How the Subconscious Mind Affects Behavior

While day-to-day tasks are primarily performed using your conscious mind, most of your actions are actually controlled by your subconscious mind. You may think that it is the same thing as how reflex actions work, but they are different. According to clinical psychologists in Montreal, a reflex action is how your body responds during stressful situations or when disturbances around you arise, and then you realize what you just did afterwards. On the other hand, you don’t realize that something you did was influenced by your subconscious mind.

Your subconscious mind stores memory permanently. It remembers everything that we see, feel, and experience throughout life. You may not be able to recall these things, but how these affected you are in your subconscious and are controlling how you react to different situations. The subconscious mind never sleeps. It controls our heartbeat, circulation of blood, and regulates digestion even as we sleep – even if someone is under a coma, as its function is to get us out of harm.

The subconscious stores emotions. A good example of this is, suppose someone had almost drowned in the ocean at a very young age. Even if they eventually forget the exact memory of this incident, the subconscious mind has their fear stored in it forever. The person may have a phobia of big bodies of water because of the impression this event had left in their subconscious.

This part of our mind has the power to control our life. If you keep thinking that you are not going to be successful in life, then that is most likely to happen, as the subconscious mind likes to take everything seriously. Once this negative energy is stored in your subconscious, you start to act on it and eventually work towards your own failure. Even doctors recognize this as a fact, as they do like to say words of encouragements to their patients before a surgery, no matter how difficult or complicated it is going to be.

Because of the power of the subconscious mind, it is crucial that as much as possible, we protect young children from all kinds of negativity if we can, as negative suggestions will be rooted deep into their minds and will affect their behavior as they grow into adults. Who you are now as a person is a direct effect of every little thing you saw, felt, and experienced while you were growing up.

Most of the time, we are not aware at all of how we are acting, and why we are acting a certain way. This is the result of our subconscious mind responding to what is in front of us.

Most people operate at only 1% consciousness when they are awake, meaning that almost the entire time, we are being controlled by our subconscious – which is not a bad thing. Who we are is a sum of all the things that we have gone through, and it is the essence of growing as a person. We have our subconscious mind to thank for that.