March 2, 2026 • 42 mins
We like to think we’re making conscious choices all day long - but a lot of what drives our reactions, habits, and gut feelings happens outside of awareness. The conscious vs. unconscious mind is a useful way to understand why you can know what you want, and still do the opposite. In this episode, we break down what the conscious and unconscious mind actually mean in psychology, where the idea came from, why it can feel unsettling to face, and how to build more influence over your impulses and automatic patterns.
We explore:
• The difference between deliberate thinking and automatic processing
• Freud’s topographical model
• The importance of the unconscious mind
• The responsibilities of the conscious and unconscious
• How to spot unhealthy unconscious patterns
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Our favourite sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/bookseries/abs/pii/S0065260106380021?via%3Dihub
https://acmelab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/1999_the_unbearable_automaticity_of_being.pdf
The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is
so great to have you here back for another episode
as we of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today,
I have something really fun and scientific for you guys.
So if your favorite episodes of the podcast and when
we kind of go deep into concepts and deep into research,
(00:50):
you are going to love today's topic. And even if
you don't, I still think this is one of those
ones you should definitely listen to because it will tell
you all much about how you operate, your behaviors, your
decision making while you make decisions that you don't always
actually want to make rationally, because today we are talking
(01:11):
about the conscious versus unconscious mind and the role each
of them plays in our lives and why we kind
of again yeah, make decisions that feel bizarre and hard
to justify while we have these reactions that come out
of nowhere, and yet we still keep doing them, and
(01:33):
we can't quite figure out how to change. This is
the unconscious mind. This is the part of our existence
and how we interpret the world. We're going to really
drill into today. The idea that there are parts of
us operating outside of our deliberate rational control is not
a new idea. What's just changed over time and over
(01:54):
the years is how we explain it. And we cannot
talk about the unconscious versus conscious mind without doing a
little bit of a history lesson first. So long before
we had these words that I think we use so
often these days, unconscious, conscious, subconscious, A lot of brilliant
ancient thinkers were describing basically the same thing, this feeling
(02:17):
that we as humans are split between what we know
rationally and how we choose to behave emotionally. This goes
like all the way back to like Plato and Aristotle
and Spinosa, who basically distinguished between what they called intuitive
passions or appetites and then on the other hand, deliberate reason. Plato,
(02:41):
for example, I like this metaphor. He described the human
soul as having three parts, and he kind of described
it as if we are sitting behind a chariot and
the chariot represents us and represents our reason, and we
think we're the ones that are guiding it, but really
what's guiding the chariot are these two horses were guided
(03:01):
by these two in his mind, two winged horses. One
represented nobility. It represented our emotional and social knowledge and
our desire to be good and to be reasonable and rational.
And then the other horse represented like our wild side
like it represented our desire and the appetite of like
(03:23):
the unbounded parts of the soul. That is a very
early representation of how we might now view our rational mind,
and how we might also view our impulses and emotions
or our I guess beliefs, or our social behavior, each
of them leading us in different directions. If this sounds
(03:47):
familiar to Freud's idea of the ego and the super
ego and the id, it's because it is. Freud took
a lot of his ideas from Plato and some of
these ancient thinkers. He is obviously one of the most
famous psychoanalysts of all time. And yeah, he based a
(04:07):
lot of his work and the foundation of a lot
of his theories on some of these metaphors, and he
kind of took those initial ideas and tried to format
them or flashed them out even more. And in his mind,
the mind is divided into three parts, the conscious mind.
So what you're aware of right now, you know, I'm
sitting in this room, I'm looking around, There's a microphone
(04:29):
in front of me. I'm recording my podcast. My pre
conscious mind things that are kind of just sitting below that.
I want to talk about, where this idea is going,
what I have to do next, how my mood is
being impacted by things that happened earlier this morning, and
then the unconscious mind material that to him is kept
(04:52):
out of awareness but is still influencing you. So you
may have seen this, especially in like psych one oh
one classes, represented as an Iceberg. That's a pretty classic
way of representing it. I still remember having that Iceberg
diagram in my psyche textbooks. But all of these things,
the conscious, subconscious or pre conscious and unconscious or kind
(05:14):
of work together to form the person that we know
as ourselves. One thing Freud really emphasized though, was the
role of dreams in being able to basically understand what
the unconscious mind is doing below the surface. So in
his mind, like we could never directly know what's happening
(05:38):
happening unconsciously in our mind. He basically said that dreams
are one of the only ways of really being able
to understand what's going on. He wrote a whole book
about it. It's literally called The Interpretation of Dreams. He
also claimed that you know, our dreams fulfilled our unconscious wishes.
So like, if you want to be famous, your dream
(05:58):
may your dreams may reveal to you how you should
do that. Or you know, if you feel guilty, your
dreams may reveal to you how you're not or how
you should forgive yourself. He also says they reveal what
we desire most and what we fear the most. Some
other ways that he said we could get in touch
(06:19):
with the unconscious mind were the famous Freudian slip artwork
repressed memories. These days, we know that's all probably less
than accurate. There may be some slight truth to it,
some slight truth to our dreams kind of working out
some deep emotional wounds. But Freud did get a lot
(06:40):
of stuff wrong. I think he did the best that
he could with what he had. But he's still a
controversial figure. And this is a great place to kind
of shift gears and talk about what we know about
the unconscious and conscious mind now in the modern day,
with a bit more technology, with a bit more scientific
experimental practic going on. Pretty simply, the conscious mind, in
(07:03):
psychological terms, is the set of mental processes that you
can deliberately direct, what you can hold in awareness, what
you can reason about, what you can talk about, what
you can see. The big thing about the conscious mind, sorry,
is that it's relatively slow. It's very intentional effortful. It's
kind of limited in its capacity as well. So for example,
(07:25):
you can't you really can't juggle more than a couple
of things in your conscious mind at any one time.
It's why we're bad at multitasking. It's why we get
mentally overwhelmed. It's why you say things automatically you don't
really mean when a lot's going on around you. I
like to think of your conscious mind as like the spokesperson.
(07:46):
It is the person that, like the company puts in
front of the cameras, who is like reading off the
script that the unconscious mind has given it. Or it's
kind of more like it's putting together a speech from
a bunch of dot points that the end conscious mind
has given it. It has some decision making powers, It
directs a small amount of information. It definitely applies a
(08:09):
lot of reason, and it interprets the small things that
the unconscious mind gives it. But beyond like directing impulses
and directing things around you, it also doesn't completely Your
conscious mind cannot be aware of absolutely everything. It's just
(08:34):
responsible for constructing the story of who you are based
on what it has access to. Just basically, it interprets
your human experience for you, but it doesn't always have
a good grip on everything that's going on in kind
of the back offices of the mind. Right again, think
(08:54):
off this spokesperson or CEO analogy. Let's use the ceo analogy.
The CEO may be upfront, but she is like nothing
without the staff whose jobs she can't possibly do or
by herself, and she can't possibly be aware of everything
that's going on in the back offices all the time.
That's the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is just the
(09:16):
front man. There's a lot going on behind the scenes.
One key aspect that the unconscious mind is responsible for
is rapid evaluation that our conscious mind just isn't quick
enough for you know whether something is good or bad,
whether something is safe or unsafe, whether to approach or avoid,
how to react in a situation of danger. Before you
(09:37):
consciously decide how you feel about a situation, or even
about someone's tone, or their physicality or their presence, your
body often already knows automatic evaluations. They are what help
us really move quickly in social and physical environments. You know,
for example, if you meet somebody and you instantly feel uneasy,
(09:59):
but you can't explain why. That's your unconscious mind, Like
your mind has picked up on subtle cues like microexpressions
or a mismatch between their words and their tone without
conscious awareness. It's like that feeling in your gut right interestingly, actually,
maybe not a surprising fact for many people, but women
(10:21):
are better at this. Women are better at unconsciously picking
up on these microexpressions. It was a study in twenty
twenty that basically gave participants a bunch of portraits of
people either with an authentic or an unauthentic, non authentic smile.
Women were picking up on that incredibly quickly and with
(10:45):
much higher accuracy. This is because your unconscious mind is
also responsible for always kind of having this idea of
like what are we going to do next? Or action preparation,
i e. If this person is dangerous, it knows what
you're immediately gonna do before you even know about it.
(11:06):
It's also responsible for associative learning, right that study right
where these women could tell if people were inauthentic and
the smile was not to be trusted. Definitely, your unconscious
mind has picked up on times in the past where
that's probably happened, where you've trusted somebody and they had
a smile like that person and then they betrayed you,
(11:27):
or you've trusted somebody and they've had an authentic smile
like that person and they've ended up being a great friend. Really,
it's this embodied reaction. We often label it as a
gut reaction that comes from all these past experiences, childhood hurt,
memories we've forgotten about that have lingered on in some
form or another, often through automatic behaviors. And sometimes this
(11:50):
is amazing, right, intuitive reactions are really helpful. Knowing how
to follow your intuition is an amazing human ability. But
other times this reaction can be really faulty. It can
be encoded through bias and through fear so that you know,
we often do respond in weird self sabotaging ways or
(12:12):
in a way that we don't really want you because
our conscious mind didn't sign off on it. And that's
the final thing. The unconscious mind, or the theories say
the unconscious mind is also really responsible for and plays
a role in, is your habits and your context triggered behavior.
Habits aren't just repeated actions, they are learnt links between
(12:35):
a q A response and a feeling. For example, choosing
to exercise or not. Yeah, your conscious mind might make
the final decision, and you might think that you have
a say in whether you choose to exercise tonight or not.
But behind the scenes are all these associations that are
(12:56):
pushing you towards one decision or another, Like how you
felt the last you exercised, your beliefs about people who exercise,
that one time you were a kid and you were
picked last for the ball team, or you fell over,
and now you forever resent exercise, and there's always this
like weird duck memory about it, even if you can't
consciously remember that happening. Another way we see this really
(13:19):
interestingly is with a lot of our food choices, like
how we choose what we buy at the grocery store.
So why is it important to separate the conscious from
the unconscious? What does that actually help us with behavior
behaviorally and emotionally and psychologically. We're going to talk about
(13:40):
all of that and more and the important lessons we
can really take from unconscious impulses after the short break,
stay with us. So why can't we just lump our
conscious and our unconscious together and call it a day,
Like it's our mind, it just is what it is, Like,
(14:02):
why do we actually have to understand them separately. Well,
these habits we were talking about, right, those like repetitive
behaviors or things that we keep doing. That is why
it's important to know what comes from your conscious goal
directed you, your higher self, and what comes from something deeper.
(14:24):
The quote I always use, I feel like I've been
quoting Carl Jung and lot in recent episodes, but this
quote is spectacular for what we're talking about today. Carl
Jung one of the grandfathers of modern psychology. He said,
until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life,
and we will call it fate. And this is what
(14:45):
we're talking about. I think a lot of us assume
that we're pretty self aware as people, especially if like
you've done a lot of that deep emotional work or
you've been in therapy, especially if you talk openly about
your feelings, you're like, yeah, kind I know myself, I
know what's going on. But a lot of research says
that most of these behaviors and this knowledge is really
(15:08):
just scratching the surface. There was a pretty famous piece
of literature psychology, literature from the nineteen seventies where essentially
these researchers Nis Bitton Wilson realized that, wait, we really
don't know why we make certain choices. We really don't
know what produces our judgments. And when we're asked to
(15:31):
explain when we make certain decisions, often we'll just give
an answer that sounds reasonable, even if that is not
the true reason, just to kind of make our unconscious
actions make sense. And this study, this study was like
fundamental in showing this. So essentially they put these participants
in a room or I don't know how they actually
(15:52):
did it, when it was one by one I think
it was, and they put them in front of like
a clothing rack, and there were these series of clothing
items and they didn't have any tags on them, and
they just asked them to choose which item was the best. So,
which item was the best, had the best quality? Which
one did they prefer the most? The thing was the
items were almost identical, and most people chose the item
(16:17):
that was simply the furthest to the right. They just,
for whatever reason, people kept going back to this one.
They were all the same, this one at the very end,
and they would feel all these items. Whether it was
because it was the last item they felt because it
was on the very end or the last item they saw,
it didn't really matter. For some reason, they were all
(16:38):
choosing this particular piece. And when they were asked why
did you choose this item, participants never mentioned the positioning.
They never mentioned anything about that. They weren't even consciously
aware of it. Instead, they just gave these explanations like
(16:58):
this one had this very particular sense to it, or
this very particular texture and I could tell it was better,
or this one the fib account reminded me most of
like this Twitter I had as a kid that my
mum spent a lot of money on. Like they were
just it wasn't that they were lying, It's just that
there were these underlying unconscious processes that were impacting their
(17:20):
choices that they didn't have access to, and yet their
conscious mind had to justify it. And this is a
way that human behavior can be manipulated. That is one
of the biggest reasons why we have to understand it.
The group who know a lot about this and know
very well how do we manipulate these unconscious shortcuts or
(17:43):
choices are actually advertisers. And also this may surprise you.
We talked about grocery stores before. The people who stock
your supermarket shelves, they know a lot about the unconscious mind.
Did you know that most of our shopping decisions are
based on placement alone. So the majority of us, if
(18:04):
we were given let's say, twenty options for like jam
or pasta or sauce or whatever, we're just gonna buy
what's like directly in our line of sight, like ninety
percent of the time. Yeah, like price and quality will
sometimes come into play, but big brands will literally pay
top dollar to buy shelf space right in the middle,
(18:27):
right in that line of sight. And that's why the
most popular brands will often sit there, even if you
choose not to buy that product. Why you buy a
different one is also due to your own conscious mind.
For example, stuper markets always put the most expensive items
at the top. That slightly higher price makes it feel
(18:50):
slightly better. It makes you feel slightly better about yourself
being able to afford something that isn't the basic choice,
because it feeds your ego, It feeds some unco just
part of your mind that needs validation. Maybe if you
choose a certain past the saurce because one time somebody
really attractive who reminded you of your childhood crush. You
saw them buying that pasta sauce. You don't remember that happening,
(19:13):
but now that's someone you always buy. Maybe it was
the one that your parents always chose. That is a
huge influence. What our parents buy is often what you
know continues to influence us, even when we think we're
making our own conscious decision. You need to understand the
unconscious mind again, because people are using it to direct
(19:33):
your behavior, maybe against your actual wants. People can manipulate it.
But also because imagine we're not in a grocery store,
Imagine we're around our friends, Imagine we're with somebody that
we're dating. Those same automatic, ingrained mental shortcuts that dictate
your grocery choices also then dictate how you behave in
(19:56):
those situations as well. Like why you pick a fight
over something small that seems to mean absolutely nothing. Why
you get so defensive towards criticism even though you rationally
know it's like a healthy part of a relationship. Why
for some reason, like your friend interrupting you drives you mad,
(20:16):
but like she could be as late as she want,
she could literally steal money from you and you don't care,
but as soon as she's mad, Like that's this weird
disrespect that you don't know why you respond, but you do.
Your unconscious mind is trained to respond to whatever you
repeatedly experience, rehearse an emotionally encode, especially when it happens early, often,
(20:37):
or intensely. That is really how your unconscious mind is
trained early often, or intensely, frequency, intensity, or the age
at which it occurred. A big aspect that impacts our
unconscious mind is obviously you may have guessed this our
early learnings, our family, our childhood experiences, even and some
(20:58):
would say this speri answers you had in the womb
or generationally. Literally, there is this idea called collective unconscious,
which says that our deepest beliefs in our ways of
seeing the world are spiritually inherited before our before we
even are conscious beings. Your unconscious mind is being formed
(21:20):
way before your conscious mind even catches up. Whilst I
think that's pretty hard to prove scientifically and there is
yet to be a lot of proof scientific proof for it,
we do know that you absorb the rules of your
environment before you are consciously aware of them, things like
(21:40):
how love is shown, what happens when you're upset, whether
mistakes when you were a child were punished or repaired,
whether your needs were welcomed or inconvenient, whether you were bullied,
how you were taught to behave things that really traumatized
you or excited you as a kid. They are what
are creating the rules for your unconscious mind, and they
(22:00):
become the template for how life works, how relationships work,
how everything in the world works. Even in adulthood. Your
body will keep running these childhood rules until you consciously
update them. And this is why therapeutic tools like you know,
like talk therapy or learning to reparent yourself, or reprocessing
(22:23):
or processing for the first time, or trauma are so effective.
You know, these are the stuff that we're not necessarily
aware of all the time. We kind of know what happens,
we don't really get the wounds that it's causing. And
it's not until you like really like get in the
trenches and like dig deep, almost like an archaeologist, and
you bring up this stuff with a professional right that
(22:46):
you get yourself a bit more and you really understand
what causes these patterns in your behavior. So how can
you recognize when your unconscious mind is really steering things
in a way that isn't benefitting Because your unconscious mind
is deering a lot some of it's great, We don't
need to touch that. How do we figure out when
we do? We do need to do some of that again,
(23:08):
archaeological digging. As Freud said, there will be signs. It's
probably not going to be dreams though, or disturbing art
or Freudian slips. That's probably not the only way. That's
not the best way to get access to this. Instead,
and I hate to say, it's probably going to be
the natural consequences of your actions and of your behavior.
(23:29):
I wish we could interpret everything that was wrong with
us unconsciously through our dreams that'd be a lot easier. No,
it's probably going to have a bit more realistic, tangible,
a more realistic tangible feel to it. One way to
know is when you keep repeating a pattern even though
consciously you want something different. You might genuinely want to rest,
(23:51):
but you keep overworking and you feel terrible about it
because you're not seeing your family or your friends, but
you cannot stop. You might really want a healthy relie relationship.
You really want to be with somebody who loves you,
but you keep choosing emotionally unavailable people, repetition with regret.
You might really want to stand up for yourself and
(24:12):
you really want to start that business, and you really
want to be a self made success. But when it
comes down to it, you put yourself, You put yourself
in a box, You apologize, you can't you put yourself
out there. You feel this kind of stagnation, that there
is like this ceiling to how much you can achieve.
(24:32):
You know, your wiring says to you, that is not
something that is available to us, That is not who
we are based on past experiences. That gap, that gap
is important, the gap between what you consciously want and
what you repeatedly do or believe is the clearer sign
of an automatic reflex that is built on unconscious unhelpful mechanisms.
(24:57):
Another time that you can notice that your unconscious is
like in control in a way that's not great is
when your reactions feel bigger than the situation that is
in front of you. A useful, very useful tool or
clue is when you feel this real sense of urgency
to respond in a specific way to a situation. If
(25:20):
it feels like I have to do this right now
to feel okay, otherwise like I don't have any other way,
I don't know any other way to respond to this.
That is often the unconscious mind trying just to reduce
discomfort as efficiently as possible, and it's just trying to
protect you in the way that made sense in the past.
If a small comment sends you into panic and rage
(25:44):
and shut down and you just like don't know where
that has come from, or if you find yourself like
overreacting just like rapidly and then you feel super confused afterwards,
that is often an automatic threat response. In these kinds
of situations, we are responding through memory, and we're responding
(26:06):
based on past meaning rather than what is actually happening
in the present moment, And it definitely is a sign
like something deeper is being activated or triggered here that
maybe we're not aware of, or maybe we are but
we don't want to think of. Just to give you
some more examples, like I'm trying to think about what
would be a good one. So, for example, if your
friend always chooses the restaurant and you start getting like
(26:31):
really annoyed them, really annoyed at them, and you do
not know why is it really them or is it
because you don't like being directed or because you're not
in control of plants, because somebody else using a restaurant
probably shouldn't elicit that much of a of an emotional reaction,
but you think it really says something about you. Or
if your partner doesn't say I love you back in
like the specific right tone at the right time, and
(26:53):
like you go into this full tizzy. Is it about
them or is it that you, like maybe all secretly
question whether anyone could truly love you because your parents
didn't show you that much affection, or because a relationship
in the past made you feel worthless. It's worth asking.
Once you are aware of these markers and these reactions
(27:14):
that just seem really disproportionate. You are basically more aware
than I would say ninety percent of people, probably higher.
So like noticing it feels very shameful sometimes and feels
very much like awkward and weird. And I actually think
that's the greatest place to start in that discomfort of
recognizing behaviors you don't like about yourself because it isn't
(27:38):
your fault. It definitely isn't your fault most of the time.
That like, this is who you are, and this is
how you were programmed, and this is how your this
is what your unconscious mind chooses to prioritize. It is
your responsibility though, which really sucks. It's just an extra
another one of those extra fun things about being an adult.
But we can definitely do it. We can definitely take
(27:58):
responsibilities for these behaviors and change the outcome and change
the behavioral loop. So we're going to take one final
break here and then when we come back, I want
to give you three ways to do this and to
reprogram your unconscious mind as much as we possibly can
as conscious individuals to stay with us. I personally think
(28:27):
one of the biggest signs of intelligence in somebody is
choosing not just to accept your situation or learn behavior
for what it is choosing not just to say like,
this is the way I am, and this is how
I've always been, so why do I have to change,
but instead instead taking action on behalf of your better
(28:48):
self and on behalf of the person you want to be,
even if you are not there yet. In fact, research
has shown, research has shown time and time again that
one of the biggest signs of low mental flexibility and
therefore low mental intelligence or emotional intelligence, I should say,
is being unable to take accountability or see any issue
(29:11):
with our own behavior that is not going to be us. Though,
that is not going to be us because we know
what we're responsible for. Now we're going to change it.
Recognizing ways you may be self sabotaging is not a weakness.
Most people will never do this in their entire lives.
So this is what we're going to do next. The
(29:33):
first step, according to the incredible author Brianna Weste I
think her name is Brianna west Wist you will know
her though she wrote the book one hundred and one
Essays to Change the Way You Think. She also wrote
the pivot year the mountain is you. I think she
has another book coming out, but one of the best
things that she said about this, about this rewiring of
(29:55):
the unconscious, is if you want to change your behavior
and you want to rewire how your unconsciousness or unconscious
brain responds to things, you have to signal to your
subconscious and your unconscious that another reality is possible. Essentially,
you have to be able to imagine a new scenario
and a better scenario for yourself. And the more you
(30:17):
practice that imagined scenario in your brain by rehearsing it,
by visualizing it, the more it feels real. So you've
recognized the response that you want to change. Now you
are essentially reprogramming the outcome that the possibility of a
different outcome that could come afterwards. Your brain often treats
(30:39):
subjective reality, and your thoughts about a potential reality or
your imagination is the same, and that means that if
you think it can be true, your brain starts to
believe it as well. That's cognitive rewiring. It's literally the
same neurological patterns that create anxiety, just in the reverse
(31:00):
right your brain like your brain cooks up these like
what if possibilities and overinvest in them because it can't
always tell imagined reality from actual reality. In this situation, though,
we're going to overthink the best case scenario. We are
like reverse reverse engineering this to help us out. As
Brianna says, you have to be willing to see it's
(31:21):
possible before the reality of possibility follows. Whether that is
in a relationship, whether that is imagining how you are
going to break out of your cycle of dating emotionally
unavailable people, you have to imagine that that's possible. Whether
it is breaking out of a pattern of rage and anger,
(31:42):
you have to imagine it's possible first, whether it is
breaking out of a pattern of not communicating with your
friends and always having these like dramatic friendship blow ups.
If you cannot imagine a different way of doing it,
you're not going to be able to do it. So
part of this practice is like almost kind of like
a creative writing, creative rewiring exercise of like write your
(32:05):
own adventure, write your own ending. How is this going
to go? Second, once you have the imagined alternative scenario,
just keep the programming really really simple. Choose one behavior,
one reaction, one automatic choice you make that you don't
particularly like and target that. This was advice that was
(32:28):
written about in The New Scientists in twenty eighteen. They
actually did this whole series of like reprogramming your own
conscious if you want to pay for a subscription. But
essentially what they said, or what the author of this
article said, was that we have to start small. We
have to start on the most micro level to gain
access to our unconscious and rewire it. So creating a
(32:52):
singular if then plan whether then is the desired behavior?
That is what we're talking about. If I'm in this situation,
then this is how I'm going to respond. There's actually
such strong evidence. It's been written about so many times.
This is not an original idea for me, by the way,
at all. This has been written about and studied so
(33:13):
often that one of the simplest ways to gain more
control over automatic impulses is to predecide what your response
is going to be in advance. It's also a way
that people recover from addiction, you know, one behavior at
a time. There was a major two thousand and six
meta analysis, so a little bit old now, but this
(33:35):
big meta analysis that pulled together results from dozens of studies,
and they tested. What these are called. These are called
implementation intentions, right, those if then plans like if it's
ten pm, then I'm in bed. If it's the morning,
then I'm not on my phone. That's a bad one.
Like if I feel the urge to people please, then
(33:57):
I will email somebody and say I'll get back to you.
Then I will give myself twenty minutes to respond. If
I'm angry at my partner, then I'll take a walk.
Those kind of implementation intentions. Across all these studies, people
who had these in place, people who had the imagined
better scenario, were significantly more likely to follow through on
(34:21):
their new habits and intentions then people who just set
a general broad desire to change. So people who were
like I want to be better, I want to be
a better person, I want to be healthier, blah blah
blah blah blah, they weren't able to really do it.
But when you could say this is my trigger or
(34:41):
this is the situation I normally unconsciously respond to, and
this is how I want to respond differently, when you
could really identify A and B, your chances of success skyrocketed.
And the explanation for that, sorry just to drill into
this a little bit more. The explanation for that is
that the if part is the crucial part because it
(35:04):
makes you more sensitive to what is queuing the automatic
response that you would normally perform. If the IF is
making you aware of what in your environment triggers a response,
what in your own environment makes you particularly sensitive, what
in your environment your past has made you particularly reactive to,
(35:27):
And then it interrupts the normal loop that your unconscious
or automatic behaviors would want to perform and is like,
this is our exit, then we will do something else.
Another way to feel more in control of the impulses
of the unconscious mind, especially the ones again I keep
saying this, the ones we don't want your unconscious mind
(35:49):
as great things. But another way to feel in control
of those that we don't particularly enjoy is really simply
to just move slower. When we talk about impulses, we're
often really talking about bottom up automatic, like automatic processing
and like automatic emotional responses. Right, It's coming from something
(36:13):
very deep in us, and these responses are often generated
by much older, ancient brain systems, the ones that would
have come about first the amygdala, the limbic system, the
mid brain structures. Literally, if you looked at a cross
section of the brain, they are right in the they
are right in the center. They're the most protected because
(36:35):
they are the most important. These systems. They are fast,
they are efficient, They are designed for survival. It doesn't
want you to wait for nuance. Your automatic behaviors don't
care about your long term goals. They don't want to
consult you about how your reaction might meet your vision
(36:55):
of your ideal self. When you are stressed, when you
are sleep deprived, when you are over stimulated, when you
are emotionally flooded, the balance between your limbic system and
your prefrontal cortext shifts, so that your ability to intentionally
interrupt a behavior or intentionally interrupt I don't know, reaction,
it just goes way down, like it's hard to get
(37:19):
in front of that bus. In high arousal states, you
are again more likely to return to the default or
to your habitual behaviors, and so your window for tolerance
of discomfort and your ability to interrupt it, it just narrows.
Slowing down. On the other hand, interrupts that like that
cascade of stuff that's happening from a neurobiological perspective. Deliberately,
(37:46):
you know, reducing even your walking pace, deliberately making yourself
in less of a rush all the time, slowing down
your breathing, slowing down your speech, slowing down your physical movement,
slowing down how you eat, even whether you rush breakfast
over the counter or you sit down and enjoy it.
(38:08):
Slowing down all of that stuff increases parasympathetic nervous system activity,
which means better emotional regulation and stronger like top down
control rather than bottom up response. You are literally making
it biologically, neurologically easier to choose a better outcome for
(38:30):
yourself rather than just reacting. You can't manage what is
unconscious if you are always in a reactive state. It's
just not possible. So this is probably the most important
thing of all. Do the talk therapy, do the inner
child healing, do all of that to the historical work.
(38:51):
But if your nervous system is not regulated, if you
are not going about life more intentionally, and I feel
like intentionality such a buzzword, but it's true. If you
do not work on these high level intentions and slowing
down your life and reducing stress in whatever way you
can I know it's a busy life, but reducing stress
(39:12):
and whatever way you can your ability to signal to
your body that you want to perform this new set
of narratives and that you want to respond differently is
going to be very, very difficult. But I still think
you're able to do it. I still think that even
just recognizing to begin with the role of your own
(39:32):
conscious mind and what it's kind of doing, not doing
to you, but what it's trying to do for you,
based on the past, based on past hurt, based on
past fea trauma, even good things, that is a great
place to begin, I know for me, and I feel
like I've been talking about this a lot in recent episodes.
You can tell I'm really this is what I'm going
(39:54):
through at the moment. But my big thing has been
realizing how I unconsciously like resp onto social threats, especially
with my friends, and reflecting on you know how when
I was a kid, like I wasn't accepted and I
was bullied, and I didn't have many friends and I
was very lonely, and so I would always have this
weird reaction when like people would hang out without me
(40:14):
or I don't know, things of that nature would happen
where I would get really irritated and I would self
sabotage in a way where I would put even more
distance between myself and that friend, even when they were
kind of like, hey, what the heck is going on.
That's been a big thing for me realizing that unconsciously
(40:36):
everything that my brain is trying to do is to
make life safer for me, and it's trying to protect
me from past hurt. And the thing is is that
I'm not in that situation anymore. I'm not that child
or that teenager or that kid who was like feeling
very socially rejected. I'm an adult who has a brilliant
life and who has really focused on brilliant friendships. Those
(40:56):
patterns from my past like don't fit here anymore. And
if I keep them up, and if I keep performing them, like,
I'm gonna lose a really good thing. So just noticing
it and being as intentional as possible and being like,
I don't want to be this person anymore. Just one
of the most brilliant things that you can do or start,
like not just in your twenties, but like at any age.
(41:16):
You can be in your sixties and it's still gonna
be great. You could be in your nineties and this
is still an effective, wonderful thing for us to do.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it's
given you some insight stirred up some conversation. As always,
thank you to our brilliant researcher Libby Colbert for her
help with this episode. So much research went into this
(41:39):
and it's just, like always such a fascinating topic to
return to, whether you're like in the intro stages of
psychology or like more advanced. I feel like it's one
of my Yeah, it's one of my favorite things to discuss.
If you are listening on Spotify, leave a little brain
emoji below so I know that you made it to
the end of the episode and thank you for sticking around.
(42:00):
I very much appreciate it. Make sure that you are
following us on Instagram on substack if you want the yeah,
if you want the links to this article and to
look at all the research we used. You can also
watch us now on Netflix. If you're in the US
or Canada, please tag me in your pictures, tag me
in your stories of you watching the podcast. The vibe
(42:24):
is amazing. You can see all these cool props behind
me right now. It just brings I don't know, a
whole deeper level to what we're doing today and what
we're talking about. So thank you again for listening. Hopefully
I see you over on Netflix. If you are in
the US or kind of elsewhere, I'm sorry I can't
help you with that right now, but hopefully soon. And
until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself.
(42:47):
We will talk very very shortly.
Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is
so great to have you here back for another episode
as we of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today,
I have something really fun and scientific for you guys.
So if your favorite episodes of the podcast and when
we kind of go deep into concepts and deep into research,
(00:50):
you are going to love today's topic. And even if
you don't, I still think this is one of those
ones you should definitely listen to because it will tell
you all much about how you operate, your behaviors, your
decision making while you make decisions that you don't always
actually want to make rationally, because today we are talking
(01:11):
about the conscious versus unconscious mind and the role each
of them plays in our lives and why we kind
of again yeah, make decisions that feel bizarre and hard
to justify while we have these reactions that come out
of nowhere, and yet we still keep doing them, and
(01:33):
we can't quite figure out how to change. This is
the unconscious mind. This is the part of our existence
and how we interpret the world. We're going to really
drill into today. The idea that there are parts of
us operating outside of our deliberate rational control is not
a new idea. What's just changed over time and over
(01:54):
the years is how we explain it. And we cannot
talk about the unconscious versus conscious mind without doing a
little bit of a history lesson first. So long before
we had these words that I think we use so
often these days, unconscious, conscious, subconscious, A lot of brilliant
ancient thinkers were describing basically the same thing, this feeling
(02:17):
that we as humans are split between what we know
rationally and how we choose to behave emotionally. This goes
like all the way back to like Plato and Aristotle
and Spinosa, who basically distinguished between what they called intuitive
passions or appetites and then on the other hand, deliberate reason. Plato,
(02:41):
for example, I like this metaphor. He described the human
soul as having three parts, and he kind of described
it as if we are sitting behind a chariot and
the chariot represents us and represents our reason, and we
think we're the ones that are guiding it, but really
what's guiding the chariot are these two horses were guided
(03:01):
by these two in his mind, two winged horses. One
represented nobility. It represented our emotional and social knowledge and
our desire to be good and to be reasonable and rational.
And then the other horse represented like our wild side
like it represented our desire and the appetite of like
(03:23):
the unbounded parts of the soul. That is a very
early representation of how we might now view our rational mind,
and how we might also view our impulses and emotions
or our I guess beliefs, or our social behavior, each
of them leading us in different directions. If this sounds
(03:47):
familiar to Freud's idea of the ego and the super
ego and the id, it's because it is. Freud took
a lot of his ideas from Plato and some of
these ancient thinkers. He is obviously one of the most
famous psychoanalysts of all time. And yeah, he based a
(04:07):
lot of his work and the foundation of a lot
of his theories on some of these metaphors, and he
kind of took those initial ideas and tried to format
them or flashed them out even more. And in his mind,
the mind is divided into three parts, the conscious mind.
So what you're aware of right now, you know, I'm
sitting in this room, I'm looking around, There's a microphone
(04:29):
in front of me. I'm recording my podcast. My pre
conscious mind things that are kind of just sitting below that.
I want to talk about, where this idea is going,
what I have to do next, how my mood is
being impacted by things that happened earlier this morning, and
then the unconscious mind material that to him is kept
(04:52):
out of awareness but is still influencing you. So you
may have seen this, especially in like psych one oh
one classes, represented as an Iceberg. That's a pretty classic
way of representing it. I still remember having that Iceberg
diagram in my psyche textbooks. But all of these things,
the conscious, subconscious or pre conscious and unconscious or kind
(05:14):
of work together to form the person that we know
as ourselves. One thing Freud really emphasized though, was the
role of dreams in being able to basically understand what
the unconscious mind is doing below the surface. So in
his mind, like we could never directly know what's happening
(05:38):
happening unconsciously in our mind. He basically said that dreams
are one of the only ways of really being able
to understand what's going on. He wrote a whole book
about it. It's literally called The Interpretation of Dreams. He
also claimed that you know, our dreams fulfilled our unconscious wishes.
So like, if you want to be famous, your dream
(05:58):
may your dreams may reveal to you how you should
do that. Or you know, if you feel guilty, your
dreams may reveal to you how you're not or how
you should forgive yourself. He also says they reveal what
we desire most and what we fear the most. Some
other ways that he said we could get in touch
(06:19):
with the unconscious mind were the famous Freudian slip artwork
repressed memories. These days, we know that's all probably less
than accurate. There may be some slight truth to it,
some slight truth to our dreams kind of working out
some deep emotional wounds. But Freud did get a lot
(06:40):
of stuff wrong. I think he did the best that
he could with what he had. But he's still a
controversial figure. And this is a great place to kind
of shift gears and talk about what we know about
the unconscious and conscious mind now in the modern day,
with a bit more technology, with a bit more scientific
experimental practic going on. Pretty simply, the conscious mind, in
(07:03):
psychological terms, is the set of mental processes that you
can deliberately direct, what you can hold in awareness, what
you can reason about, what you can talk about, what
you can see. The big thing about the conscious mind, sorry,
is that it's relatively slow. It's very intentional effortful. It's
kind of limited in its capacity as well. So for example,
(07:25):
you can't you really can't juggle more than a couple
of things in your conscious mind at any one time.
It's why we're bad at multitasking. It's why we get
mentally overwhelmed. It's why you say things automatically you don't
really mean when a lot's going on around you. I
like to think of your conscious mind as like the spokesperson.
(07:46):
It is the person that, like the company puts in
front of the cameras, who is like reading off the
script that the unconscious mind has given it. Or it's
kind of more like it's putting together a speech from
a bunch of dot points that the end conscious mind
has given it. It has some decision making powers, It
directs a small amount of information. It definitely applies a
(08:09):
lot of reason, and it interprets the small things that
the unconscious mind gives it. But beyond like directing impulses
and directing things around you, it also doesn't completely Your
conscious mind cannot be aware of absolutely everything. It's just
(08:34):
responsible for constructing the story of who you are based
on what it has access to. Just basically, it interprets
your human experience for you, but it doesn't always have
a good grip on everything that's going on in kind
of the back offices of the mind. Right again, think
(08:54):
off this spokesperson or CEO analogy. Let's use the ceo analogy.
The CEO may be upfront, but she is like nothing
without the staff whose jobs she can't possibly do or
by herself, and she can't possibly be aware of everything
that's going on in the back offices all the time.
That's the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is just the
(09:16):
front man. There's a lot going on behind the scenes.
One key aspect that the unconscious mind is responsible for
is rapid evaluation that our conscious mind just isn't quick
enough for you know whether something is good or bad,
whether something is safe or unsafe, whether to approach or avoid,
how to react in a situation of danger. Before you
(09:37):
consciously decide how you feel about a situation, or even
about someone's tone, or their physicality or their presence, your
body often already knows automatic evaluations. They are what help
us really move quickly in social and physical environments. You know,
for example, if you meet somebody and you instantly feel uneasy,
(09:59):
but you can't explain why. That's your unconscious mind, Like
your mind has picked up on subtle cues like microexpressions
or a mismatch between their words and their tone without
conscious awareness. It's like that feeling in your gut right interestingly, actually,
maybe not a surprising fact for many people, but women
(10:21):
are better at this. Women are better at unconsciously picking
up on these microexpressions. It was a study in twenty
twenty that basically gave participants a bunch of portraits of
people either with an authentic or an unauthentic, non authentic smile.
Women were picking up on that incredibly quickly and with
(10:45):
much higher accuracy. This is because your unconscious mind is
also responsible for always kind of having this idea of
like what are we going to do next? Or action preparation,
i e. If this person is dangerous, it knows what
you're immediately gonna do before you even know about it.
(11:06):
It's also responsible for associative learning, right that study right
where these women could tell if people were inauthentic and
the smile was not to be trusted. Definitely, your unconscious
mind has picked up on times in the past where
that's probably happened, where you've trusted somebody and they had
a smile like that person and then they betrayed you,
(11:27):
or you've trusted somebody and they've had an authentic smile
like that person and they've ended up being a great friend. Really,
it's this embodied reaction. We often label it as a
gut reaction that comes from all these past experiences, childhood hurt,
memories we've forgotten about that have lingered on in some
form or another, often through automatic behaviors. And sometimes this
(11:50):
is amazing, right, intuitive reactions are really helpful. Knowing how
to follow your intuition is an amazing human ability. But
other times this reaction can be really faulty. It can
be encoded through bias and through fear so that you know,
we often do respond in weird self sabotaging ways or
(12:12):
in a way that we don't really want you because
our conscious mind didn't sign off on it. And that's
the final thing. The unconscious mind, or the theories say
the unconscious mind is also really responsible for and plays
a role in, is your habits and your context triggered behavior.
Habits aren't just repeated actions, they are learnt links between
(12:35):
a q A response and a feeling. For example, choosing
to exercise or not. Yeah, your conscious mind might make
the final decision, and you might think that you have
a say in whether you choose to exercise tonight or not.
But behind the scenes are all these associations that are
(12:56):
pushing you towards one decision or another, Like how you
felt the last you exercised, your beliefs about people who exercise,
that one time you were a kid and you were
picked last for the ball team, or you fell over,
and now you forever resent exercise, and there's always this
like weird duck memory about it, even if you can't
consciously remember that happening. Another way we see this really
(13:19):
interestingly is with a lot of our food choices, like
how we choose what we buy at the grocery store.
So why is it important to separate the conscious from
the unconscious? What does that actually help us with behavior
behaviorally and emotionally and psychologically. We're going to talk about
(13:40):
all of that and more and the important lessons we
can really take from unconscious impulses after the short break,
stay with us. So why can't we just lump our
conscious and our unconscious together and call it a day,
Like it's our mind, it just is what it is, Like,
(14:02):
why do we actually have to understand them separately. Well,
these habits we were talking about, right, those like repetitive
behaviors or things that we keep doing. That is why
it's important to know what comes from your conscious goal
directed you, your higher self, and what comes from something deeper.
(14:24):
The quote I always use, I feel like I've been
quoting Carl Jung and lot in recent episodes, but this
quote is spectacular for what we're talking about today. Carl
Jung one of the grandfathers of modern psychology. He said,
until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life,
and we will call it fate. And this is what
(14:45):
we're talking about. I think a lot of us assume
that we're pretty self aware as people, especially if like
you've done a lot of that deep emotional work or
you've been in therapy, especially if you talk openly about
your feelings, you're like, yeah, kind I know myself, I
know what's going on. But a lot of research says
that most of these behaviors and this knowledge is really
(15:08):
just scratching the surface. There was a pretty famous piece
of literature psychology, literature from the nineteen seventies where essentially
these researchers Nis Bitton Wilson realized that, wait, we really
don't know why we make certain choices. We really don't
know what produces our judgments. And when we're asked to
(15:31):
explain when we make certain decisions, often we'll just give
an answer that sounds reasonable, even if that is not
the true reason, just to kind of make our unconscious
actions make sense. And this study, this study was like
fundamental in showing this. So essentially they put these participants
in a room or I don't know how they actually
(15:52):
did it, when it was one by one I think
it was, and they put them in front of like
a clothing rack, and there were these series of clothing
items and they didn't have any tags on them, and
they just asked them to choose which item was the best. So,
which item was the best, had the best quality? Which
one did they prefer the most? The thing was the
items were almost identical, and most people chose the item
(16:17):
that was simply the furthest to the right. They just,
for whatever reason, people kept going back to this one.
They were all the same, this one at the very end,
and they would feel all these items. Whether it was
because it was the last item they felt because it
was on the very end or the last item they saw,
it didn't really matter. For some reason, they were all
(16:38):
choosing this particular piece. And when they were asked why
did you choose this item, participants never mentioned the positioning.
They never mentioned anything about that. They weren't even consciously
aware of it. Instead, they just gave these explanations like
(16:58):
this one had this very particular sense to it, or
this very particular texture and I could tell it was better,
or this one the fib account reminded me most of
like this Twitter I had as a kid that my
mum spent a lot of money on. Like they were
just it wasn't that they were lying, It's just that
there were these underlying unconscious processes that were impacting their
(17:20):
choices that they didn't have access to, and yet their
conscious mind had to justify it. And this is a
way that human behavior can be manipulated. That is one
of the biggest reasons why we have to understand it.
The group who know a lot about this and know
very well how do we manipulate these unconscious shortcuts or
(17:43):
choices are actually advertisers. And also this may surprise you.
We talked about grocery stores before. The people who stock
your supermarket shelves, they know a lot about the unconscious mind.
Did you know that most of our shopping decisions are
based on placement alone. So the majority of us, if
(18:04):
we were given let's say, twenty options for like jam
or pasta or sauce or whatever, we're just gonna buy
what's like directly in our line of sight, like ninety
percent of the time. Yeah, like price and quality will
sometimes come into play, but big brands will literally pay
top dollar to buy shelf space right in the middle,
(18:27):
right in that line of sight. And that's why the
most popular brands will often sit there, even if you
choose not to buy that product. Why you buy a
different one is also due to your own conscious mind.
For example, stuper markets always put the most expensive items
at the top. That slightly higher price makes it feel
(18:50):
slightly better. It makes you feel slightly better about yourself
being able to afford something that isn't the basic choice,
because it feeds your ego, It feeds some unco just
part of your mind that needs validation. Maybe if you
choose a certain past the saurce because one time somebody
really attractive who reminded you of your childhood crush. You
saw them buying that pasta sauce. You don't remember that happening,
(19:13):
but now that's someone you always buy. Maybe it was
the one that your parents always chose. That is a
huge influence. What our parents buy is often what you
know continues to influence us, even when we think we're
making our own conscious decision. You need to understand the
unconscious mind again, because people are using it to direct
(19:33):
your behavior, maybe against your actual wants. People can manipulate it.
But also because imagine we're not in a grocery store,
Imagine we're around our friends, Imagine we're with somebody that
we're dating. Those same automatic, ingrained mental shortcuts that dictate
your grocery choices also then dictate how you behave in
(19:56):
those situations as well. Like why you pick a fight
over something small that seems to mean absolutely nothing. Why
you get so defensive towards criticism even though you rationally
know it's like a healthy part of a relationship. Why
for some reason, like your friend interrupting you drives you mad,
(20:16):
but like she could be as late as she want,
she could literally steal money from you and you don't care,
but as soon as she's mad, Like that's this weird
disrespect that you don't know why you respond, but you do.
Your unconscious mind is trained to respond to whatever you
repeatedly experience, rehearse an emotionally encode, especially when it happens early, often,
(20:37):
or intensely. That is really how your unconscious mind is
trained early often, or intensely, frequency, intensity, or the age
at which it occurred. A big aspect that impacts our
unconscious mind is obviously you may have guessed this our
early learnings, our family, our childhood experiences, even and some
(20:58):
would say this speri answers you had in the womb
or generationally. Literally, there is this idea called collective unconscious,
which says that our deepest beliefs in our ways of
seeing the world are spiritually inherited before our before we
even are conscious beings. Your unconscious mind is being formed
(21:20):
way before your conscious mind even catches up. Whilst I
think that's pretty hard to prove scientifically and there is
yet to be a lot of proof scientific proof for it,
we do know that you absorb the rules of your
environment before you are consciously aware of them, things like
(21:40):
how love is shown, what happens when you're upset, whether
mistakes when you were a child were punished or repaired,
whether your needs were welcomed or inconvenient, whether you were bullied,
how you were taught to behave things that really traumatized
you or excited you as a kid. They are what
are creating the rules for your unconscious mind, and they
(22:00):
become the template for how life works, how relationships work,
how everything in the world works. Even in adulthood. Your
body will keep running these childhood rules until you consciously
update them. And this is why therapeutic tools like you know,
like talk therapy or learning to reparent yourself, or reprocessing
(22:23):
or processing for the first time, or trauma are so effective.
You know, these are the stuff that we're not necessarily
aware of all the time. We kind of know what happens,
we don't really get the wounds that it's causing. And
it's not until you like really like get in the
trenches and like dig deep, almost like an archaeologist, and
you bring up this stuff with a professional right that
(22:46):
you get yourself a bit more and you really understand
what causes these patterns in your behavior. So how can
you recognize when your unconscious mind is really steering things
in a way that isn't benefitting Because your unconscious mind
is deering a lot some of it's great, We don't
need to touch that. How do we figure out when
we do? We do need to do some of that again,
(23:08):
archaeological digging. As Freud said, there will be signs. It's
probably not going to be dreams though, or disturbing art
or Freudian slips. That's probably not the only way. That's
not the best way to get access to this. Instead,
and I hate to say, it's probably going to be
the natural consequences of your actions and of your behavior.
(23:29):
I wish we could interpret everything that was wrong with
us unconsciously through our dreams that'd be a lot easier. No,
it's probably going to have a bit more realistic, tangible,
a more realistic tangible feel to it. One way to
know is when you keep repeating a pattern even though
consciously you want something different. You might genuinely want to rest,
(23:51):
but you keep overworking and you feel terrible about it
because you're not seeing your family or your friends, but
you cannot stop. You might really want a healthy relie relationship.
You really want to be with somebody who loves you,
but you keep choosing emotionally unavailable people, repetition with regret.
You might really want to stand up for yourself and
(24:12):
you really want to start that business, and you really
want to be a self made success. But when it
comes down to it, you put yourself, You put yourself
in a box, You apologize, you can't you put yourself
out there. You feel this kind of stagnation, that there
is like this ceiling to how much you can achieve.
(24:32):
You know, your wiring says to you, that is not
something that is available to us, That is not who
we are based on past experiences. That gap, that gap
is important, the gap between what you consciously want and
what you repeatedly do or believe is the clearer sign
of an automatic reflex that is built on unconscious unhelpful mechanisms.
(24:57):
Another time that you can notice that your unconscious is
like in control in a way that's not great is
when your reactions feel bigger than the situation that is
in front of you. A useful, very useful tool or
clue is when you feel this real sense of urgency
to respond in a specific way to a situation. If
(25:20):
it feels like I have to do this right now
to feel okay, otherwise like I don't have any other way,
I don't know any other way to respond to this.
That is often the unconscious mind trying just to reduce
discomfort as efficiently as possible, and it's just trying to
protect you in the way that made sense in the past.
If a small comment sends you into panic and rage
(25:44):
and shut down and you just like don't know where
that has come from, or if you find yourself like
overreacting just like rapidly and then you feel super confused afterwards,
that is often an automatic threat response. In these kinds
of situations, we are responding through memory, and we're responding
(26:06):
based on past meaning rather than what is actually happening
in the present moment, And it definitely is a sign
like something deeper is being activated or triggered here that
maybe we're not aware of, or maybe we are but
we don't want to think of. Just to give you
some more examples, like I'm trying to think about what
would be a good one. So, for example, if your
friend always chooses the restaurant and you start getting like
(26:31):
really annoyed them, really annoyed at them, and you do
not know why is it really them or is it
because you don't like being directed or because you're not
in control of plants, because somebody else using a restaurant
probably shouldn't elicit that much of a of an emotional reaction,
but you think it really says something about you. Or
if your partner doesn't say I love you back in
like the specific right tone at the right time, and
(26:53):
like you go into this full tizzy. Is it about
them or is it that you, like maybe all secretly
question whether anyone could truly love you because your parents
didn't show you that much affection, or because a relationship
in the past made you feel worthless. It's worth asking.
Once you are aware of these markers and these reactions
(27:14):
that just seem really disproportionate. You are basically more aware
than I would say ninety percent of people, probably higher.
So like noticing it feels very shameful sometimes and feels
very much like awkward and weird. And I actually think
that's the greatest place to start in that discomfort of
recognizing behaviors you don't like about yourself because it isn't
(27:38):
your fault. It definitely isn't your fault most of the time.
That like, this is who you are, and this is
how you were programmed, and this is how your this
is what your unconscious mind chooses to prioritize. It is
your responsibility though, which really sucks. It's just an extra
another one of those extra fun things about being an adult.
But we can definitely do it. We can definitely take
(27:58):
responsibilities for these behaviors and change the outcome and change
the behavioral loop. So we're going to take one final
break here and then when we come back, I want
to give you three ways to do this and to
reprogram your unconscious mind as much as we possibly can
as conscious individuals to stay with us. I personally think
(28:27):
one of the biggest signs of intelligence in somebody is
choosing not just to accept your situation or learn behavior
for what it is choosing not just to say like,
this is the way I am, and this is how
I've always been, so why do I have to change,
but instead instead taking action on behalf of your better
(28:48):
self and on behalf of the person you want to be,
even if you are not there yet. In fact, research
has shown, research has shown time and time again that
one of the biggest signs of low mental flexibility and
therefore low mental intelligence or emotional intelligence, I should say,
is being unable to take accountability or see any issue
(29:11):
with our own behavior that is not going to be us. Though,
that is not going to be us because we know
what we're responsible for. Now we're going to change it.
Recognizing ways you may be self sabotaging is not a weakness.
Most people will never do this in their entire lives.
So this is what we're going to do next. The
(29:33):
first step, according to the incredible author Brianna Weste I
think her name is Brianna west Wist you will know
her though she wrote the book one hundred and one
Essays to Change the Way You Think. She also wrote
the pivot year the mountain is you. I think she
has another book coming out, but one of the best
things that she said about this, about this rewiring of
(29:55):
the unconscious, is if you want to change your behavior
and you want to rewire how your unconsciousness or unconscious
brain responds to things, you have to signal to your
subconscious and your unconscious that another reality is possible. Essentially,
you have to be able to imagine a new scenario
and a better scenario for yourself. And the more you
(30:17):
practice that imagined scenario in your brain by rehearsing it,
by visualizing it, the more it feels real. So you've
recognized the response that you want to change. Now you
are essentially reprogramming the outcome that the possibility of a
different outcome that could come afterwards. Your brain often treats
(30:39):
subjective reality, and your thoughts about a potential reality or
your imagination is the same, and that means that if
you think it can be true, your brain starts to
believe it as well. That's cognitive rewiring. It's literally the
same neurological patterns that create anxiety, just in the reverse
(31:00):
right your brain like your brain cooks up these like
what if possibilities and overinvest in them because it can't
always tell imagined reality from actual reality. In this situation, though,
we're going to overthink the best case scenario. We are
like reverse reverse engineering this to help us out. As
Brianna says, you have to be willing to see it's
(31:21):
possible before the reality of possibility follows. Whether that is
in a relationship, whether that is imagining how you are
going to break out of your cycle of dating emotionally
unavailable people, you have to imagine that that's possible. Whether
it is breaking out of a pattern of rage and anger,
(31:42):
you have to imagine it's possible first, whether it is
breaking out of a pattern of not communicating with your
friends and always having these like dramatic friendship blow ups.
If you cannot imagine a different way of doing it,
you're not going to be able to do it. So
part of this practice is like almost kind of like
a creative writing, creative rewiring exercise of like write your
(32:05):
own adventure, write your own ending. How is this going
to go? Second, once you have the imagined alternative scenario,
just keep the programming really really simple. Choose one behavior,
one reaction, one automatic choice you make that you don't
particularly like and target that. This was advice that was
(32:28):
written about in The New Scientists in twenty eighteen. They
actually did this whole series of like reprogramming your own
conscious if you want to pay for a subscription. But
essentially what they said, or what the author of this
article said, was that we have to start small. We
have to start on the most micro level to gain
access to our unconscious and rewire it. So creating a
(32:52):
singular if then plan whether then is the desired behavior?
That is what we're talking about. If I'm in this situation,
then this is how I'm going to respond. There's actually
such strong evidence. It's been written about so many times.
This is not an original idea for me, by the way,
at all. This has been written about and studied so
(33:13):
often that one of the simplest ways to gain more
control over automatic impulses is to predecide what your response
is going to be in advance. It's also a way
that people recover from addiction, you know, one behavior at
a time. There was a major two thousand and six
meta analysis, so a little bit old now, but this
(33:35):
big meta analysis that pulled together results from dozens of studies,
and they tested. What these are called. These are called
implementation intentions, right, those if then plans like if it's
ten pm, then I'm in bed. If it's the morning,
then I'm not on my phone. That's a bad one.
Like if I feel the urge to people please, then
(33:57):
I will email somebody and say I'll get back to you.
Then I will give myself twenty minutes to respond. If
I'm angry at my partner, then I'll take a walk.
Those kind of implementation intentions. Across all these studies, people
who had these in place, people who had the imagined
better scenario, were significantly more likely to follow through on
(34:21):
their new habits and intentions then people who just set
a general broad desire to change. So people who were
like I want to be better, I want to be
a better person, I want to be healthier, blah blah
blah blah blah, they weren't able to really do it.
But when you could say this is my trigger or
(34:41):
this is the situation I normally unconsciously respond to, and
this is how I want to respond differently, when you
could really identify A and B, your chances of success skyrocketed.
And the explanation for that, sorry just to drill into
this a little bit more. The explanation for that is
that the if part is the crucial part because it
(35:04):
makes you more sensitive to what is queuing the automatic
response that you would normally perform. If the IF is
making you aware of what in your environment triggers a response,
what in your own environment makes you particularly sensitive, what
in your environment your past has made you particularly reactive to,
(35:27):
And then it interrupts the normal loop that your unconscious
or automatic behaviors would want to perform and is like,
this is our exit, then we will do something else.
Another way to feel more in control of the impulses
of the unconscious mind, especially the ones again I keep
saying this, the ones we don't want your unconscious mind
(35:49):
as great things. But another way to feel in control
of those that we don't particularly enjoy is really simply
to just move slower. When we talk about impulses, we're
often really talking about bottom up automatic, like automatic processing
and like automatic emotional responses. Right, It's coming from something
(36:13):
very deep in us, and these responses are often generated
by much older, ancient brain systems, the ones that would
have come about first the amygdala, the limbic system, the
mid brain structures. Literally, if you looked at a cross
section of the brain, they are right in the they
are right in the center. They're the most protected because
(36:35):
they are the most important. These systems. They are fast,
they are efficient, They are designed for survival. It doesn't
want you to wait for nuance. Your automatic behaviors don't
care about your long term goals. They don't want to
consult you about how your reaction might meet your vision
(36:55):
of your ideal self. When you are stressed, when you
are sleep deprived, when you are over stimulated, when you
are emotionally flooded, the balance between your limbic system and
your prefrontal cortext shifts, so that your ability to intentionally
interrupt a behavior or intentionally interrupt I don't know, reaction,
it just goes way down, like it's hard to get
(37:19):
in front of that bus. In high arousal states, you
are again more likely to return to the default or
to your habitual behaviors, and so your window for tolerance
of discomfort and your ability to interrupt it, it just narrows.
Slowing down. On the other hand, interrupts that like that
cascade of stuff that's happening from a neurobiological perspective. Deliberately,
(37:46):
you know, reducing even your walking pace, deliberately making yourself
in less of a rush all the time, slowing down
your breathing, slowing down your speech, slowing down your physical movement,
slowing down how you eat, even whether you rush breakfast
over the counter or you sit down and enjoy it.
(38:08):
Slowing down all of that stuff increases parasympathetic nervous system activity,
which means better emotional regulation and stronger like top down
control rather than bottom up response. You are literally making
it biologically, neurologically easier to choose a better outcome for
(38:30):
yourself rather than just reacting. You can't manage what is
unconscious if you are always in a reactive state. It's
just not possible. So this is probably the most important
thing of all. Do the talk therapy, do the inner
child healing, do all of that to the historical work.
(38:51):
But if your nervous system is not regulated, if you
are not going about life more intentionally, and I feel
like intentionality such a buzzword, but it's true. If you
do not work on these high level intentions and slowing
down your life and reducing stress in whatever way you
can I know it's a busy life, but reducing stress
(39:12):
and whatever way you can your ability to signal to
your body that you want to perform this new set
of narratives and that you want to respond differently is
going to be very, very difficult. But I still think
you're able to do it. I still think that even
just recognizing to begin with the role of your own
(39:32):
conscious mind and what it's kind of doing, not doing
to you, but what it's trying to do for you,
based on the past, based on past hurt, based on
past fea trauma, even good things, that is a great
place to begin, I know for me, and I feel
like I've been talking about this a lot in recent episodes.
You can tell I'm really this is what I'm going
(39:54):
through at the moment. But my big thing has been
realizing how I unconsciously like resp onto social threats, especially
with my friends, and reflecting on you know how when
I was a kid, like I wasn't accepted and I
was bullied, and I didn't have many friends and I
was very lonely, and so I would always have this
weird reaction when like people would hang out without me
(40:14):
or I don't know, things of that nature would happen
where I would get really irritated and I would self
sabotage in a way where I would put even more
distance between myself and that friend, even when they were
kind of like, hey, what the heck is going on.
That's been a big thing for me realizing that unconsciously
(40:36):
everything that my brain is trying to do is to
make life safer for me, and it's trying to protect
me from past hurt. And the thing is is that
I'm not in that situation anymore. I'm not that child
or that teenager or that kid who was like feeling
very socially rejected. I'm an adult who has a brilliant
life and who has really focused on brilliant friendships. Those
(40:56):
patterns from my past like don't fit here anymore. And
if I keep them up, and if I keep performing them, like,
I'm gonna lose a really good thing. So just noticing
it and being as intentional as possible and being like,
I don't want to be this person anymore. Just one
of the most brilliant things that you can do or start,
like not just in your twenties, but like at any age.
(41:16):
You can be in your sixties and it's still gonna
be great. You could be in your nineties and this
is still an effective, wonderful thing for us to do.
So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it's
given you some insight stirred up some conversation. As always,
thank you to our brilliant researcher Libby Colbert for her
help with this episode. So much research went into this
(41:39):
and it's just, like always such a fascinating topic to
return to, whether you're like in the intro stages of
psychology or like more advanced. I feel like it's one
of my Yeah, it's one of my favorite things to discuss.
If you are listening on Spotify, leave a little brain
emoji below so I know that you made it to
the end of the episode and thank you for sticking around.
(42:00):
I very much appreciate it. Make sure that you are
following us on Instagram on substack if you want the yeah,
if you want the links to this article and to
look at all the research we used. You can also
watch us now on Netflix. If you're in the US
or Canada, please tag me in your pictures, tag me
in your stories of you watching the podcast. The vibe
(42:24):
is amazing. You can see all these cool props behind
me right now. It just brings I don't know, a
whole deeper level to what we're doing today and what
we're talking about. So thank you again for listening. Hopefully
I see you over on Netflix. If you are in
the US or kind of elsewhere, I'm sorry I can't
help you with that right now, but hopefully soon. And
until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself.
(42:47):
We will talk very very shortly.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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