I grew up thinking my unconscious mind regulated my breathing and heart rate and other autonomic functions.  I assumed that my thinking was done only at the conscious level.  I was clearly wrong.

One of the most amazing and at the same time unsettling ideas emerging from research in the neurological and psychological sciences in recent decades, is the power and the pervasive nature of automatic unconscious (or nonconscious) thinking.  It’s amazing because we have an incredible thinking and problem solving machine operating beneath the conscious level of our awareness.  It’s unsettling because it is becoming apparent that some, and probably many, of our decisions are made by unconscious processing before we become consciously aware of them.  That is a topic for another time.

Some Complex Decisions Are Better Made Unconsciously

Your conscious mind can only manipulate a very limited number of chunks of information in working memory.  It has limited processing capacity.  This is not the case for the unconscious mind.  It is a massive parallel processing machine that performs amazing feats that we have not yet been able to replicate with computers.  The unconscious mind also has a much higher processing speed than the conscious mind.  Scientists have estimated the bits-per-second of each, but I can’t remember where I’ve read them or what the numbers were.  I do remember the conscious mind’s processing powers were tiny in comparison.

As strange and counter-intuitive as it may sound, this means that decisions in which a large number of variables or units of data must be compared and manipulated are going to overwhelm the limited capacity of your conscious mind.  The general rule then is to leave the more complex decisions, those with a lot of variables, to the power of your unconscious mind.  Simpler serial or logical decisions with fewer variables are better suited to the conscious reasoning process.

The last time I bought a car I thought my head was going to explode.  I kept trying to decide between two cars that both had their different advantages and disadvantages.  It was difficult to compare the weight of the various factors, and there were simply too many variables for me to get a clear handle on what to do.  I finally went with the gut feeling I had been having all along and I never have regretted it.

An Experiment in Choosing the Best Apartment

Imagine this.  Four fictitious apartments are assigned 12 attributes each.  Things like “has an attractive look”, “is fairly large”, “has a bad landlord”, and “is in a noisy” neighborhood.  These attributes had been pretested and set up in a way that there was a clear choice on the best apartment (a lot more positive attributes) and a clear choice on the worst (a lot more negative attributes).  The other two apartments were neutral.

The subjects of the experiment were then presented the attributes of the apartments one at a time.  After all the attributes of the four apartments were presented, they were asked to make their choice for the best apartment.  They were divided into three groups.  One group was asked to make an immediate decision.  The second group was given time to think about their decision before making it.  The third group was given the same amount of time to complete a distracting task and then they were asked to make a decision.  The distraction task was an intensive working memory task to ensure the subjects couldn’t be consciously thinking about the apartment.  These groups were labeled “immediate”, “conscious”, and “unconscious” respectively.

The bottom line results were that the “unconscious” group consistently produced the best results.  For some reason, pondering the decision and consciously trying to pick the best apartment was not much better than the immediate group that had no time to think about it.  Why would this be so?  You would think that the conscious group’s unconscious mind would also be working on the problem during their conscious thinking time and thus they would get additional benefit from having both minds working the same problem.  With more power on the problem shouldn’t the conscious group produce the best results?

Articulation of Reasons Can Lead to Bias

There is a lot of evidence from other experiments that translating complexity into verbally articulated reasons can cause bias in our minds.  This bias my override the unconscious conclusion.  When we are reasoning consciously, we tend to favor those factors that can be easily articulated and thus we give them more weight than they deserve.  This leads to bad decisions.  Couples who simply report their feelings about the status of their relationship and rate it as “good” are much more likely to still be together six months later than couples who listed the reasons for their relationship status and also rated it as “good”.  The latter are obviously are not able to verbally articulate the true state of the relationship.  The unconsciously generated feeling was simply more accurate than the verbally articulated reasons.  Ladies take note!  Your relationship chatter is not necessarily a good thing

The same thing happened in an experiment on choosing art.  People who just go with what they feel they like, pick differently than those who are asked to list the reasons for their choice.  The reason givers are more likely to be unhappy with their choice later.  Bottom line is that giving reasons often impacts your choice for the worse.  It causes you to emphasize that which can be verbalized over that which can’t.

Focus groups cannot pick television show winners because by articulating their reasons they are biasing their choices.

In the apartment picking experiment there were further trials to try to tease out what was going on in the unconscious mind that allowed it to make a better choice.  It turns out that it seemed to be able to better separate the positive and negative attributes.  Over the time period when it was working on the problem, the unconscious mind was able to increase the polarization of the positive and negative attributes and thereby make a better decision.

You actually make decisions with unconscious processing a lot more often than you realize.  Your unconscious mind often (but not always) communicates its answers to you through feelings.  People who have lost the ability to feel emotions through brain injury are paralyzed by their conscious reasoning.  They can’t make a decision because there are simply too many factors to consider.  They may labor over what others might consider simple decisions for hours and never get anywhere.  So even when you think you are making a rational decision, you are often just rationalizing an unconscious feeling after your unconscious mind has already decided for you, usings reasons of which you are not consciously aware.

What Does All This Mean to You

Should we then just give up conscious thinking?  Of course not.  The conscious reasoning powers you have are excellent for serial and logical deductive thinking.  They just can’t handle the massive parallel processing of the unconscious mind.  Further, the conscious mind often needs to overrule the mistakes and errors of the unconscious.  When looking for my new car, I felt really good about a $125,000 dollar Mercedes, but my conscious mind eliminated that option from consideration.  It would have given my bank account a bad feeling!

Experts in the field believe that in the case of complex decisions where there are a lot of variables, you need to give yourself a goal, such as to choose a new car, and then consciously become informed of the relevant information.  Then you stop thinking about the decision and do something else while your unconscious mind evaluates.  Later, maybe the answer will just pop into your head, but if not you are going to have feelings about the right choice.  Learn to read those feelings and go with them.  If you try to reason it out you become susceptible to the verbal bias I described above.

By nature I am a very logical and rational person.  It is very hard for me, and I think for a lot of other people, to believe that some decisions can be better made unconsciously.  However, the experimental evidence is piling up.  Furthermore, most people just don’t realize the critical part that unconsciously generated feelings play in most of their day-to-day decisions.

The skill that is going to make the difference in improving your decision making is knowing when to employ the various methods.  I don’t have the answers, but I think the coming years are going to reveal a great deal about the amazing abilities of our mysterious minds.  If you get out ahead of the curve, you are going to be the better prepared to deal with our increasingly complex world.

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Most people I know are fairly responsible with their monetary situation.  I suspect most of you reading this blog have somewhat reasonable control of your finances.  And yet, there are other currencies you deal in every day and to which you pay far less attention and over which you have far less control.  This is a risky game you are playing because some of these currencies are actually more important than money.

Your Attention

Whatever you focus your attention on expands.  It collects interest far more rapidly than money.  As one simple example, when you pay attention to celebrity gossip you are telling your brain celebrity gossip is important and you automatically attract more of it into your life.  It’s not some mystical attraction, it is simply the fact that your brain’s alert system will notice more of it and draw your conscious attention to it.  You get interested in the stories.  The headlines in the checkout stand will jump out at you and you may pick up the magazine and browse it.  Your ears will pick up on the TV news coverage of celebrities and their trivial lives.  You will be drawn toward conversations at work or in social situations that are focusing on celebrities.  It’s a vicious cycle and you need to stop it.  You think it is harmless but it is not.  Your non-conscious mind is thinking about it.  Wouldn’t you rather that super-computer in your head be focused on more creative and important issues?

Another example.  You start complaining about something at work.  Your co-workers join in and you all start thinking of more examples.  You put emotion into your negative thoughts.  Your brain is now on alert and it notices more and more examples of your miserable work life.  You think about it more and more and these negative situations become even more important.  You are just feeding the beast and allowing it to grow to the point it consumes you.  And you thought it was just some harmless complaining at the water cooler.

A Recent Story

Here is a personal example that has a positive ending.  A while back I was browsing a table of new biographies in a Barnes and Noble bookstore.  I noticed two new biographies of Ayn Rand.  I hadn’t read any of her writings for decades, but one of the biographies looked fascinating and I decided to buy it.  I was immediately absorbed in the fascinating story of her troubled and brilliant life.  It took me back 30 years to a time when I first discovered her books and was drawn deeply into her ideas.  In the days after I read her biography I found myself going to my bookshelves and pulling out my really old copies of her books and reading some of the material.  I didn’t really want to spend my time doing that because I already knew exactly what she had said.  I had focused my attention on the subject of Ayn Rand and her ideas started filling my conscious and non-conscious thoughts.  I had told my brain that the subject of Ayn Rand was important.

While I disagree with Ayn Rand in some significant ways, one of the things that drew me to her in my youth was her incredibly passionate belief that ideas matter and that they matter a lot.  To this day I have never encountered another person that has held that belief so deeply or so brilliantly articulated the practical impact of philosophy and ideas.  That’s the good part of this story of my brief time travel back into the world of Ayn Rand.  It reminded me of the importance of ideas.

From that point on I have spent more time thinking deeply and reflectively.  It reawakened in me a passion for philosophy and deeply critical thought.  I find myself now reading some books that are much more likely to light a fire in me than what I had been reading.  I had been focusing on things that were of a more immediately practical nature.  I was not wasting my time on the practical; these ideas were interesting and useful, but they didn’t get me out of bed in the morning or get me excited about life.

I had been paying attention to the practical side of life and thus the practical grew in importance.  I was neglecting some of my most deeply held values; the things that mattered most to me.  So simply paying attention to one book, created a course correction in me that is making my life more satisfying right now.

I started a book yesterday afternoon that is absolutely fascinating, The Age of American Unreason (Vintage) by Susan Jacoby.  It’s about the current state of the anti-intellectual American culture; its causes and its consequences.  I only halfway through it but I’m totally enjoying it and it’s really making me think.  Yesterday afternoon I also bought a new 600 page book I found at B&N called  The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism by Howard Bloom.  I’ve read the author before and he is a big thinker.

What’s the point of me telling you all of this?  What you pay attention to matters and it matters a great deal.  It matters much more than you think.  Even when you are not consciously aware of it, the biggest and most powerful part of your brain is cranking away on what you tell your brain is important.  Your non-conscious brain decides what is is important based upon what you are pointing your attention towards.  What you are paying attention to now in some degree determines what your non-conscious mind will be paying attention to in the future.

“Your attention is the strongest currency at your disposal.  If you squander it, your life will result in one big overdraft.  If you invest it in things that you value, you will collect interest big time – and be interested along the way.” – Alan Cohen

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The technique described in this article is intended to be used for habit change.  You can use the power of your non-conscious brain to make behavioral changes that you are otherwise finding difficult to make by conscious willpower alone.  This is an extremely powerful technique for these types of changes, but please note that  it is not a technique for achieving your big dreams.  It is not the way you will achieve your ultimate future.  That will be covered in another article.

Remember that your non-conscious brain is at least 5/6th of your thinking power and it operates 7 X 24.  Please read these articles if you have not already done so: What You Need to Know About Your Amazing Brain – Part I and What You Need to Know About Your Amazing Brain – Part II.

Here are some things to keep in mind as we begin applying these powerful techniques:

• If you want to change your behavior, you must change your thoughts first.  If you attempt to change your behavior without changing your thoughts first, you will have a very difficult time succeeding.
• If you change your non-conscious thoughts first, your behavior will follow automatically.  This makes it much easier to change your habits.  If you do not, your powerful non-conscious brain will fight you all the way.
• If you read the articles I referenced above, you will know that emotion creates much stronger neural pathways in your brain.  Make use of that fact.
• You non-conscious mind will work on those ideas that are dominated by your conscious thoughts.  Those thoughts you dwell on in your conscious mind will be considered important by your non-conscious mind.
• The more powerfully you dwell on something in your conscious mind, the more powerful will be the instructions to your non-conscious mind.
• Your non-conscious mind does not distinguish between fantasy and reality, between the truth and a lie.  Whatever pictures it receives are as real to it as any others.  This is a key factor that you can use to tremendous advantage.  It is also a key factor in your failure.  If you dwell on what the negative, you get negative.  Your non-conscious mind does not know it is a negative.  A negative picture is just as powerful as a powerful picture.  When you say to yourself “I wish I wasn’t fat” you are sending your non-conscious mind a picture of you being fat.  Big mistake.
• There is no free lunch with your brain.  Everything takes time and effort.  Your current thought patterns have developed over many years and they don’t go away overnight, if at all.  You have to re-channel the river, but the old river bed will remain.  It may degrade, but it is always there waiting to be used again.

Use this technique for virtually any habitual change you want to make in your life.  What follows is based upon a technique by Doug Bench.  He calls these “Inner States” and he describes the process as sending your non-conscious mind an Inner State.

1. Write out your end-state, the end-goal which you want to achieve, on several index cards.  You need to tape one to your bathroom mirror, carry one in your pocket, and tape one to some other frequent and appropriate place you visit.  Your refrigerator, your desk, your car, etc.
2. Write out your state in the active present form: “I am”.  Never write “I will”, “I shall”, etc.  For example, say you want to lose weight and be healthy.  You might write something like:  “I am healthy and fit as result of eating only healthy food.  I am a lean, mean, fit, human machine”.
3. Always write a positive.  Never, ever, under any circumstances, write a negative.  For example don’t write “I’m not fat anymore”.  Don’t write “I’m going to stop smoking”.  Those may be good goals but they are framed as a negative.  The way something is framed makes all the difference in the world to your non-conscious brain.  It’s the difference between getting your non-conscious mind to work with you instead of against you.
4. Only use this technique for something that is totally within your personal control. If it requires the cooperation of another, then you are setting yourself up for failure.  This is a technique to change your behavior.
5. Make it emotional and exciting. Use words that trigger emotion in you brain. This technique works exceptionally well with things that are currently a flat out lie.  If you are fat and ill, then to say I am fit and healthy is a lie that triggers an emotional response in you.
6. You need to repeat your state to yourself out loud.  This is much more powerful than saying it silently in your own mind.  You are adding your sense of hearing to the mix.  Your vocalization gets more of your brain involved.  The more senses you involve the better.
7. Say it with emotion and inflection. Put energy behind your words.  Belt it out.  The hell with your embarrassment!  If you want to change then pay the price.  If not, then don’t bother with this at all.  Here’s a tip, if you are embarrassed by someone hearing you performing your inner states, then create an inner state that eliminates the habit of embarrassment.  “I am proud of people seeing and hearing me perform my inner states!  I am excited for people to know I am changing myself.”.  Another tip.  Your car can be a good place to do them in private.
8. Act it out.  Move your body, move your arms and legs if appropriate.  The more action the better.  I like to pump my arms.
9. You need to see yourself.  A mirror is best, but anything that reflects your image will work.  You are adding the most powerful sense of all to your state; your vision.
10. Perform your state at least 3 times per day.  The more times the better but you don’t have to get ridiculous and do it 20 times a day.  Five or six times a day is great.  Here’s another tip.  The more variety you can add to your locations the better.  The belief is made stronger by slight variations and contexts.  You create the same belief with different environments and this creates some slightly different pathways in your brain that reinforce one another.
11. Repeat your statement at least 5 times each session.  Add variety to these five repetitions by changing inflections or movements.
12. Create an emotional state for yourself right before you perform your inner state.  The brain is made more powerful by emotion.  The neural connections are stronger and more easily traversed if they are created with a flood of positive neurotransmitters released.  Sit in a chair, close your eyes, and recall a particularly emotional experience in your life.  Maybe the day you meet your soul-mate.  Whatever you do, create a flood of emotions.  If you cannot do that then just force yourself to laugh.  Laughing, fake or real, releases powerful neurotransmitters that will make whatever you do next stronger.
13. Close your eyes and visualize your end-state immediately after you finish performing your statements. Put yourself forward in time to when your goal has been achieved.  Make it powerfully visual and incredibly detailed.  See yourself fit and trim in all your glory.  Visualize yourself in your new clothes size.  Visualize yourself picking your size zero off the rack and trying it on your new slim and trim muscular  body.  (Sorry ladies but I have no idea what a size zero means.  I just pulled that out of the air.)
14. You must perform each state for at least 30 consecutive days.  It is better if you go 60 but this is highly individualized.  One you finish your 30 day period then keep doing that same state at least once a week for the next several months.  Once again this varies by individual and habit, but whatever it takes for you to maintain the habit change as a permanent habit change.

You may be saying to yourself that this seems too hard.  Well, it’s your choice.  You can take the easy road to failure or the hard road to success.  Personally, I think it is a fairly minor task.  No, it is not a change-your-mind-change-your-life-overnight sales job, but unfortunately science proves you can’t do that, regardless of what someone else tells you or sells you.

Changing your deeply ingrained habits or beliefs is not easy.  It takes emotional commitment.  You must work at it this, but the rewards are enormous.  You have the tool.  You have the choice.

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