things you see, how your small toe feels like right at this moment to the noises around you or how the consistency of the food is, that you are eating.
And now you pick around 20 rice corns out of that heap.
These are the 20 bits that are conscious to you.
These are the ONLY things that are conscious to you!
Nothing else of that heap.
That is not much, right?
And on top of that, while your conscious mind is the logical, analytical part of you, the subconscious mind is completely illogical.
It is the emotional part.
Most of the time we just take the way we think and feel for granted and we don’t see that there are 2 different parts in us.
We normally don’t see this discrepancy between logical and illogical.
I came across this discrepancy rather unfortunately in my life.
I was 22, living in a nice and cozy apartment together with my boyfriend, who is also my husband by now. At that time, we both studied at the same university. It was late at night, I was lying in bed, sleeping.
My boyfriend was lying next to me, also deep asleep.
He woke up because something was not right.
He found me twitching spasmodically next to him, with foam coming out of my mouth and my eyes were rolled back, so that he could only see the whites.
I have no memory of that at all.
What I had was an epileptic seizure. A so called Grand Mal seizure.
The first one only left me sore all over my body because of all the spasm.
Unfortunately, two weeks later I got another two of them in one night. And those ones did some major damage to my brain.
My long-term memory: at least some parts of it – gone.
I came across a picture where I am standing underneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris for New Year’s Eve and I have absolutely no memory of even being there at all.
I also don’t remember my first vacation with my husband. It’s gone.
My short-term memory: shattered.
I had to learn for exams and although I normally memorized things pretty easily, I had major issues getting that stuff I needed to reproduce into my head.
And I failed a couple of tests twice. If I would have failed a third time, I would have been expelled.
I still have big issues remembering faces and names. If you see me next time, and I ask you for your name, please don’t be annoyed with me.
They just don’t want to stick in my head.
That is one of the reasons, too, why my talks and seminars are all completely scripted. I have to use my notes, otherwise I can’t give them.
But the worst part for me was, that somehow the barrier between my conscious and subconscious was thin. And with thin I mean REALLY thin.
Emotionally, I was reacting like a small child. Whenever someone said “no” to me, I started crying. Like kids do, when you say no to them. (I have two at home, so I know what I’m talking about 😉 …)
That is definitely not fun when you visit an authority to apply for your passport and they tell you, that they can’t do your passport today, because the machine for pictures is not working.
I remember sitting there, talking to that lady and crying at the same time.
Telling her, to ignore my tears running over my face. I felt completely embarrassed.
While my conscious mind told me, that what I am doing there – crying – is completely ridiculous, my subconscious just didn’t give a shit. Sorry for that word, but there is no other one to describe it better.
So, sitting there on that day, I caught a glimpse of this discrepancy between logical and illogical.
Again: Most of the time we just take the way we think and feel for granted and we don’t see that there are two different parts in us. But believe me, there are! And our subconscious one is basically running our lives through everything that is stored inside – If we are surrounded by negatives all the time, it will respond with negativity. If we have beliefs about ourselves like: “I am not good enough”. “I am unworthy”, “I will never be…”, then these believes come true.
However, the amazing thing is, that we can influence not only the conscious part, but also the subconscious one!
How do you get started?
You don’t believe me?
Then, let’s do a small experiment…
Think about it: Which shoe do you normally put on first? The left one or the right one?
Good question, right? You probably had to think about it for a while. Why?
Well, it is not a conscious task for you. You have been putting on shoes thousands of times in your life. This routine is now deeply ingrained into your subconscious mind.
By the way, you normally always put on the same shoe first!
For this small experiment please concentrate a couple of days on putting the other shoe on first.
At the beginning it will be hard. You really have to concentrate on it. After a while you’ll find yourself confused of what to do first and then there will be days, where you’ll just put on the other shoe first without thinking about it.
I highly encourage you to try it out.
You will see, in no time, the new routine will be ingrained in your daily life 😉
But what does that have to do with personal development?
Well, here is the thing:
As you can see with the shoe experiment, you can easily “teach” your subconscious mind to work in favor for you. But you need to be crystal clear on the goals you want to achieve and communicate this to your subconscious mind!
This can be done for example via hypnosis, affirmations, and visualizations – all techniques I am using in my seminars, too, to empower you to build the life you really want to live.
In the next blog article, I’ll tell you more about all three techniques.
So, stay tuned.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hi, I’m Caydee Schwarz and I write about personal development, success and happiness.
Let’s be honest: all of us want to live a happy life and fulfilled life. And every day, a lot of us fail in our attempt to get there. Our thoughts, the right inner attitude and the right knowledge empower us to create our life according to our wishes. Knowing what our mission is and what makes us truly happy is the foundation to a happy and fulfilled life. I’ll help you lay that foundation – so you can live the life you want.