What is the Subconscious Mind

The subconscious mind operates below conscious awareness, working in the background and influencing your thoughts, actions, feelings, habits and behaviors.

Your subconscious mind stores your memories, habits, beliefs, experiences and emotional responses. It plays a major role in shaping how you react to situations.

Because it processes information automatically. it can strongly influence behaviors without you consciously thinking about or being aware of it. Repeated ideas, habits and thoughts are strengthened in the subconscious through repetition, you can find out more about this in my article what is hypnosis.

How Your Subconscious Perpetuates Your Problems

Therefore, the subconscious mind can make you feel very unhappy and restricted in life if it is full of negative memories and feelings. The subconscious part of your mind is constantly absorbing new information; therefore, actively and deliberately influencing this part of your mind can overcome and change habits, fears and phobias and negative emotions.

Sometimes people refer to the unconscious mind but they mean the subconscious. Think about tying your shoelaces or driving a car, we do these things automatically a lot of the time. Things like this run in the background without needing constant conscious attention and being fully focused on those activities. This is the subconscious part of your mind working for you and making things easier.

How to Deliberately Influence Your Subconscious Mind

Think of all the changes you could potentially make to those automatic reactions. If you have always had social anxiety for example, all of those experiences where you were perhaps forced to be in uncomfortable situations they all add up in the subconscious to reinforce your dislike or fear of social situations. The subconscious part of your mind reinforces fear by bringing anxiety back every time. It always remembers to bring the feelings of fear and anxiety doesn’t it?

Imagine if you worked hard at steadily desensitizing yourself from your social anxiety. Imagine working on giving your subconscious mind positive memories and feelings about social interaction. Gradually your reactions would be affected by this new, updated information. The automatic response of anxiety might become just a slight discomfort and gradually a neutral feeling.

How the Subconscious Mind Works in Hypnosis

Hypnosis works by helping you access and influence the subconscious mind in a relaxed and focused way.

In this state of hypnosis, it becomes easier to introduce positive hypnotic suggestions that are designed to help you change habits, emotional responses, thoughts and behaviors.

You can learn more about this in how does hypnosis work and what does hypnosis feel like.

The Subconscious and Hypnosis

When using hypnosis it is always done with the intention of influencing and affecting the subconscious mind. Of course the conscious mind also hears some or all of what is said but we always hope the subconscious has absorbed some of the helpful suggestions. This is why sometimes it take a little while to get a result, especially if the problem or habit or reaction is deeply ingrained in the subconscious mind. In this circumstance a lot of repetition would be necessary to get a good result.

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If you would like to understand more about hypnosis you may find these helpful:

• What is hypnosis
• How does hypnosis work
• What does hypnosis feel like
• Is hypnosis safe
• Can anyone be hypnotized

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