How the Subconscious Mind Works

Your subconscious mind is far more powerful than your conscious one. By learning how to train and use your subconscious mind, you will be able to control your behavior, break bad habits, get rid of unwanted emotions and fix your belief system. To use the power of your subconscious mind you must first know how the subconscious mind works. The subconscious mind has many governing rules.

Rules of the Subconscious Mind :

The subconscious mind does not differentiate between visualizations and real situations: Have you been to a horror movie lately? If you have, then you must have noticed how your pulse raced in fear and horror despite being in no real danger. In simpler words, because your subconscious mind does not differentiate between real and imagery situations, it assumes that you are facing a real threat rather than a merely imagery one. Now, with such knowledge, you can start using it to your benefit. Suppose you had to give a presentation. If you properly visualize your presentation a couple of times before you actually have to present it, your subconscious mind will more or less believe that you've performed so well in your previous 'presentations' and is thus more likely to keep up the same level of performance in the next one; the real one.

Your subconscious feels that time passes faster: Have you ever wondered why time always seems to fly whenever you're doing something fun? It's because you don't keep looking at your watch every few minutes, something you would have probably done if you were in a situation where you bored out of your mind. Consequently, you'd be experiencing the passing of time 'unconsciously', and because the subconscious mind doesn’t have a sharp sense of time, you'd feel like you've hardly spent any time. The same would happen when you're asleep; when you go to sleep, it is only your conscious mind that is in fact sleeping while your subconscious one stays awake. That’s why you feel like you've hardly had time to sleep when you wake up.

The longer the subconscious mind believes something, the harder it will be to alter this belief in any way: If you have a longstanding belief, it will definitely be more difficult to alter than a recently formed one.

Every thought causes a physical reaction: If you think that you are going to do badly in a presentation, your pulse and breathing would start to race as soon as you start talking. These physical changes are caused by that one thing; the idea or thought.

What you expect tends to be realized: If you are sure that you are going to fail an exam, you will indeed fail even if you have all it takes to succeed. Your thoughts and expectations serve as the master plan for your subconscious mind, so whenever you think of something, your subconscious mind will do its best to make it come true.

Finding proofs to your held beliefs serves to strengthen them: If you believe that you were not good-looking and someone makes a remark confirming your suspicion, you would probably be convinced beyond doubt that what you believe is true. That in turn would make altering your belief much more difficult.

The subconscious mind always prevails in conflicts with the conscious one: If you are afraid of the dark and you passed into a dark room, you will definitely feel fear, apprehension and anxiety swell within you, even while you try to convince yourself that there is nothing to be afraid of. This is the result of the subconscious mind being more powerful than the conscious one; it will dominate your thoughts and basically "win" any conflict with your conscious mind.

An idea, once accepted, will remain firmly in place until it is replaced by another: For example, up until the fifteenth century, people believed that the earth was flat. When it was proved that the earth was a globe, the people of that time simply accepted this new fact, replacing the old belief with the new one.

The greater the conscious effort the lesser the subconscious response: This can be best explained by the example of someone suffering from insomnia (inability to sleep). Consciously trying to sleep will only make this person even more awake. By avoiding conscious effort and thinking of anything else instead, he/she would find that they will eventually fall asleep.

Suggestions can be used to "program" the subconscious mind: This is the main idea behind hypnosis, namely sending suggestions to the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind accepts all suggestions that are sent, providing the absence of the conscious mind's supervision.