Conscious vs Unconscious Parts of the Mind
There are 2 parts to our brains: the conscious and the unconscious minds. The conscious takes up 5% of daily thinking, while the unconscious (or subconscious) deals with 95%. Let's look into them.
Conscious:
The conscious parts of our minds are logical, analyzing, dealing with daily tasks and critiquing. It is the part of our mind that sets goals and accomplishes them, finds motivation throughout the day, it’s our willpower, our focus, it makes decisions using logical thinking and rationalizing. It also judges and critiques and filters out everything happening to us and around us from our external world - people, places, events, our 5 senses. It can also only handle one task at a time. Our conscious mind is what we are aware of, while the unconscious is everything else.
Unconscious:
The unconscious handles everything we are unaware of and can multitask. It handles our breathing, digestion, all our other bodily functions, body temperature, as well as our emotions. Habits get stored here as well and become part of the auto-drive of the unconscious. Think back to when you first started driving, most young, new drivers are on high alert and take every cautionary step necessary. Now think about your driving now, it's probably more relaxed. You don't have to put so much thought into driving and can think of other things, your unconscious knows green means go, yellow means slow and red means stop. Any habit such as this is stored within your unconscious.
Along with habitual patterns as stated above, our way of thinking can become habitual too. Our minds enjoy complacency and security in what is comfortable. However, it is important that if and when you book a Hypnotherapy session, you start paying attention to your thoughts and stop any sort of negative self-talk in it's tracks. Our unconscious minds take everything literally and have no sense of humor, the more negative things we consciously say to ourselves, the more it believes them and makes it true. From this moment on, when a negative thought appears, become aware of it and place that belief or thought in the past. Then follow it up with a positive, empowering thought. This helps prime the unconscious mind for change. An example is, "I know I can't do it, I have failed before, and I will fail again." Start reframing your thoughts and say, "I may have failed in the past, but I can learn from those mistakes and choose to keep going. I can do this." Suggestions that encourage growth and optimism open up the unconscious mind to change instead of telling it what it already believes to be true.
The unconscious also works like a data bank or computer and stores every single past experience or memory of you within it. Due to these memories, it stores our taught and adopted values, our accepted beliefs and also our identity and how we see and describe ourselves. The unconscious mind stores these beliefs and values through what we have experienced.
The conscious mind thinks it’s running the show, but it’s actually filtering out information through the unconscious. It’s helpful to understand that the unconscious is infinitely more powerful than the conscious and it is your ‘inner protector’. Its primary function is to prevent you from getting hurt and it learns and remembers rules and behaviours in order to do exactly this. So when new situations and new stimuli are coming in, your conscious mind checks to see if it is a yes or no situation, and accepts or rejects that thought or belief as true or false. “Does this match up with what I believe and hold true to myself? Is this safe, based on my past experiences? If yes, keep or experience. If no, discard and move on.” Once again, what this is doing is - it is protecting us from harm, and our minds use discernment from previous experiences or beliefs, and it also establishes and reinforces one’s sense of self. In the same way it can be helpful in dangerous situations, it can actually be the opposite and be limiting if we are wanting to enforce a new habit or new belief and our minds are telling us no.
Each client that comes in for a session is presenting with a 'unconscious’ problem. If the problem were a conscious one, they would have decided to change it there and then and be done with it. They might consciously want to pick up a new habit or quit one, but their unconscious has very different ideas based on its own set of rules and ideas. Change cannot happen when only the conscious mind wants change, the unconscious mind also has to accept it. We must get the unconscious mind to get on board with the changes the conscious mind wants in order to make change. Once we are able to do this, we are able to create new, strong neural pathways that replace old limiting beliefs or habits with more aligned, positive ones.
