The conscious mind is the part of mind that is self-aware. It is the part of the mind that uses logic and reasoning to navigate your daily life. In the book A Primer of Jungian Psychology, the authors describe the conscious mind as a collection of “conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts and feelings.” (Hall, Nordby, New American Library, 1973)

While it is not clear exactly how the conscious mind works to store information, it appears to involve electrical signals carried by the nervous system. Stanford University’s Neuropharmacology Laboratory is currently conducting studies that measure consciousness through EEG activity, and preliminary findings are showing that the EEGs can measure loss of consciousness due to drugs that are central nervous system suppressants. In other words, the EEG can show how deep the subject has gone under due to anesthesia. (www.stanford.edu/group/maciverlab/research.html)

If you want to make lifestyle changes, initiate personal growth or stop bad habits or compulsions through the conscious mind, the most widely used method today is cognitive therapy. The Beck Institute, which was founded by the originators of cognitive therapy and is the premier research facility on the subject, describes cognitive therapy as a method that “seeks to help the client overcome difficulties by identifying and changing dysfunctional thinking, behavior, and emotional responses. This involves helping clients develop skills for modifying beliefs, identifying distorted thinking, relating to others in different ways, and changing behaviors.” (www.beckinstitute.org)

On the other hand, the subconscious mind is the part of the mind that operates outside of consciousness. (A Dictionary of Psychology, Andrew M. Colman, Oxford University Press, 2006) The subconscious mind is responsible for automatic body functions like the heart beating and breathing, but it’s also responsible for all sorts of mental processes you’re not aware are going on; one good example is decision-making. 

A recent study from the University of Rochester proves that decisions made with the subconscious part of the brain are almost always the right decision. As the head researcher, Alex Pouget, Associate Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, states, “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.” (www.physorg.com/news149345120.html) 

Dr. Laura DiGiorgio, a clinical hypnotherapist and NLP master practitioner, explains the process of communicating with the subconscious as having three avenues: through emotion, through repetition, and through symbolic language. (DiGiorgio, 2005) Strong emotions can imprint our subconscious negatively. For example, if you try public speaking and start to stammer and embarrass yourself, the shame you feel will make you want to avoid public speaking. Hypnotherapy can treat the subconscious using the techniques of repetition and symbolic language, replacing the negative thought patterns in the subconscious with positive thought patterns that lead to more productive behavior. Appeals to the subconscious like hypnotherapy, NLP or guided imagery are among the best ways to create long-term change for personal issues, because while cognitive therapy can help treat the conscious mind, the subconscious mind is actually stronger and appeals for change that ignore it won’t work in the long term.