Rewire Subconscious Mind’s Reality
My clients come to me for one thing and one thing only. They are seeking the change they are looking for that they haven’t found in talk therapy and psychiatry. They want to live a life where their internal psychological suffering isn’t just managed or suppressed with medication. I imagine if you’ve found my website and blog post, you probably want to do the same. You are searching for a guide on how to rewire your subconscious mind.
However, I imagine just like them, you might be skeptical of hypnotherapy. You might not understand why it works or why it’s gotten so popular since the millennium. Maybe, you aren’t sure how it works or what the subconscious mind is. You might have seen videos of hypnotists giving commands to people while they appear to be asleep. You might think this is the only type of hypnotherapy that exists or is the most powerful form.
All of that is okay. Today, I’m going to dive deep into what exactly the subconscious mind is, why it matters so much to you, and why hypnotherapy is so powerful at creating change in people’s mental health.
What Is Your Subconscious Mind
To rewire your subconscious mind, you first have to understand what it is exactly. It is best to think of it as a supercomputer in your head that’s creating this experience we call reality. It represents 90% of your mind’s processes, depending upon what body of psychology or neuroscience you read. The subconscious mind is the domain of…
- The nervous system. It is creating the changes in the neurochemical state that we call emotional shifts.
- Regulation of the body. It is automating your digestive system, breathing, heart rate, sleep cycles, etc, etc.
- External reality. It is processing all the sensory data from your eyes, taste buds, nose, skin, and ears to create the physical world you live in. It processes all this sensory data to determine what objects in your environment are of value or threat.
- Internal reality. It is creating memories and automatic thoughts in your head which tell you what the objects in your physical reality mean. They can be either an object of value or threat.
- Behavior and habit. It learns behavior and automates it with habit to allow the body to work on autopilot without the need for conscious control.
- Protection of the body. It uses the nervous system and automatic behavior to reflexively protect the body. It will take control away from the conscious mind to protect the body when under threat.
- Social hierarchy. The mammalian part of the subconscious mind works off the principle that we need to be in a group for the body to survive. It is constantly regulating our social relationships to ensure our place in the tribe. It responds to threats to our relationships similar to threats to the body, but not as intensely.
- Purposes and values. These are your unique purposes in life and what you value as a person about these purposes. This is the area of the mind that sets one purpose down the path of being a musician while another down the path of being a sports player. It is largely concerned to be unchangeable. I have yet to find a hypnotherapy book with techniques that attempts to change a person’s values.
- Memories and beliefs. These are your personal experiences. Your memories are data for the subconscious mind. It’s how your mind determines what things and people in your environment are of value to your purposes or a threat to your purposes. When the mind decides a certain object is a value or threat and begins to fire off the nervous system automatically in response to it, we call this a “subconscious belief”.
It’s best to think of the subconscious mind as everything automatic or outside of your conscious awareness as a human. It is the part of the mind that is not only creating the game of life but also communicating the rules of the game to you through positive and negative emotions.
What is Your Conscious Mind
Now, that we understand the subconscious mind, we need to understand the conscious mind that is going to rewrite your subconscious mind. The conscious mind is you. You are the player in this game of life being created by the subconscious mind. The conscious mind represents the other 10% of the human mind that exists to manage the other 90% of the mind.
- Observer of the external reality. The conscious mind is aware of the physical world created by the subconscious mind.
- Awareness of the internal reality. The conscious mind receives memories and automatic thoughts from the subconscious mind and interprets them.
- Reason and logic. It receives emotions, memories, and automatic thoughts, analyzes the physical world with reason and logic, and decides whether or not they are relevant to the present moment.
- Willpower and decision. The conscious mind is the ultimate controller of the body. The emotions, memories, and automatic thoughts from the subconscious mind are just suggestions. The conscious mind can override the automatic behaviors of the subconscious mind.
- Imagination. The conscious mind uses imagination to train and manage the subconscious mind’s emotions and automatic behaviors.
- Focus. The conscious mind controls what the mind ultimately focuses on.
In other words, the conscious mind is the pilot of the body and the receiver of all this data from the subconscious mind. You are the conscious mind.
Rewiring Your Subconscious Mind Requires Respect
To rewire your subconscious mind, you have to understand you are an animal trainer working with a very powerful and strong tiger. The subconscious mind is exponentially more powerful than the conscious mind. It is creating the reality the conscious mind lives and operates in. This might be a bit jarring for most people because our minds work off an illusion that the conscious mind is the more powerful one. However, this is an illusion.
All control the conscious control has over the body is given to it by the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind can override conscious control by increasing emotional intensity. Neuroscience has shown the parts of the brain sourced to cognitive functions begin to darken out and go dim when emotional arousal increases. “Knee jerk reactions” are an example of the subconscious mind taking control of the body.
It even can control focus. The conscious mind has ultimate control over focus, but the subconscious mind can redirect focus automatically toward objects of value or threat. It does this through the reticular activating system to make the conscious mind aware of important things it’s detected in its environment. This is why we look at car wrecks when we drive by them and men reflectively look at women’s cleavage.
It’s important to understand the power the subconscious mind has to understand why traditional talk therapy and self-help don’t always work. These fields attempt to create change by working through the conscious mind via reason, decision, willpower, and logic. This is very limiting in its effectiveness, because of the limitations of the conscious mind. True change has to be created subconsciously with the subconscious belief structures determining the nervous system fires off in a certain way in a certain situation.
Rewire Your Subconscious Mind’s Belief Structures
The moment-to-moment internal reality being created by the subconscious mind is a stream of every shifting neurochemical state tied to narrative. We experience emotion in a certain situation because our subconscious mind believes a certain narrative about the situation. If you experience social anxiety, it’s because your subconscious mind has a narrative stored in memory about how social situations are threatening or dangerous. This narrative creates the emotional state of anxiety you experience when you go to social events. This narrative and emotional state is what is making social events anxiety-inducing to you, not because they are threatening or dangerous. Therefore, to rewire your subconscious mind, you have to rewire the narrative.
And it is rewritable. The fact that it is rewritable is at the heart of human adaptability. It’s also self-evident. A couple that has sailed for 20 years gets caught in a horrible storm. After they get back to land, they are overcome with an intense fear that prevents them from getting on the boat. A man with a drinking problem almost dies in a car accident and never drinks again. A man with unhealthy habits witnesses his child being born and changes his ways.
All of these examples have one thing in common. They are events involving emotional experiences where the subconscious mind internalized new narratives about the world. The events don’t involve a hypnotist barking commands at them. They involve shifts in emotion, and shifts in the neurochemical state that are the key to the mind internalizing new ideas and growing.
Hypnotherapy Allows For the Internalization of New Ideas On Demand
Advanced hypnotherapy works by working with the true catalyst for growth and change: emotion. It works by taking people into hypnosis, guiding them back to the root causes of their undesired emotional state, re-processing that emotion, and taking new positive lessons.
For social anxiety, this means revisiting the memories where a person learned social situations are threatening, processing that fear, and taking new lessons about social situations that better serve them. With general anxiety and trauma, it means revisiting the traumatic events and discharging the emotion, so the mind can learn they are over and the nervous system no longer needs to activate. For depression, it means grieving the painful events behind the depression and taking the positive lessons that allow the mind to move into a new positive life.
This form of hypnotherapy is powerful and consistent in all clients because it doesn’t simply make suggestions for change. It works with the subconscious mind and nervous system directly to harness its natural system for creating change. This is why I deliver consistent results to every client whose case qualifies for my work.
If you enjoyed this post on how to rewire your subconscious mind, you might find these posts on reframing negative self-talk, lack of motivation, and learned helplessness to be helpful as well.
