In this article, you’ll find answers to popular questions about the unconscious mind.
The reason I decided to dive into the unconscious is to get a better understanding of how we can uncover things that shape our behaviour whose presence we are unaware of.
One of the main questions I’m trying to answer on this blog and I’m helping my clients every day with is how to overcome limiting beliefs that stop us from reaching success.
You will find a lot of resources out there on how to change your limiting beliefs but you can change a belief only after you have uncovered it and realised that it’s sabotaging your success. That’s why I preach that self-awareness is probably the most valuable skill to have and the good news it can be developed.
I’m planning to be updating this guide so in case you wish to be notified when I’ve gone deeper into the unconscious (at least consciously!), please subscribe below:
Table of Contents
Conscious VS Unconscious
The distinction between conscious and unconscious mind has long exercised psychologists and philosophers.
Consciousness is first person’s subjective experience:
I am aware of this. I see this. I feel this. I understand this. I realised that…
Right now you are using your conscious mind to understand this article (your conscious mind is your thinking mind).
But you’re also using your unconscious mind to read every sentence including this one:
Waht is The Dfifeercne Bweeetn the Cnoisucos and Uinoscocnus Mnid?
As long as the first and last letter are in the right order, changing the order of the letters in between doesn’t affect your capacity to decipher the words in a sentence such as the one above.
Your conscious mind contains all your thoughts, memories, feelings that you are aware of at any given moment.
The unconscious is everything that happens in your brain outside of your awareness.
It’s important to understand that our conscious and unconscious minds are not located in two different areas in our brain. When neuroscientists perform all these MRI’s and brain scans detect activity in different parts of the brain but that activity is associated with both conscious and unconscious information.
The Different Types of the Unconscious
We tend to throw a lot of things into this basket that we call unconscious. I’d divide unconscious into five different types:
- There is unconscious stuff that’s happening in a different place or behind my back that I have no awareness of. My brain isn’t even processing that information as it doesn’t have access to it.
- There are people who are unconscious (not fully awake) when they are in a coma or under anaesthesia.
- The neurophysiological unconscious. I’m sure you are not conscious of how your kidneys work in your body every day, or how you experience pain, or what specific area of your brain is active right now.
- The cognitive unconscious: Anything that became part of your psyche without you being aware but it can emerge to your conscious mind through cognitive reasoning and explanations. (This is the stuff I’m interested to bring to my clients’ awareness as a coach.)
- The psychodynamic unconscious: This is the Freudian unconscious with all the repressed memories, feelings, early age mental content that ‘doesn’t make sense’ and explains why humans such complex psychological beings.
Why Do We Need the Unconscious?
Most of the tasks we perform throughout the day are being driven by our unconscious mind. If we were to use our conscious mind for everything we do, it would be overwhelming, energy inefficient, and maladaptive.
When you drive home after work you’re not consciously aware of every time you change gear or constantly thinking each and every action like ‘I’m now going to turn my head to the left, I’m now going to press the break halfway down, I’m now going to check the mirror’. If you did all that with your conscious mind you would arrive at home exhausted every day. That’s why when you were learning to drive, you could feel your head burning after an hour of practice because you were driving with your conscious mind. 🙂
And not only would it be more energy-consuming, but it would mess the task up, you wouldn’t be able to do the task as efficiently.
The unconscious has a tremendous capacity for storing and hard-wiring information. You can see this information as executable computer programs in your unconscious that you load into your memory and let them run and perform tasks for you on auto-pilot.
Can you imagine a pianist ever being able to finish a sonata by repeatedly thinking ‘what should be the next note’?
Can you think of what it would be like to have to remind yourself to breathe all the time?
And by the way, which part of your brain do you think helps you to figure out where the edges of your bed are so you don’t fall off when you’re sleeping? Correct — that’s the unconscious!
The unconscious mind is fast, spontaneous and hard-wired for survival.
When you instinctively cover your head with your hands and bend down in the case of sudden loud sound or explosion, it’s the unconscious that drives you. If you had to think and process all that’s going on, it would be too late — you would be dead already.
Why Would We Want to Reprogram our Unconscious?
Our unconscious helps us to do all these automatic things such as drive, read, walk while chewing gum. It helps us survive and takes care of all the physiological tasks that happen in our body automatically. All that is the functional behaviour of the unconscious.
But at the same time, our unconscious undermines us by doing irrational and unhelpful things.
Imagine you’re scared of public speaking. You are at home enjoying your cup of tea and you bring to your memory the last time you gave a presentation at work. Your heart starts pounding as if you’re now giving another presentation in front of the whole department! How bizarre!
Or although you know that cheese can’t take your life, every time you see a slice of cheese you freak out and want to run away! (There is such a phobia by the way and it’s called tyrophobia).
These cases have to do with some dysfunctional behaviour of our unconscious mind.
Psychologists have found that spontaneous behavioural patterns traced back in your childhood or teenagehood are much more strongly encoded than patterns adopted in adulthood.
And all that makes you wonder… Why is it so difficult to convince yourself that you shouldn’t worry about public speaking when you are at home and you haven’t got any public speaking scheduled? Why is it so difficult to convince yourself that there are no threats or tigers around anymore?
What complicates the thing is what we call emotion. The unconscious mind is something like a black box that runs in the background, records everything that you experience and these recorded experiences come back as warnings in the form of emotions every time your unconscious recognises a similar experience. You know it’s totally irrational but that doesn’t stop you from feeling the warning, ie. having that emotional experience.
You can see the unconscious as the survival brain that prioritises your survival over anything else and the conscious as the executive brain, the thinking, rational, new, evolutionarily-developed brain. Life experiences are a constant negotiation between these two brains:
⚠️ I think you should go home now and forget this talk! What if you faint? What if they laugh at you? What about your status?
👍🏼 Listen, everything is going to be OK. I’ve done this before. I’ve done my preparation. It will be fun!
How Does Something Gets Repressed into our Unconscious?
David Hawkins says in his book Letting Go:
When we repress a feeling, it is because there is so much guilt and fear over the feeling that it is not even consciously felt at all. It becomes instantly thrust into the unconscious as soon as it threatens to emerge. The repressed feeling is then handled in a variety of ways to ensure that it stays repressed and out of awareness.
But how exactly does a memory gets repressed? A possible scientific explanation is that the prefrontal cortex (part of our developed brain) increases its activation and deactivates parts of the brain that are involved in memory such as the hippocampus to keep that memory outside of awareness.
Techniques such as hypnosis, mindfulness, meditation have been found to decrease the activation of the prefrontal cortex and let that repressed memory release again and rise to the level of consciousness.
Once this memory reaches our awareness we can restructure and give it a different, or more positive meaning. So the whole point is to release that memory and rework it, reintegrate it into the system in a more positive way.
What is the Difference Between the Unconscious and the Subconscious?
I bet you are more familiar with the term subconscious rather than unconscious.
When I first tried to answer this question for myself I lost one day of my life or more. I’ve probably suppressed that experience so deep into my unconscious because of how painful it was!).
This is the best article/explanation that I managed to find. And it makes perfect sense to me now after having read a few academic papers on the unconscious.
And I’m saying unconscious because that’s the right term to use and this is what psychologists, therapists, and neuroscientists use.
The term unconscious in psychoanalysis was firstly introduced by Freud referring to feelings, memories, and mental content outside of conscious awareness.
As the author of the article above says:
In most of the professional literature where mental functioning is concerned (including not just psychoanalysis, but also psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience, among others), writers—like Freud—tend to use the word “unconscious” rather than “subconscious.” Although the word “subconscious” continues to appear in the lay literature, it is rarely defined carefully and may or may not be synonymous with “unconscious.”
Even Freud himself used unconscious and subconscious interchangeably in the beginning but he eventually stuck with unconscious.
It is surprising to me that people are still trying to make a clear distinction between the two terms unconscious and subconscious even on well-respected online sources.
Well, actually it shouldn’t be surprising as it’s an innate characteristic of the human nature to see differences especially when it comes to slight differences or a debate on ‘what’s the difference’!
It looks to me that people who make a distinction between the two terms have derived their conclusions after unconsciously being influenced by a linguistic point of view (the actual words) rather than a scientific one.
Anyway, I may be unconsciously doing the same myself right now! 😃
From what I found, those who’re trying to distinguish the two terms make a point that the subconscious is not as unconscious as the unconscious and they make an analogy with repressed and suppressed feelings. So, the subconscious is something that you consciously try to ignore (the same way you purposely suppress unwanted feelings) whereas unconscious is something you have no clue of (like repressed feelings that were pushed out to your unconscious without your slightest awareness).
So, you can use subconscious if you want (I’m sure I’ve used subconscious on this blog if I do a quick search right now) but you can stick with the unconscious.
Neuroscience VS Psychoanalysis (or Unconscious Brain VS Unconscious Mind)
In this guide, I’ve probably used the term unconscious brain and unconscious mind interchangeably and unconsciously!
The field of neuroscience looks at the brain and the nervous system from a more scientific point of view, ie. areas of the brain, electric signals, neurons (nerve cells in our brain), chemical imbalances, etc. That’s why you will hear the term unconscious brain from neuroscientists.
Psychologists and psychotherapists focus on someone’s psyche — soul, mind, spirit. They look at someone’s behaviours and try to fix any dysfunctional behaviours through psychotherapy, conversations, hypnosis and other forms of therapies.
We tend to see psychoanalysis as art and neuroscience as science, but it’s the same thing. You can’t separate art from science. There is art in science and science in art. For example, there is definitely a scientific explanation behind why hypnosis works even though we don’t have that explanation yet.
It’s the same as trying to separate body and mind. You can’t—these things go together. That’s why a new field is emerging that is looking at the brain/mind combining neuroscience and psychoanalysis — the field of neuro-psychoanalysis.
How to Set your Unconcious Up for Success
How do I rewire my unconscious mind for success?
How do I make the unconscious an ally when working on my vision?
Here are my top tips:
Tip #1: Protect your Conscious Mind and Give it Proper Food
Your conscious mind is the guard of your unconscious. You don’t have much direct control over your unconscious but you can choose to consume content and information that will drive you to your vision.
You may wish to go on an information diet and spend less time on social media, stop watching films that are passing the wrong subliminal messages to our unconscious. Only then will we be able to create the space for unconscious beliefs to rise to the surface and build awareness of what we need to change and what we want to do with our lives.
We have a short amount of conscious attention and we have to be very selective when it comes to what we feed our brains with.
That applies to the people we choose to interact with. Hang out with the right people who will feed your unconscious with their own empowering beliefs and help you to walk towards your vision.
Tip #2: Your Brain is another Muscle — Exercise it!
The brain is another organ like a muscle. If we exercise it, it will go in a certain direction. Practice meditation, mindfulness exercises, journaling.
Your unconscious loves images. Practice visualisation. Close your eyes and spend a few minutes every day visualising yourself having achieved your vision. Create detailed pictures of what you do and how your life is different when you have achieved your goals. What’s the impact that you’ve had on other people’s lives by achieving your vision? Visualise all this for a few minutes every day.
Create some space in your calendar for these exercises. You never forget to brush your teeth. Take care of your brain too. Make it a habit.
Tip #3 – Find the Right Coach, Therapist, or Anyone Really!
Human beings are vastly similar and vastly different. Not all treatments, therapies or techniques work for everyone. Until neuroscience gives us all the answers one has to experiment and try different things.
Here’s something else that I’ve found to be true from experience that always fascinates me. There is something that cuts across all these different types of therapies, an unexplained element of the treatment and that’s the relationship with somebody that’s having these effects whether you’re getting coached, having CBT or DBT or psychoanalysis, etc.
Probably the biggest factor is not the technique itself but the relationship you’re having with one person in particular, either that is a coach, a therapist or someone else. It’s that person’s care, the alliance you form together, their empathy, the connection that produces the results.
So talk to people, speak to 10 coaches until you find the right one. As a coach, I understand that I can’t help everybody. I connect with some people more than others. And I don’t mean that I become friends with them. It’s the chemistry, the relationship, the resonance in our frequencies.
And remember that human connection can support coaching! Or I should better say that this is one of the reasons why coaching works. Because a deep conversation and connection between human beings can be therapeutic and transformational.
All for now, Angelos
P.S. If you want to have a conversation with me to make unconscious stuff conscious but mostly look at what’s possible for you… enter your email below and reply to the message that you will receive. Let’s talk.