Conscious vs Subconscious Mind: Which Part is Actually Driving?

Your subconscious mind stores everything you experience and learn.

Take riding a bike or driving a car. When you’re first learning, it takes a lot of energy and attention, but, once you’ve mastered the art of it, you can do it without thinking. It becomes effortless. This is because your subconscious mind memorises and then takes control of the task at hand. For example as you drive you are consciously looking for dangers and watching the road but after years of driving you do not have to actively think about indicating (for some anyway haha), braking or changing gears.

One way to understand the conscious and subconscious better is to think of your mind as split into two rooms with a door in between the rooms. The conscious mind being one room and the subconscious being the other room. You’re sitting in your conscious mind most of the time, you can see the door to the other room, but it's closed unless you choose to open it.

So, when you go to ride your bike or drive your car, you will open the door to let your subconscious take the task at hand. Sometimes, the door will swing open without your permission (so to speak), such as when you slip into a daydream. When we do hypnotherapy we actively open the door to the subconscious mind. Despite there being two rooms, the subconscious is always subtly influencing us under the surface. It is the subconscious keeping us alive as we do not consciously think about breathing, the heart pumping blood around the body etc. We like to think we are entirely in control of our choices, but we are often far less in control than we realise.

For example, how many times have you consciously said to yourself, "I will stop this tomorrow," or, "I will start that on Monday"? The conscious mind plans and has the best intentions, but the subconscious only likes what it deems as familiar. You can have all the conscious will in the world to change, but your subconscious mind will find reasons to keep you repeating what you know because it is familiar and comfortable.

It's clear how easily and frequently we flick between our conscious and subconscious, and we know the subconscious holds everything we have ever learnt and experienced. This includes the way limiting beliefs and automatic patterns form, which ultimately shape our daily behaviour, habits, and even our emotional reactions.

So, we can use this to our advantage when we are interested in working towards a goal, breaking a habit or understanding ourselves better. We can access our subconscious mind to see what might be holding us back or address a pattern we wish to break free from. We can alter what is being stored in our subconscious in order to pave the way for a brighter future.

Hypnotherapy communicates with the subconscious, allowing us to suggest things to our subconscious to help us manifest our conscious desires. To find out more about this, you’ll find an article about hypnotherapy in my blog.