Understanding the Subconscious Mind And How It Impacts Your Habits and Behavior
Meta Description: Discover how the subconscious mind shapes your daily habits and behaviors, and learn actionable tips to reprogram your subconscious for lasting change.
The human mind is often compared to an iceberg. The small portion visible above the surface represents our conscious awareness, while the vast majority—hidden beneath the water—symbolizes the subconscious. This comparison aptly illustrates how much of our daily lives, behaviors, and habits are influenced by forces operating outside of our immediate awareness.
Understanding the subconscious mind is essential to gaining insight into why we act the way we do and how we can make lasting changes to our habits and behaviors.
The subconscious mind plays a crucial role in our daily lives, impacting everything we do. From our automatic habits, like brushing our teeth, to emotional reactions, like yelling at ourselves when we mess up, almost all of your behavior is controlled by the subconscious.
Unlike the conscious mind, which actively processes information, the subconscious mind works in the background, guiding behaviors based on deeply ingrained patterns, experiences, and beliefs. This is why understanding the subconscious mind is essential for personal growth and self-improvement.
In this post, I’ll educate you on how the subconscious mind impacts your behaviors and habits, and offer some tips and strategies to help you reprogram your subconscious for positive change.
What is the Subconscious Mind?
As a therapist, who specializes in trauma work, I understand how powerful the subconscious mind is in how we see ourselves, how we see the world, and how we see our place in the world. Oftentimes, it’s not good. So what is the subconscious mind?
The subconscious mind acts like a powerful storage system. From the moment we are born, we are given information and experiences that help shape how we learn to live in the world.
As babies, we are sponges, observing everyone around us.
We are exposed to love (or not), nurturing (or not), and beliefs. We are exposed to whatever our caretaker chooses to expose us to. And these experiences, and messages become the basis of our understanding of the world. The subconscious mind is formed by what those around us fill us with. And as time progresses, we integrate experiences and form beliefs and opinions.
And without the guidance or support of a caretaker, our brains often create negative messages. This is why trauma in childhood is so impactful. If a traumatic event happens, and we are not given the support, connection, nurturance, or understanding to make meaning about the event, we often form negative self-beliefs about ourselves.
Even when trauma never occurs, as infants we are constantly bombarded with messages that shape us. From the brand of bread that you buy to the beliefs you have about people, hard work, education, health, community, and/or society, those beliefs have bee
Our subconscious holds memories, beliefs, and past experiences that then influence our habits and our actions. While the conscious mind deals with logic and active thought, the subconscious operates passively, affecting everything from daily habits to emotional triggers.
This hidden part of the mind is responsible for many automatic behaviors, such as driving a car, responding to situations based on previous experiences, and even maintaining deeply rooted habits—both good and bad.
How the Subconscious Mind Impacts Our Behaviors and Habits
The Role of the Subconscious in Habit Formation
Many of the daily habits we engage in and beliefs we have about the world are the result of subconscious programming. When you repeat an action or thought over time, it becomes ingrained in your subconscious mind. The repeated nature of these actions over time allows you to perform them automatically. It becomes like the drive-thru of life.
For example, brushing your teeth every morning or reaching for your phone first thing in the day are habits that operate on autopilot, thanks to your subconscious.
Do you remember how difficult it was when you first started driving? And now you can get from Point A to Point B without even thinking about it. That’s the power of the subconscious. It takes over to help us become more efficient.
But what if those habits or beliefs are unhealthy, destructive, or just plain wrong?
Breaking a habit or forming a new one requires consciously addressing this deeper layer of the mind.
Be warned though, the subconscious DOES NOT LIKE change.
It favors familiarity and routine, even if it consciously creates negative consequences. This is why leaving a bad relationship, quitting a bad job, or sticking to a new diet can feel so hard.
This is why when people in your life say, “Why can’t you just follow through”, I can see beyond just simple behavior change. Habit formation is such a complex process. The more a behavior is repeated, the more likely it is to become part of your subconscious mind’s programming.
Emotional Triggers and Automatic Reactions
The subconscious also stores emotional associations and can trigger automatic responses to specific situations or stimuli. If you’ve experienced a traumatic or negative event, your subconscious mind may react with fear or anxiety in similar situations, even if there’s no present danger.
For example, someone who experienced a childhood fear of public speaking after being laughed at may still feel anxious when speaking in front of others, even as an adult. This automatic reaction is an example of the subconscious mind influencing behaviors based on past emotional triggers.
Limiting Beliefs Can Cause Self-Sabotage
One of the most powerful ways the subconscious mind impacts our lives is through self-sabotaging behaviors. These are actions that conflict with your conscious goals and desires. For instance, if you consciously want to save money but repeatedly overspend, it could be due to a subconscious belief that you don’t deserve financial security or success.
These limiting beliefs, often formed in childhood, create subconscious barriers that make achieving your goals more difficult. Reprogramming the subconscious mind is essential for overcoming these negative patterns and creating lasting change.
Reprogramming the Subconscious Mind: How to Change Behaviors and Habits
Below are several tips and strategies to incorporate into your life before you start to think about setting goals. You must begin to focus on changing your subconscious mind so that the habits and behaviors you want to change have the opportunity to successfully root and grow. Try all or some of these for 30 days and see what happens.
1. Observe, observe, observe
The first step to making a shift is to focus on seeing yourself differently. You must begin to notice your current habits. From the first things you do in the morning, to the food that you eat, to the content you consume, what you do on the way to work, how you talk to those in your house, how you dress, everything should be up for observation. To change, you must first begin to see yourself and your habits. This is the blind spot we often overlook. What are your current beliefs about the thing you want to change? What is your attitude about the thing you want to change?
For example, let’s say that you want to lose weight. It is not enough to just observe what you’re eating. You can easily say that you need to eat better. But what are your beliefs about losing weight? Is it hard? Are skinny people mean? If you lose weight’ you’ll never be able to eat fun food ever again. Focus on observation.
2. Journaling: Uncovering Limiting Beliefs
Journaling is an effective way to uncover the hidden beliefs and patterns stored in your subconscious mind. By writing about your thoughts, feelings, and experiences, you can identify the limiting beliefs that are influencing your behaviors.
Through self-reflection, you can challenge these beliefs and replace them with healthier alternatives. For example, if you discover that you hold a subconscious belief about not being worthy of success, you can actively work to change this belief through journaling and affirmations.
Daily journaling, focused on writing three pages, every morning, helps your subconscious come to the surface. It will attempt to self-sabotage you, distract you, berate you, and dissuade you. Let it.
At some point in the process, thoughts and beliefs will begin to contradict themselves, and you have an opportunity to challenge the current beliefs with ideas, thoughts, and beliefs that you do want to have.
By focusing on journaling in the morning, you help to exhaust the current beliefs and then open the door the implementing and integrating new beliefs, new thoughts, and new habits before the old ones have a chance to automatically go to work.
3. Visualization: Creating Mental Blueprints
Visualization is another effective method for influencing the subconscious mind. When you vividly imagine achieving your goals or successfully performing a desired behavior, your subconscious begins to accept this as reality. Visualization helps create a mental blueprint for success.
This technique is especially effective for changing your perception of your current reality and overcoming fears. When you play out a best-case or worst-case scenario in your mind, you can develop the insights to change your actual behaviors in the real world. Perhaps you want to imagine how a mentor or someone you admire would address the issue and you can visualize them giving you advice on how to make change.
Whether it’s visualizing yourself having career success or seeing yourself in excellent health, these mental images guide your subconscious toward behaviors that support these outcomes.
4. Affirmations: Shifting Your Self-Image
A crucial step to making shifts in your life is to focus on seeing yourself differently. You must begin to see yourself as someone worthy of the life that you want to live and believe in your ability to accomplish the goals.
Affirmations are a powerful way to overwrite negative beliefs stored in the subconscious mind. By repeating positive statements about yourself or your goals, you can create a new narrative that your subconscious accepts over time. Imagine the years of comments, beliefs, and behaviors that you have been subjected to.
One or two daily positive affirmations are not going to cut it. You need to repeat the new beliefs and attitudes over and over and over again. Imagine that it might take a year to repeat something over and over and over again before the shift starts to happen.
For example, if you struggle with self-confidence, repeating affirmations like “I am confident and capable” or “I can do hard things” helps reprogram the subconscious mind to believe in your abilities. The more you repeat affirmations, the stronger the new belief becomes, allowing you to act in ways that align with your goals.
Think about how many times you've seen a commercial and without you even being aware, you can repeat the jingle in your head. That's the power of repetition.
*Side note, these affirmations have to produce an emotional response for it to be effective.
5. Mindfulness and Meditation: Becoming Aware of Subconscious Patterns
Mindfulness and meditation are powerful tools for bringing subconscious patterns into conscious awareness. By practicing mindfulness, you can observe your thoughts and emotions without judgment, gaining insight into how your subconscious is influencing your actions.
Unlike simple observation, as noted above, mindfulness allows you to slow down and focus in greater detail on how you do things. It’s one thing to notice what you do when you first wake up, but could you identify in the most minute detail how you do things? How do you brush your teeth? Is it with your left hand or right hand? How do you shower? Do you shave first or lather up?
By observing these things, you can become curious about how you developed some of these habits and challenge whether it’s effective. A big one I notice personally is around meals.
People will often eat lunch at noon and never notice if they are hungry or not. Why noon? Why do you always eat the same thing or go to the same place? And often the response is “I don’t know, it’s just what I’ve always done”. These small awarenesses become the stepping stones towards making change.
Meditation allows you to quiet the conscious mind, making it easier to access the subconscious and influence it positively. Over time, regular meditation practice helps you stay present and aware, giving you more control over automatic responses and ingrained habits.
6. Hypnotherapy: Accessing the Subconscious for Change
Hypnotherapy offers a direct route to the subconscious mind. In a relaxed, meditative state, the hypnotherapist helps you access your subconscious and make suggestions that align with your conscious goals. This method is particularly effective for overcoming deeply ingrained habits like smoking or anxiety triggers.
Many people find that hypnotherapy accelerates the process of change, allowing them to make significant shifts in their behaviors and habits in a shorter amount of time.
Conclusion
The subconscious mind is the driving force behind many of our actions, habits, and emotional responses. While it operates outside of conscious awareness, it can be reprogrammed through intentional effort. Techniques such as observation, journaling, affirmations, visualization, mindfulness, and hypnotherapy offer practical ways to influence the subconscious and bring about lasting change.
By understanding the power of the subconscious, we gain insight into why we behave the way we do and how we can change unwanted habits. Reprogramming the subconscious is the key to aligning your actions with your conscious desires, leading to personal growth and transformation.
The subconscious mind has a profound impact on our lives, influencing our habits, behaviors, and even our emotional responses. While it operates silently in the background, it shapes our daily experiences in powerful ways. By learning how to reprogram the subconscious mind, you can break free from limiting beliefs, form new habits, and take control of your behaviors to achieve lasting change.
If you are interested in working with me, to reprogram your subconscious, join my private group, where I work in small groups with people to help them achieve their personal goals.
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