What is the subconsicous mind?
The subconscious mind is responsible for generating over 90% of our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and behaviors, yet it often gets overlooked. It’s an operating system that has been running since we were in the womb. Its main functions is to collect, permanently store and retrieve data of everything that’s ever happened to us like one-big-giant memory bank. In fact, it’s the only system we run on until the age of 6. It helps us absorb everything we see and hear like a sponge, permanently shaping our young minds. Believe or not, it’s only between age 6 – 8 that we develop the analytical mind, aka the conscious mind that’s responsible for logic, reasoning, will power and capability to make our own decisions.
In addition to being a memory bank, our subconscious mind obeys every command from our conscious mind like a humble servant without question. It works tirelessly 24/7 to form patterns consistent with our behaviors from repeated thoughts, like an internal algorithm. Think of your conscious mind as the ‘gardener’ planting seeds, and your subconscious mind as the ‘garden’ in which the seeds grow. What your subconscious mind grows, weeds or flowers, highly depends on the mental contribution from your conscious mind. However, the overall state of the subconscious garden can also influence what kind of seeds the conscious gardener will continue to plant.
How does it influence our daily lives?
Our subconscious mind is truly a remarkable system and can work highly in our favor when we know its inner functions. However, it can also easily take over our lives if left on auto-pilot. Because our subconscious mind is always practicing homeostasis, it keeps us thinking and acting in a manner consistent with what we’ve done in the past to maintain a stable, constant internal environment. It memorizes all of our habits and comfort zones, and works really hard to keep us in it, even if it no longer serves us in our personal growth. That’s because the subconscious mind cannot think for itself or reason independently, it’s merely an internal software.
So, imagine yourself as a vulnerable child, where a particular situation caused you to feel immense disappointment and emotional pain. As a coping mechanism, you learned to avoid such situations in order to feel safe. Overtime, this becomes an established pattern of behavior, your programming. It starts to manifest in areas of your life where you’re unable to trust, takes risks, open up to others or be emotionally available. You even avoid things, people and situations altogether that has this ‘potential’ possibility of the past. Therefore, you stay in your comfort zone where it may feel safe, but in actuality it’s your subconscious programming that’s limiting and blocking you from living your best life.
Is it possible to overcome our subconcious programming?
How we emotionally view and react to any given situation comes from years and years of subconscious programming. Majority of them are false and no longer valid because they were formed in a state when we were vulnerable children. So in order to make any meaningful change in our lives we must recognize these subconscious patterns, and start to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. It’s the only way we’ll ever break the pattern! We must recognize whenever we want to do anything new or different, our subconscious mind will make us feel emotionally and physically uncomfortable because it goes against our established patterns of behavior.
However, we are much greater than our subconscious programming, greater than any emotional and physical subconscious response. Forming new habits with higher awareness and competence is the beauty of being an empowered adult, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. We are no longer that vulnerable, defenseless child. We have the power to tap into our subconscious to become aware of our old existing programmings, form better habits, new comfort zones and let go of what no longer serves us so we can finally be the highest version of ourselves.