Almost all the brain’s activity happens below the level of consciousness. Your unconscious has many vital functionsĚý– from controlling breathing to processing incoming information – but there are also a few glitches. Tweak theseĚýand you can make the system work better for you.
Hack your unconscious
Your unconscious mind is not a black box of fears and desires working to undermine you, but a powerhouse of thought. Discover how you can take advantage
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Conscious vs Unconscious
Most unconscious thinking happens deep within the brain, while conscious thoughts tend to occur at the surface
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Bad habits and how to break them
As much as 40 per cent of our daily behaviour is habitual. This can be very useful. For example, while your unconscious is busy driving to work, your conscious mind is free to focus on something else.
Automated behaviours are grouped into distinct routines, or “chunks” – having a cigarette when drinking coffee, perhaps – making bad habits hard to break.
To reprogram your unconscious, you must first derail the existing problematic habit. If you always reach for a snack when you walk into the kitchen, for example, move the snacks so that they are out of easy reach.
Use prominent cues to trigger a more desirable habit. So, to replace snacking with fruit eating, buy a different fruit bowl and put it in a new, easily accessible position in your kitchen.
Repetition is the key. It can take anywhere between 15 and 254 days to form a new habit.
As well as cues, contexts trigger habitual behaviours, so try breaking a bad habit while away from your normal environment. Quit smoking while on holiday, for instance – but be careful not to let your good habits slip too.
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Know your biases
biases influence much of your thinking and decision-making. They evolved to help our ancestors act fast and effectively, but these days they often trip us up. Knowing how cognitive biases shape your thinking is the first step to consciously controlling them. Here are some to look out for:
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AnchoringĚý–ĚýFocusing on one factor, often the first encountered, when making a decision
Clustering illusion –ĚýSeeing phantom patterns in random events
Confirmation bias –ĚýPreferentially seeking and recalling information that confirms your preconceptions
Congruence bias –ĚýTesting ideas by seeking evidence that supports rather than refutes them
Endowment effect –ĚýValuing things more highly simply because they belong toĚýyou
Fundamental attribution error –ĚýAttributing people’s behaviours to their personality, not the situation
Gambler’s fallacy –ĚýBelieving that past random events alter the likelihood of future ones
Hyperbolic discounting –ĚýOvervaluing what’s available now relative to what you can have later
In-group bias –ĚýOverestimating the abilities and values of your own group relative to others
Negativity bias –ĚýPaying more attention to bad news and feedback than good
Projection bias –ĚýAssuming that most people think like you and hold the sameĚýbeliefs
Status quo bias –ĚýFavouring decisions that will leave things just as they are
In addition, we all have our own implicit biases: prejudices about things like race and gender that affect our judgements of others. Discover yours at
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Five ways to game your unconscious
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1. Take a hot bath
If you’re feeling lonely, a hot bath may make you feel better. Why? Research reveals that . Conversely, holding an ice pack can make you feel lonelier.
2. Think yourself full
Looking at pictures of particular foods . Similarly, spending just a minute imagining that you are full .
3. Smell something fishy
It “smells fishy” is a metaphor for distrust in more than 20 languages. Intriguingly, , perhaps because unconscious vigilance for rotten fish makes us more wary in general.
4. Get your house in order
Crime rates are famously linked with broken windows, litter and graffiti. But . Such visual disorder may activate mental metaphors such as “crooked politician”, which affect behaviour.
5. Don’t be deceived
We are surprisingly bad at consciously spotting liars, partly because we look for behaviours, such as fidgeting and averted eyes, which don’t actually signal deception. To avoid being duped, it is better to trust your intuition, since we do have an unconscious sense of who is lying to us.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Lifting the lid on the unconscious”
