…about how the Subconscious mind is an overpowering entity over the Conscious mind. Your Subconscious mind rules you in other words.
I was watching an interesting video on how to unlock yourself from procrastination on Skillshare today and came across a class taught by a lady called Jill Mcabe who has built a life around just that. By teaching people how to unlock themselves from the sometimes debilitating phenomenon we know as Procrastination. This video was relating to our Goal making and achieving.
She says that our subconscious minds are ruling our conscious minds. And that the reason they rule over our cognitive conscience is that the subconscious talks in our own body language. I don’t mean body language like folding your arms or frowning. I mean in the language of emotions and feelings, imagery and senses.
The conscious mind speaks in the language of the spoken word, concepts and ideas. And when you think about how the two languages differ, and so can’t really communicate. Well, at least fluently, it kind of stands out that unless you actually know how this works – how the hell are you going to master it! And with that, maintain any sort of progressive furthering, or venture? Like setting goals and then working towards them until they are complete.
Our subconscious minds are basically hi-jacking what we are striving towards in what we are trying so hard to do, and I find it fascinating how it works.
So…when we are procrastinating it means that there is something that we really should get on with but we don’t. A lot of people call this laziness, full stop. Well, if procrastination is just laziness then I hold my hands up, I’m the laziest person on the planet! She has another video that I’ll watch which goes more deeply into the science behind it but here’s my take on what I’ve learned so far.
We get overwhelmed with the cognitive. Words, calls, ideas, actions, just life in general and when this happens we can get ‘brain fog’ or ‘writer’s block’, that kind of thing. When this happens what do we have to fall back on (which is already there by the way), yes, our Subconscious which has been controlling our emotions, feelings and thought processes for all of the time. If we aren’t aware that the two minds speak in different ways then how do we manage them?
In respect of goals and things that we are trying to achieve, we need to State, then Translate. To State would be to think about what it was that you want to be doing, or should be doing and to Translate would be to ask ‘why’ you want to do it. In other words what you’ll get out of doing it.
One way of looking at it would be to ask yourself, “what will happen to me if I achieve this?”, and the reason for this is that asking what the outcome will be, will envoke positive emotions that will start to talk in subconscious language. You’ll feel something which comes directly from the thought, and that in turn, speaks to your subconscious. Or, “what good will come to me?”, “what will happen if THAT happens?”. Do you see how it’s working?
Every time you ask the questions of why, your emotionally driven subconscious gives you a shot of dopamine, which makes you feel better. So 1 small, tiny action towards your goal after you’ve thought about it gives you a hit of dopamine. If the subconscious knows it’s important it’ll reward you with a dopamine hit. 1 small action snowballs. Action=dopamine=action=dopamine=action=dopamine. And that’s the trick. By doing this you can give yourself a dopamine drip by simply asking and answering questions.
She goes into how the Amygdala works with it all too. The Amygdala is the centre which evokes Fight or Flight responses. We all know them right? Well to bring that into operation you need to ask a slightly different question, which is looking at it on the negative side rather than the positive side, like…”What will happen if I don’t do this? or how will it affect me if that’s not done?” Putting these types of questions to yourself conjures up feelings of negativity and panic, which in turn provide the subconscious with food for thought. And in so doing when you think of NOT doing something you get a shot of adrenaline which makes you kind of shudder.
Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will & if you’re not familiar you will be fearful – so just do it!
Choose the right Goals so that you’re not actually wasting time and speak to your subconscious for those rather lovely dopamine hits.
Hey, that’s my crazy take on it all anyway, but it brings me to a relative subject which relates to the subconscious mind and that’s Mindfulness.
How do we talk to our subconscious when it’s doing that, that we really need to do to get over certain hurdles. We use what’s called the practice of Mindfulness & Meditation and you can read all about it by clicking the above link 🙂
