What is the subconscious mind?

What is the Subconscious Mind?

The subconscious mind, also known as the unconscious mind, is a part of our mental processes that lies below the level of conscious awareness. It is a reservoir of thoughts, emotions, memories, beliefs, and desires that influence our behavior and experiences.

While the conscious mind represents our immediate awareness and logical thinking, the subconscious mind operates beneath the surface and has a significant impact on our thoughts, feelings, and actions. It plays a vital role in shaping our perceptions, motivations, habits, and automatic responses to various stimuli.

The subconscious mind is responsible for storing long-term memories and processing information at a rapid and intuitive level. It also influences our emotions, instincts, and intuition. Many of our beliefs and attitudes, formed through past experiences and social conditioning, reside in the subconscious mind and can influence our behavior and decision-making without us consciously realizing it.

Hypnotherapy and other techniques such as meditation and visualization aim to access and work with the subconscious mind to bring about positive changes. By tapping into the subconscious, individuals can gain insight, resolve conflicts, release emotional blockages, and create new patterns of thinking and behaving that align with their desired goals and well-being.

10% of the mind is the conscious mind responsible for logical, analytical, linear thinking, will power. The subconscious mind constitutes the other 90% which is responsible for our, beliefs, emotions, habits, automatic bodily functions, all memories, etc. This is the key to the success of hypnotherapy which in a state of deep relaxation we are able to tap into the subconscious mind and bypass the critical factor of the conscious mind. In this state we are better able to problem solve, think creatively and access parts of our thinking that we don’t access as easily in our waking state.

“The conscious mind involves all of the things that you are currently aware of and thinking about. It is somewhat akin to short-term memory and is limited in terms of capacity. Your awareness of yourself and the world around you are part of your consciousness… the subconscious mind, includes things that we might not be presently aware of but that we can pull into conscious awareness when needed..[the subconscious] is a part of the mind that corresponds to ordinary memory. These memories are not conscious, but we can retrieve them to conscious awareness at any time.”

(The Role of the Conscious mind, Verywell Mind, 2019, Kendra Cherry)