Dialogue with your unconscious

Opinion

How does your unconscious affect your life?

Most psychologists, including Freud, define the unconscious mind as the place where we store information that we cannot access. It consists of childhood memories, experiences, instinctual wishes that can drive our behavior and form our personality.

Many studies have shown that 95% of the time we only use the unconscious, leaving 5% for the conscious.

Because of the presence and high speed of the unconscious (40 million bits of data per second), we are able to perform multiple tasks at the same time.

I have always been fascinated at how our mind never stops processing thoughts and emotions. How it always keeps on going even when we are asleep. The act of dreaming is so powerful that it sometimes reflects our deepest fears, fantasies, wishes, or instincts which we aren’t even aware of, which are somehow hidden in our unconscious.

So often, I have tried to stop myself thinking through meditation. To give my mind a break. At the beginning I thought it would be really easy, but the harder I tried not to think of anything, the greater the number of thoughts that started going through my mind.

The inner conversations that we have actually indirectly dictate to our unconscious what to do in the near future, what habits to form, what emotions to trigger in certain situations, and how to act. Negative inner dialogues will lead to negative results, and positive inner dialogues to positive results.

I remember when I had to make a presentation in front of my whole class. As I am not a comfortable public speaker, this situation created anxiety even though I felt prepared and truly believed in the information that I was going to present. A few minutes before the presentation, thoughts started to run through my mind: „What if I say something wrong? What if I forget what I have to say?”

The translation for my unconscious was already taking place; I was solidifying in my mind exactly what I didn’t want to happen. I couldn’t stop it. I was already picturing it, as though it were a movie. My anxiety and fear were taking a hold over me and my body immediately reacted, my hands started to sweat and my first instinct was to run away.

But then I remembered that, although I may not be able to control my emotions, I can dictate my thoughts. I replaced them with „ I am actually excited that everybody can see my work” „I couldn’t be more prepared, nothing can go wrong”.

And then I imagined how I wanted it to be. And suddenly my palms were dry, and I felt relaxed. I couldn’t believe it had worked. Was it that simple?

Why did it work? My answer was that it happened because I truly believed that everything would go well. I just had to focus on this instead of the negative.

Be aware of your thoughts. Be aware of your inner dialogues. Take care of the words you choose to express yourself.

Our life reflects our unconscious programming, and unfortunately, because of our education and the social rules that we grew up with and had to conform to, for most of us, our programming tends to be negative – for example: fear of what people might be thinking of us, fear of not being accepted, etc.

We live these emotions without even realizing it. We adapt to them without even looking for the real reason behind them. It is just the way we have to feel, because everybody feels the same in typical situations. We can’t be conscious all the time, so the unconscious basically rules us.

Meditation and exercises to eliminate negative words would, however, be a start towards a new path of increased awareness as well as a focus on our thoughts and inner conversations that we have.

Credits

Image	Title	Author	License
	Dialogue with your unconscious	Enrico	CC BY 2.0