3 Ways Subconscious Mind Learns

“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”Sigmund Freud

On average, people live more than 80% of their lives in autopilot. Their morning rituals, the path they choose while going to work and actions they take before sitting on a chair or meeting new people. This means, they are not aware of the actions they take on a daily basis. Consciousness might be the part, humans can perceive and understand, however, unconscious part of the brain is what structures the beliefs and actions which may sound abstract to some people. The habits we build, fears we feel and beliefs that, in fact, form the character itself, all of it exist in the subconscious mind which learns from past experiences in order to keep us alive. In that case, how does subconscious mind learns from the past? Just like going to a gym.

Intensity of Emotions

Lifting weights will cause a damage in muscle tissues which seems to a hazardous action to most people. However, the damage itself what actually bodybuilders desire before their competitions. Reparation of the damage what actually makes the muscles grow.

Heavy dumbbells -> Bigger Damage -> Bigger Muscles

Similarly, having intense emotions for a particular situation conditions the brain by linking the responsible neurons to each other. By consuming the sweet,delicious, sugar contained nutrition, you trigger dopamine receptors for feeling pleasure of that tasty food as a reward which at the end might establish an addiction.

Another example is emergence of FEAR. Fear is the emotion brain reveals in order to keep us alive. Since the brain can not distinguish concreteness and discreteness, wild animals(Concrete) and humiliation(Discrete) have no clear difference in the subconscious mind. If you are humiliated by someone you loved, the intense pain of the emotion will be triggered as anxiety and stress every time you want to trust someone in order to NOT feel that again.

Intense Emotion -> Inference -> Subconscious Reaction

Those emotions will repeat as long as we are influenced by the particular situation, which brings us to next way of subconscious learning.

Repetition

One intense work out in the gym is not the reason of bodybuilders success on the competitions. As the emotion repeated at some intensity level, it is much more likely to stick. Just like habit building or belief structuring, with repetition brain is more likely to learn from the past to adapt to new possible dangerous or delightful situations.

Timing

If you are not hydrated, did not consume enough food for energy or have an injury on your way to gym; I do not think that is day you will have the most efficient training you ever had. Subconscious mind might infer different meaning from the same situation. Wrong timing might shift everything to the contrary direction of our purposes.

Conflicting Emotion

The most understandable example would be a day you had had a painful conflict with your boss or family before you met your spouse or friend. Meeting your spouse can ease the pain and relieve the stress normally but if the conflict’s impact is more intense than your spouses relieving effect on you, that might cause an extra problem in your relationship which eventually has the conflict’s emotional effect on subconscious mind. Additionally, in some cases, spouse might be the new trigger of the emotion if it is too powerful.

First Impression

“First impression matters.” is the statement that can be found in any article. It matters because, brain needs to make an inference from the past experiences and past experiences were never experienced until the very first time. With the first experience, brain wires itself for doing it MORE or NEVER doing it again.

Brain Waves

Subconscious mind is open to new conditioning when the brain waves are at the optimum level. Brain waves’ frequency changes according to our consciousness level. Brain becomes extremely active as the frequency increases and it becomes less and less active when it decreases. Optimum frequency is, like in hypnosis, between 7 Hz and 8 Hz for subconscious mind’s shift. It is the gap we achieve just before we sleep and the moment we try to wake up. As a result, listening an affirmation tape before sleep could make a change as long as the affirmations don’t trigger a conflicting emotion.

In conclusion. subconscious mind controls our personality, success, happiness level, everything. If we don’t learn how to control it, we can not take control of anything about ourselves.