Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
What Is the Unconscious Mind?
The old-fashioned idea of the unconscious (sometimes called the subconscious) mind, following Freud, was of a kind of dungeon where we lock up all the repressed desires (aggression, lust, selfishness) that we can’t admit to. Modern psychological research is showing this up as a very out-of-date view.
In fact, your unconscious mind is just those parts of your thought processes which happen below the radar of your conscious awareness. When you are talking to someone, who is it that chooses the words and the order they come out in? When you pick up your phone from the table, who is coordinating the dozens of muscles involved in that movement? What keeps you breathing when you are asleep? It’s not your conscious awareness.
Your unconscious mind is able to multitask in a way that is far beyond your conscious abilities. It keeps the billions of cells and thousands of systems in your body working in (more or less) perfect harmony. It runs your immune system, your digestive system, your circulation, and performs prodigious feats of real-time processing that the most advanced computers are nowhere near matching.
Learn to Use Your Unconscious Mind
Your unconscious mind is like a faithful servant, carrying out your wishes without the need for conscious effort on your part. It wants you to succeed and tries to act in your best interests. It likes to be given tasks to carry out. If you don’t give it any instructions, it will take them from elsewhere – usually advertising, the media (including social media), or peer pressure. Right now you can choose to enlist its help, by being clear about what you want, and giving your unconscious mind exact and unambiguous instructions to follow.
Try this tip: to make use of your unconscious mind’s creativity, ask it to solve a problem as you go to sleep. You will often find that you have the answer when you wake.
Manage Your Mind
Your conscious mind (the ‘you’ that makes decisions, or your ‘will’) is like the captain of a ship. The unconscious mind is like the crew. The crew members all know what their jobs are, and they can carry them out without having to be told. So what is the job of the captain? To decide where the ship is going. Many people, though, don’t use their conscious mind for its intended purpose. On their ‘ship’, the captain is forever worrying about whether the crew are doing their jobs, while neglecting to set a course for the ship. For long stretches their ‘ship’ is becalmed, or going round in circles. Instead, you can consciously select the course you intend and let your unconscious mind get on with the job of following it.
How to Talk So Your Unconscious Mind Listens
The unconscious mind does not understand the word ‘not’, so it’s important that you learn to talk to it in a way it will understand.
Get more effective results, both from your unconscious and from other people, by telling them what you do want them to do, rather than what you don’t.
If a parent tells a toddler “Don’t touch those sweets”, the toddler’s unconscious mind hears “touch those sweets”. Similarly, suppose that someone wants to give up smoking – if they constantly tell themselves “I’m not going to smoke”, they will be continually reminding themselves of cigarettes, and probably restimulating their craving. ‘Negation’ (the ‘not’ in “don’t get nervous” or “I must not have another cookie”) makes sense logically but you can’t form an image of it, so instead focus your unconscious mind on what you want, and on positive benefits.
The articles and podcast episodes on this site will help you get started using NLP techniques. But if you want to really go into depth, get some or better still all of the books in the acclaimed Practical NLP series – they’re easy to read and designed to demystify NLP so that anyone can use it.
© 2026, Andy Smith. All rights reserved.