Have you ever decided to make a change in your life then found yourself reverting back to your old patterns within just a few weeks, days, or even hours? You feel that ping of frustration because you just keep repeating old patterns even though you know they aren’t serving your highest vision.
You’re not alone, my friend.
Change is possible, but I won’t deny that without the proper knowledge and tools, change is hard.
That’s why I want to let you in on the science behind successfully making a change, and what makes change so hard.
Here’s the thing, to change any part of you, whether it be a habit, an emotional reaction, or even just the order you get dressed in the morning, you must go against your hard-wired subconscious conditioning.
Your subconscious conditioning is responsible for 95% of your daily thoughts, decisions, actions, behaviors, emotional patterns, preferences, and reactions. Your subconscious is who you’ve learned to be. It’s the memorized patterns of being that make up who you are.
Since the moment you came into this world, you have been collecting information from your parents, peers, siblings, environment, and experiences in which you use to create your model of the world and your self-perception.
Essentially, you are “learning” how to be you, just like you learned to tie your shoe. Just like tying your shoe, you can now tie your shoe without even thinking about it, because it’s a learned pattern that is stored in your subconscious. I bet you could hop on one foot, while having a full in-depth conversation and still tie your shoe without any difficulty. That’s because it doesn’t take any conscious awareness to do it, it’s so automatic that your subconscious just takes over.
The thing is, your entire personality is the exact same.
Your thoughts, emotional reactions, behaviors, and everything else is carried out in the exact same way. You don’t even need to think about it, your subconscious mind just takes over and repeats the patterns of who you are.
Why does our mind do this? Because if you had to use your conscious awareness to think about every single thing you did each day, you would be so overwhelmed you probably wouldn’t even make it out the door. Storing information and patterns allows us to learn and repeat, which in many cases, is extremely useful.
Language for example, is stored in the subconscious. Without the ability to store patterns of information, we couldn’t even communicate. We use the information in our subconscious to function in every way imaginable. From brushing your teeth to operating your vehicle at highway speeds, none of this would be possible without those learned patterns held in your subconscious.
For the most part, we can be grateful for that subconscious mind and all the easily repeatable patterns that we do automatically every single day.
But to change… well, that’s where we run into issues.
If you recall, your subconscious makes up 95% of your mind. You might be wondering, what about that other 5%?
That’s the part of your mind that is aware and fully conscious, we call it the Conscious Mind. It’s the part of your mind that you use when you are learning something new. Once you’ve learned it however, it becomes an automatic pattern stored in your subconscious.
That 5% of your mind is the part that you use when trying to create change in your life. That’s why it feels like you’re trying to swim up a raging river when you’re trying to change a habit or a reaction. 5% of your mind is trying to override the other 95% of your automatic conditioning.
To add to the difficulty, you must be aware of the subconscious pattern to be able to change it. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you are trying to change an emotional reaction. You find that you get quite angry at small daily annoyances, and you’d like to become a more peaceful person.
First of all, it’s the conscious part of your mind that has the awareness that being angry all the time is not ideal. Consciously, you decide to make a change.
However, ten minutes after you decide to be a more peaceful individual, you get cut off in traffic and you automatically react with anger and aggression, cussing them under your breath. Without even thinking about it, adrenaline was released into your bloodstream, your heart rate increased, your brows furrowed, and you felt and anger boil over causing you to feel tense and irritated.
After a few moments pass, you realize that you’ve repeated that pattern again and you feel defeated. Not even ten minutes have passed and you’re already reverting to your old patterns of anger and frustration.
Sound familiar?
That’s because the emotional reaction of anger and frustration is a subconscious pattern that plays out without any of your conscious awareness needed. This means that it happens without you choosing to make it happen.
This brings us to the first reason why change is so hard. The patterns you are trying to break are happening beneath your conscious awareness. This means that to override the automatic patterns we need to go deeper and resolve the anger at its root.
This is where Hypnotherapy can become extremely useful. Hypnotherapy is a practice that allows you to access the conditioned patterns and reactions in your subconscious, and elicit real, lasting change.
In my book, The Uncaged Mind: How to break free from your subconscious conditioning to live a wildly fulfilling life I share just how we can get to the root of the subconscious pattern and make permanent changes to how you feel.
The key is to release the emotional charge. Oftentimes intellectually understanding our patterns is not enough to change them -that’s because they are driven by emotion.
Perhaps you decide to dive into your subconscious in a hypnotherapy session and find that the root of your anger stems back to an earlier time in your life where you felt completely unheard and unseen. Perhaps there have been times in your life where your voice was not heard, and you felt wronged but couldn’t express your pain either because you didn’t feel safe, or you were taught to suppress those negative feelings.
Those feeling may have been bottled up for years or even decades, and although you have consciously moved on, your subconscious is still repeating those feelings of hurt and frustration each time you feel unheard or unseen. Little things like getting cut off in traffic triggers those unhealed emotions stored in your subconscious, and you feel all the pain and anger boiling up from your past. Of course, you don’t realize that the anger is coming from somewhere deep in your subconscious, you just feel angry at the person who cut you off.
Getting to the root of that anger allows you to finally release the frustration and sadness from those earlier memories and allows you to leave the past in the past. Perhaps you find that you can forgive those that caused you to feel unheard and unseen. This is a massive breakthrough that allows the deeply rooted anger to finally be released from your subconscious, changing the way you see yourself and your model of the world.
By getting to the root of the emotion and releasing the deeper cause of the anger, you start to notice that getting cut off in traffic, or any daily annoyances doesn’t cause the same emotional reaction anymore because you are no longer reacting from past pain. You start to notice you feel more peaceful.
By getting directly to the source of that deeply rooted pattern, we can override the automatic emotional reaction and see dramatic changes in how you feel.
Change can seem hard when you don’t have the right tools. However, when you understand how to work with your subconscious mind, you realize that change is not only possible, but that its an invitation for the most incredible journey of self-discovery and healing.
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