Written by: Nadija Bajrami, Senior Level Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Let’s talk about the subconscious mind, how it can be defined, its role in our lives and how hypnosis can help us to harness its power to move forward with confidence.
“The power of our subconscious is beyond all measure.”
“As you sow in your subconscious mind, so shall you reap in your body and environment.” Quotes by Joseph Murphy (The Power of Your Subconscious Mind)
A lot of people think they can control their behaviour and actions in life by having self-control. Are you one of them?
The truth is, you can hardly control your actions by self-control only when you consider the driving force behind each action.
Before taking any action or making a decision, we usually use our conscious mind, or what we call our rational mind. We associate a lot of our habits at each point in time to our conscious mind. These habits are not only products of our conscious initiatives though as our subconscious mind also plays a key role in making most of our decisions. Habits fuelled by your subconscious mind are beyond what you can control.
In order to change your habits to help you move forward in life, you need to understand the difference between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. You also need the right techniques to reprogram your mind for positive thought patterns and habits to help you overcome any limiting beliefs and create the life you want.
We know now that our mind operates on two different levels – the conscious and the subconscious. Both have an important roles to play in our lives and they are always working in conjunction with each other.
First, let’s see the specificities of both the conscious and the subconscious minds.
Defining the conscious mind
The conscious mind involves all the things you are currently aware of and are thinking about. It is anything that is in your current awareness. The thoughts and feelings you are experiencing at the moment, and your awareness of your current environment are all part of your conscious experiences. The conscious mind is limited in capacity and can only do one task at a time. For example, we might be aware of our breathing, the physical sensations in our body, our environment, or the people around us.
Defining the subconscious mind
The subconscious mind is the habit mind. The subconscious mind oversees critically important, yet rather mundane tasks such as breathing, sleeping, and organ function. But it is also the powerful layer beneath our conscious awareness which is holding on to all the information driving our thoughts, beliefs, actions and behaviours.
Examples of subconscious activities are word processing, tying your shoes, and driving ‒ things we do habitually.
We can also mention our ability to drive a car: once we pass our driving test and know how to drive a car, we stop thinking which gears to use, which pedals to press, or which mirror to look at… Our subconscious mind just knows how we should operate while driving.
But there is so much more to the subconscious mind.
The Subconscious can be compared to a huge database, data-bank and a giant memory bank for everything, which is not in your conscious mind. It stores your beliefs, your previous experience, your memories, your skills. Everything that you have seen, done or thought is also there. It is a record of your past. It permanently stores everything that ever happens to you, and its capacity is virtually unlimited. It is also your guidance system. The subconscious mind rules approximately 95 percent of our life, hence it playing such an important part in our life. All of the memories, emotions and beliefs about everything you have ever experienced get stored in the subconscious mind. These are like programmes saved on your computer.
Its capacity is virtually unlimited. Our brains have developed the amazing ability to download a large amount of information. By the time you reach the age of 21, you have already permanently stored more than one hundred times the contents of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The subconscious mind is millions of times more powerful than the conscious mind.
Why is the subconscious mind so important?
The subconscious mind controls basically… Everything! We might think that we are consciously in charge and in control of all that we do daily but that is not really the case.
As previously mentioned, the subconscious mind drives 95 percent of our human experience which means that we only use about 5 percent of our conscious activity during the day. The rest is all happening beneath the surface and that is what is running the show.
Most of our thoughts, emotions, decisions, and behaviours happen automatically on a subconscious level. This becomes our subconscious programming. And let’s face it, for many of us, the programmes running in our subconscious mind could use a little updating. Because much of what we hold subconsciously sabotages what we consciously want to create.
So, if you want to experience real, sustainable change in your life, this is the key that unlocks that potential. Knowing how your subconscious works mean you get to take massive control of your life.
The subconscious mind, our faithful servant
The subconscious makes sure that you respond exactly the way you have been programmed to. It makes everything you say and does fit a pattern consistent with the programmes you are holding. The programmes could be positive negative or neutral. The subconscious mind does not know the difference between imagination and reality, and it merely obeys the commands it receives from the conscious mind. This is the reason why it is crucial to feed our mind with thoughts that will serve us and that will be for our higher good.
I often use the garden metaphor with my clients when I am explaining the conscious and subconscious minds. The conscious mind is the gardener that plants the seeds; the subconscious mind is the fertile soil that allows them to grow. The subconscious mind will faithfully obey any commands from the conscious mind. It is a faithful, unquestioning servant that works relentlessly, making sure it stays in alignment with what is known and familiar. The subconscious mind either grows flowers or weeds depending on what programmes we feed it.
Where do our subconscious programmes come from?
As previously mentioned, the subconscious mind being that large memory bank only replays what it has learned from everything that happened to us. Every time we experience something or something that happens to us, it becomes a subconscious programme and the brain creates links, pairs and associations with what you see, hear, feel, taste and smell.
The majority of these links and programs stem from our early life experiences, primarily before the age of 7. During the first seven years of life, the brain is designed to download programs simply by observing other people (mostly our primary caregivers, loved ones and the community we live in).
This occurs in a theta brain state which is similar to a state of hypnosis because consciousness does not really start until around age 7.
So, 95 percent of what drives us during the day is coming from programmes we downloaded in our childhood and these programmes were mostly influenced by other present in our lives. As these programmes are deeply embedded in our subconscious mind, they keep running in the background as we grow up and affect our adult life.
When we consciously decide to move towards our goals and dreams and create something different in our lives, we often struggle because we are operating from these programmes which we have inherited from other people. The programmes become hardwired in our subconscious mind and control most our life unless we work at changing the programmes that no longer serve us.
How do our subconscious programmes affect our daily life?
Have you ever felt unworthy, not good enough or just discouraged as despite all the efforts you are putting towards your goals, you end up sabotaging yourself at every turn? You feel you have tried everything but still seem unable to move beyond these feelings, this inner negative talk or self-sabotage. This shows that you are experiencing conflict between the two minds.
If you’re not where you want to be in life, no matter how much willpower and techniques you have applied, chances are you have subconscious programmes keeping you firmly stuck where you are.
If you are struggling to achieve your goals and move forward, the reason is that somehow, somewhere along the way, a decision or belief was made that you are unworthy, unlovable, based on something you saw, learned, or experienced earlier in life. And this will be the driving force behind your current response (even if it does not necessarily make sense).
The subconscious mind, being our habit mind, wants to keep you safe and is resistant to change and firmly keeps you into what is known and familiar.
You can, however, create powerful shifts in the subconscious and change the course of your life to replace outdated programmes by new more positive ones which will help you increase your self-confidence, boost your self-esteem and move towards your goals with confidence. And this is when hypnosis becomes an extremely powerful tool and modality to help you shift your mindset and reprogram these subconscious beliefs.
What is hypnosis and how it can help us reprogram our subconscious mind?
As an award-winning, fully qualified, and accredited hypnotherapist, I can say that hypnosis is a very powerful modality to help you replace any blocks or limiting beliefs that keep you stuck.
Hypnosis is a safe and natural state of relaxation with an increased level of awareness during which you are not asleep and are fully in control. You will experience a pleasant state of mind with increased attention and focus. The hypnotic state is similar to some moments in your life when you are daydreaming or fully absorbed in a specific activity like reading for example.
There is absolutely nothing to fear as therapeutic and clinical hypnosis is totally different from stage and entertainment hypnosis and as you remain in control, you will never be asked to do anything foolish or against your will. For the hypnotherapy session to be successful, the hypnotherapist must have your consent, collaboration and full commitment as the purpose is to help you reach a feeling of being more in charge and in control of your life.
While in a relaxed state of mind, new information can make its way into the subconscious which transforms old beliefs and thought patterns. Hypnosis delves into your subconscious mind to plant positive thoughts and suggestions, which can create meaningful and lasting changes in your thought process. Hypnosis replaces the old with the new. Changing your thinking will change your beliefs, fears, desires, habits, and anything that creates resistance when achieving new things.
It is not a passive process. You are actively participating by communicating your goals and what has previously held you back in the past. These goals are to be truly yours, no matter what you desire to obtain or achieve. If you are trying to satisfy social pressure, then hypnotherapy will not help you. The process is about you, your cooperation, your consent, and your participation.
More and more of us are beginning to understand how important the subconscious mind is in both helping and sabotaging our efforts to change and be happy. It is widely accepted that most of what we do and what we think is directed by the subconscious. In effect, we spend most of the day on autopilot, our past experiences shaping our responses, moment to moment.
When working with a qualified hypnotherapist, you will learn to reframe your thoughts and feelings around any trying or traumatic experiences you went through.
As a hypnotherapist I believe I work in a profession which is fantastically placed to help people align with what they really desire in life, appreciate themselves and see their true potential.
The memories of the trying or traumatic events and experiences we went through can be extremely painful to deal with and can be really debilitating. Our brain tends to work as a coping mechanism and store these difficult or traumatic moments deep within our subconscious.
Hypnosis cannot help you completely delete these bad memories. When you face a trigger that brings you back to a difficult or traumatic experience or event, you become faced with the hugest urge to get it out of your head. However, the harder you try, the more the memories end up coming back into your conscious mind.
It is during these tough moments that we would like to just delete these memories. As previously mentioned, hypnosis cannot free you of these difficult or traumatic memories, but it is a very powerful tool and modality to help you heal from these trying memories and move forward.
What your mind does as its own form of coping mechanism is it takes your negative, emotionally charged memories and pushes them into your subconscious as a means of protecting you from re-experiencing the pain and trauma. This is what is commonly known as repression. As we may know from experience, the emotions from these memories can be resurfaced from a trigger, which often causes a rollercoaster of emotions and can also create complete paralysis in our minds.
When you force yourself to suppress a recent painful memory, the memory is recalled. You then add more importance to the memory as the emotions are being re-triggered.
Hypnosis will help manage those memories in a more productive and healthier way.
Memories, with their associated thoughts and emotions, are adaptable and flexible, making us open to suggestions and more able to accept small changes to some of their original meaning.
You can change what a particular memory means to you, how you feel about it, and how you respond to it when you create and attach new pairs and associations and narratives to that memory.
Hypnosis is your reframing tool to change and “re-edit” the memories in your mind and your negative pairs and associations with a memory.
Hypnosis will help you change how you remember rather than the “raw” memory itself, by releasing the emotional response to the memory you release the symptom.
Using hypnosis, we plant new seeds in your subconscious mind which will then take root and grow. When that happens, you can take pleasure in knowing that your subconscious mind is working for you.
And once those changes are completed and have become part of your mental processes, these changes will emerge into consciousness in the form of a new feeling of confidence, belief and acceptance that you are becoming the best that you can be.
This is when you become the driver of your life, move towards our goals with confidence and optimism and take care of the vehicle that is in your mind.
Hope this gives you a better understanding of the subconscious mind, how it can be defined, its role in our lives and the power of hypnosis to harness its power to move forward in life with confidence.
Nadija Bajrami, Senior Level Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
French by birth, Nadija has lived in Scotland for 7 years and has traveled the world. After recovering from some serious health issues, Nadija had a wake-up call and came to Ireland to find her path. She has been living in Dublin since 2017.
Nadija is an empowerment specialist and holds a double diploma in Hypnotherapy, Mind Coaching, and online therapy.
She is dedicated to helping her clients get empowered, supercharge their confidence and self-esteem, overcome their limiting beliefs as well as manage anxiety, and symptoms of traumatic experiences and help people on their grief and healing journey through her therapy, coaching, and spiritual work.
