391. The unconscious vs. conscious mind

We like to think we’re making conscious choices all day long - but a lot of what drives our reactions, habits, and gut feelings happens outside of awareness. The conscious vs. unconscious mind is a useful way to understand why you can know what you want, and still do the opposite. In this episode, we break down what the conscious and unconscious mind actually mean in psychology, where the idea came from, why it can feel unsettling to face, and how to build more influence over your impulses and automatic patterns. We explore: • The difference between deliberate thinking and automatic processing • Freud’s topographical model • The importance of the unconscious mind • The responsibilities of the conscious and unconscious • How to spot unhealthy unconscious patterns Watch on Netflix http://netflix.com/thepsychologyofyour20s Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# Subscribe on Substack: @thepsychologyofyour20s https://substack.com/@thepsychologyofyour20s For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Our favourite sources: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/bookseries/abs/pii/S0065260106380021?via%3Dihub https://acmelab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/1999_the_unbearable_automaticity_of_being.pdf The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.  See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Jemma Sbeg?

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• 2:14Jemma Sbeg?

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• 2:52Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our twenties, and what they mean for our psychology.

• 3:11Jemma Sbeg?

  Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we, of course, break down the psychology of our twenties. Today, I have something really fun and scientific for you guys. So if your favorite episodes of the podcast are when we kind of go deep into concepts and deep into research, you are going to love today's topic. And even if you don't, I still think this is one of those ones you should definitely listen to because it will tell you so much about how you operate, your behaviors, your decision making, why you make decisions that you don't always actually

• 3:56Jemma Sbeg?

  want to make rationally. Because today we are talking about the conscious versus unconscious mind and the role each of them plays in our lives and why we kind of, again, yeah, make decisions that feel bizarre and hard to justify, why we have these reactions that come out of nowhere and yet we still keep... Doing them and we can't quite figure out how to change. This is the unconscious mind. This is the part of our existence and how we interpret the world. We're gonna really drill into today. The idea that there are parts of us operating outside of our deliberate rational control is not a new idea.

• 4:40Jemma Sbeg?

  What's just changed over time and over the years is how we explain it. And we cannot talk about the unconscious versus conscious mind without doing a little bit of a history lesson first. So long before we had these words that I think we use so often these days, unconscious, conscious, subconscious. A lot of brilliant ancient thinkers were describing basically the same thing. This feeling that we as humans are split between what we know rationally and how we choose to behave emotionally. This goes like all the way back to like Plato and Aristotle and Spinoza who basically distinguished between what they called intuitive passions or appetites.

• 5:24Jemma Sbeg?

  And then, on the other hand, deliberate reason. Plato, for example, um, I like this metaphor. He described the human soul as having three parts. And he kind of described it as if we are sitting behind a chariot and the chariot represents us and represents our reason. And we think we're the ones that are guiding it, but really what's guiding the chariot are these two horses. We're guided by these two, in his mind, two winged horses. One represented nobility. It represented our uh emotional and social knowledge and our desire to be good and to be reasonable and rational. And then the other horse represented like our wa- our wild side, like it represented our desire and

• 6:10Jemma Sbeg?

  the appetite of like the unbounded parts of the soul. That is a very early representation of how we might now view our rational mind. And how we might also view our impulses and emotions or our.

• 6:27Jemma Sbeg?

  I guess beliefs are our social behaviour, each of them leading us in different directions. If this sounds familiar to Freud's idea of the ego and the superego and the id, it's because it is. Freud took a lot of his ideas from Plato and some of these ancient thinkers. He is obviously one of the most famous psychoanalysts of all time. And yeah, he based a lot of his work and the foundation of a lot of his theories on some of these metaphors. And he kind of took those initial ideas and tried to format them or flesh them out even more. And in his mind, the mind is divided into three parts.

• 7:11Jemma Sbeg?

  The conscious mind, so what you're aware of right now, you know, I'm sitting in this room, I'm looking around, there's a microphone in front of me. I'm recording my podcast, my pre-conscious mind, things that are kind of just sitting below that I want to talk about. Where this idea is going, what I have to do next, how my mood is being impacted by things that happened earlier this morning. And then the unconscious mind, material that to him is kept out of awareness, but it's still influencing you. So you may have seen this, especially in like Psych one O one classes, represented as an iceberg. That's a pretty classic way of representing it. I still remember

• 7:53Jemma Sbeg?

  having that iceberg diagram in my psych textbooks, but all of these things, the conscious, subconscious or pre-conscious and unconscious all kind of work together to form the person that we know as ourselves. One thing Freud really emphasized though was the role of dreams in being able to basically understand what the what the unconscious mind is doing below the surface. So in his mind, like, we could never directly know what's happening unconsciously in our mind. He basically said that dreams are one of the only ways of really being able to understand what's going on.

• 8:33Jemma Sbeg?

  He wrote a whole book about it. It's literally called The Interpretation of Dreams. He also claimed that, you know, our dreams fulfilled our unconscious wishes. So like, if you want to be famous, your dream may, your dreams may reveal to you. How you should do that. Or, you know, if you feel guilty, your dreams may reveal to you how you're not, or how you should forgive yourself. He also says they reveal what we desire most or what we fear the most. Some other ways that he said we could get in touch with the unconscious mind were the famous Freudian slip. Um, artwork, repressed memories. These days, we know that's all probably less than accurate.

• 9:18Jemma Sbeg?

  There may be some slight truth to it, some slight truth to our dreams, kind of working out some deep emotional wounds, but Freud did get a lot of stuff wrong. I think he did the best that he could with what he had, but he is still a controversial figure. And this is a great place to kind of shift gears and talk about what we know about the unconscious unconscious mind. Now, in the modern day, with a bit more technology, with a bit more scientific experimental practice going on. Pretty simply, the conscious mind in psychological terms is the set of mental processes that you can deliberately direct. What you can hold in awareness, what you can reason about, what you can talk about, what you can see.

• 10:02Jemma Sbeg?

  The big thing about the conscious mind, sorry, is that it's relatively slow. It's very intentional, effortful. It's kind of limited in its capacity as well. So for example, you can't, you really can't juggle more than a couple of things in your conscious mind at any one time. It's why we're bad at multitasking, it's why we get mentally overwhelmed, it's why you um, say things automatically you don't really mean when a lot's going on around you. I like to think of your conscious mind as like the spokesperson. It is the person that like the company puts in front of the cameras, who is like reading off the script that the unconscious mind has given it.

• 10:43Jemma Sbeg?

  Or it's kind of more like it's putting together a speech from a bunch of dot points that the unconscious mind has given it. It has some, some decision-making powers, it directs a small amount of information. It definitely applies a lot of reason and it interprets the small things that the unconscious mind gives it. Um, but beyond like directing impulses and directing things around you. It also doesn't completely.

• 11:15Jemma Sbeg?

  Your conscious mind cannot be aware of absolutely everything. It's just responsible for constructing the story of who you are based on what it has access to. Just basically, it interprets your human experience for you, but it doesn't always have a good grip on everything that's going on in kind of the back offices of the mind, right? Again, think of this spokesperson or CEO analogy. Let's use the CEO analogy. The CEO may be up front, but she is like nothing without the staff whose jobs she can't possibly do all by herself. And she can't possibly be aware of everything that's going on in the back offices all the time.

• 12:01Jemma Sbeg?

  That's the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is just the front man. There's a lot going on behind the scenes. One key aspect that the unconscious mind is responsible for is rapid evaluation that our conscious mind just isn't quick enough for. You know, whether something is good or bad, whether something is safe or unsafe, whether to approach or avoid, how to react in a situation of danger. Before you consciously decide how you feel about a situation or even about someone's tone or their physicality or their presence, your body often already knows. Automatic evaluations, they are what help us really move quickly in social and physical environments.

• 12:42Jemma Sbeg?

  You know, for example, if you meet somebody and you instantly feel uneasy, but you can't explain why, that's your unconscious mind. Like, your mind has picked up on subtle cues like micro-expressions or mismatch between their words and their tone without conscious awareness. It's like that feeling in your gut, right? Interestingly, actually, maybe not a surprising fact for many people, but women are better at this. Women are better at unconsciously picking up on these micro-expressions. There was a study in 2020 that basically gave participants a bunch of portraits of people, either with an authentic or an unauthentic, non-authentic smile.

• 13:28Jemma Sbeg?

  Women were picking up on that incredibly quickly and with much higher accuracy. This is because your unconscious mind is also responsible for always kind of having this idea of like, what are we gonna do next or action preparation. I E. if this person is dangerous, it knows what you're immediately gonna do before you even know about it. It's also responsible for associative learning, right? That that study, right, where these women could tell if people were inauthentic and the smile was not to be trusted. Definitely, your unconscious mind has picked up on times in the past where that's probably happened.

• 14:10Jemma Sbeg?

  Where you've trusted somebody and they had a smile like that person and then they betrayed you. Or you've trusted somebody and they've had an authentic smile like that person and they've ended up being a great friend. Really, it's this embodied reaction. We often label it as a gut reaction. Um. That comes from all these past experiences. Childhood hurt, memories we've forgotten about that have lingered on in some form or another, often through automatic behaviours. And sometimes this is amazing, right? Intuitive reactions are really helpful. Knowing how to follow your intuition is an amazing human ability. But other times, this reaction can be really faulty.

• 14:50Jemma Sbeg?

  It can be encoded through bias and through fear so that, you know, we often do respond in weird, self sabotaging ways or in a way that we don't really want to because our conscious mind didn't sign off on it. And that's the final thing, the unconscious mind or the theories say the unconscious mind is also really responsible for and plays a role in is your habits and your context triggered behaviour. Habits aren't just repeated actions, they are learnt links between a cue, a response and a feeling. For example, um, choosing to exercise or not.

• 15:31Jemma Sbeg?

  Yeah, your conscious mind might make the final decision. And you might think that you have a say in whether you choose to exercise tonight or not. But behind the scenes are all these associations that are pushing you towards one decision or another. Like how you felt the last time you exercised, your beliefs about people who exercise. That one time you were a kid and you were picked last for the football team. Or you fell over and now you forever resent exercise. And there's always this like weird dark memory about it, even if you can't consciously remember that happening. Another way we see this really interestingly is with um a lot of our food choices. Like how we choose what we buy at the grocery store.

• 16:13Jemma Sbeg?

  So why is it important to separate the conscious from the unconscious? What does that actually help us with behavior behaviorally and emotionally and psychologically? We're going to talk about all of that and more and the important lessons we can really take from unconscious impulses. After the short break, stay with us.

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• 17:12Jemma Sbeg?

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• 17:49Jemma Sbeg?

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• 20:39Jemma Sbeg?

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• 21:22Jemma Sbeg?

  to know what comes from your conscious, goal-directed you, your higher self, and what comes from something deeper. The quote I always use, I feel like I've been quoting Carl Jung a lot in recent episodes, but this quote is spectacular for what we're talking about today. Carl Jung, one of the grandfathers of modern psychology, he said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and we will call it fate." And this is what we're talking about. I think a lot of us assume that we're pretty self-aware as people, especially if like you've done a lot of that deep emotional work, or you've been in therapy, especially if you talk openly about your feelings. You're like, "Yeah,

• 22:07Jemma Sbeg?

  I kind of, I know myself, I know what's going on." But a lot of research says that... Most of these behaviors and this knowledge is really just scratching the surface. There is a pretty famous piece of literature, psychology literature, from the nineteen seventies, where essentially these researchers, Nisbet and Wilson, realised that, wait, we really don't know why we make certain choices. We really don't know what produces our judgments. And when we're asked to explain when we make certain decisions, often we'll just give an answer that sounds reasonable, even if that is not the true reason, just to kind of make our unconscious actions make sense.

• 22:50Jemma Sbeg?

  And this study, this study was like fundamental in showing this. So essentially, they put these participants in a room, or I don't know how they actually did it, whether it was one by one, I think it was. And they put them in front of like a clothing rack, and there were these, a series of clothing items. And they didn't have any tags on them, and they just asked them to choose which item was the best. So which item was the best, had the best quality, which one did they prefer the most? The thing was, the items were almost identical. And most people chose the item that was simply the furthest to the right. They just, for whatever reason, people kept going back to this one. They were all the same, this one at the very end.

• 23:33Jemma Sbeg?

  And they would feel all these items, whether it was because it was the last item they felt, because it was on the very end, or the last item they saw, it didn't really matter. For some reason, they were all choosing this particular piece. And when they were asked, why did you choose this item? Participants never mentioned the positioning.

• 23:58Jemma Sbeg?

  They never mentioned anything about that. They weren't even consciously aware of it. Instead, they just gave these explanations, like, this one had this very particular sense to it, or this very particular texture, and I could tell it was better. Or this one, the fibre count reminded me most of like this sweater I had as a kid that my mum spent a lot of money on. Like, they were just, it wasn't that they were lying. It's just that there were these underlying unconscious processes that were impacting their choices that they didn't have access to, and yet their conscious mind. Had to justify it. And this is a way that human behaviour can be manipulated. That is one of the biggest reasons why we have to understand it.

• 24:41Jemma Sbeg?

  The group who know a lot about this and know very well how to manipulate these unconscious shortcuts or choices are actually advertisers. And also, this may surprise you, we talked about grocery stores before. The people who stock your supermarket shelves, they know a lot about the unconscious mind. Did you know that most of our shopping decisions are based on placement alone? So the majority of us, um, if we were given, let's say, twenty options for like jam or pasta or sauce or whatever, we're just gonna buy what's like directly in our line of sight, like ninety percent of the time.

• 25:21Jemma Sbeg?

  Yeah, like price and quality will sometimes come into play, but big brands will literally pay top dollar to buy shelf space right in the middle, right in that line of sight. And that's why the most popular brands will often sit there. Even if you choose not to buy that product, why you buy a different one is also due to your unconscious mind. For example, supermarkets always put the most expensive items at the top. That slightly higher price makes it feel slightly better and makes you feel slightly better about yourself being able to afford something that isn't the basic choice because it feeds your ego.

• 26:05Jemma Sbeg?

  It feeds some unconscious part of your mind that needs validation. Maybe it's you choose a certain pasta sauce because one time somebody really attractive who reminded you of your childhood crush, you saw them buying that pasta sauce. You don't remember that happening, but now that's the one you always buy. Maybe it was the one that your parents always chose. That is a huge influence. What our parents buy is often what, you know, continues to influence us even when we think we're making our own conscious decision. You need to understand the unconscious mind.

• 26:37Jemma Sbeg?

  Again, because people are using it to direct your behaviour. Maybe against your actual wants. People can manipulate it. But also because, imagine we're not in a grocery store. Imagine we're around our friends. Imagine we're with somebody that we're dating. Those same automatic ingrained mental shortcuts that dictate your grocery choices. Also then dictate how you behave in those situations as well. Like, why you pick a fight over something small that seems to mean absolutely nothing? Why you get so defensive towards criticism? Even though you rationally know it's like a healthy part of a relationship. Why, for some reason, like your friend interrupting you drives you mad?

• 27:23Jemma Sbeg?

  But like, she could be as late as she want, she could literally steal money from you and you don't care. But as soon as she's mad, like, that's this weird disrespect that you don't know why you respond, but you do. Your unconscious mind is is trained to respond to whatever you repeatedly experience. Rehearse and emotionally encode, especially when it happens early, often or intensely. That is really how your unconscious mind is trained. Early, often, or intensely, frequency, intensity, or the age at which it occurred. A big aspect um that impacts our unconscious mind is obviously, you may have guessed this. Our early learnings, our family, our childhood experiences.

• 28:04Jemma Sbeg?

  Even, and some would say this, experiences you had in the womb or generationally. Literally, there is this idea called collective unconscious, which which says that our deepest beliefs and our ways of seeing the world are spiritually inherited before our, before we even are conscious beings. Your unconscious mind is being formed way before your conscious mind even catches up. Whilst, I think that's pretty hard to prove scientifically. And there is yet to be a lot of proof, scientific proof for it. We do know that you absorb the rules of your environment before you are consciously aware of them.

• 28:46Jemma Sbeg?

  Things like how love is shown, what happens when you're upset, whether mistakes when you were a child were punished or repaired. Whether your needs were welcomed or inconvenient, whether you were bullied, how you were taught to behave. Things that really traumatized you or excited you as a kid. They are what are creating the rules for your unconscious mind. And they become the template for how life works, how relationships work, how everything in the world works. Even in adulthood, your body will keep running these childhood rules until you consciously update them. And this is why therapeutic tools like, you know, like talk therapy or

• 29:27Jemma Sbeg?

  learning to re-parent yourself or re-processing or processing for the first time or trauma are so effective. You know, these are the stuff that we're not necessarily aware of all the time. We kind of know it happens. We don't really get the wounds that it's causing. And it's not until you like really like get in the trenches and like dig deep, almost like an archaeologist, and you bring up this stuff with a professional, right, that you get yourself a bit more. And you really understand what causes these patterns in your behavior. So how can you recognize when your unconscious mind is is really steering things in a way that isn't benefiting you? Because your unconscious mind is steering a lot. Some of it's great. We don't need to touch that.

• 30:11Jemma Sbeg?

  How do we figure out when we do? We do need to like do some of that. Again, archaeological digging. As Freud said, there will be signs. It's probably not going to be dreams, though, or disturbing art or Freudian slips. That's probably not the only way. That's not the best way to get access to this. Instead, and I hate to say it, it's probably going to be the natural consequences of of your actions and of your behavior. I wish we could interpret everything that was wrong with us unconsciously throughout dreams. It'd be a lot easier. No, it's probably going to have a bit more realistic, tangible. A more realistic tangible feel to it. One way to know is when you keep repeating a pattern, even though consciously you want something different.

• 30:55Jemma Sbeg?

  You might genuinely want to rest, but you keep overworking and you feel terrible about it because you're not seeing your family or your friends, but you cannot stop. You might really want a healthy relationship. You really wanna be with somebody who loves you, but you keep choosing emotionally unavailable people. Repetition with regret. You might really wanna stand up for yourself. And you really wanna start that business and you really wanna be a self-made success. But when it comes down to it, you put yourself, you put yourself in a box. You apologize. You can't, you know, put yourself out there. You feel this kind of stagnation, that there is like this ceiling to how much you can achieve.

• 31:39Jemma Sbeg?

  You know, your wiring says to you, that is not something that is available to us. That is not who we are, based on past experiences. That gap, that gap is important. The gap between what you consciously want and what you repeatedly do or believe is the clear sign of an automatic reflex that is built on unconscious, unhelpful mechanisms. Another time that you can notice that your unconscious is like in control in a way that's not great is when your reactions feel bigger than the situation that is in front of you. A useful, a very useful tool or clue is

• 32:21Jemma Sbeg?

  when you feel this real sense of urgency to respond in a specific way to a situation. If it feels like I have to do this right now to feel okay, otherwise like I don't have any other way, I don't know any other way to respond to this. That is often the unconscious mind trying just to reduce discomfort as efficiently as possible. And it's just trying to protect you in the way that made sense in the past. If a small comment sends you into panic and rage and shutdown and you just like don't know where that has come from. Or if you find yourself like overreacting just like rapidly.

• 33:01Jemma Sbeg?

  And then you feel super confused afterwards. That is often an automatic threat response. And these kinds of situations, we are responding um through memory. And we're responding based on past meaning rather than what is actually happening in the present moment. And it definitely is a sign, like something deeper is being activated or triggered here that maybe we're not aware of. Or maybe we are, but we don't want to think of. Just to give you some more examples, like um. I'm trying to think about what would be a good one. So for example, if your friend always chooses the restaurant. And you start getting like really annoyed at them, really annoyed at them, and you do not know why. Is it really them or is it because you don't like being directed?

• 33:46Jemma Sbeg?

  Or because you're not in control of plans? Because somebody else choosing a restaurant probably shouldn't elicit that much of a of an emotional reaction. But you think it really says something about you. Or if your partner doesn't say I love you back in like the specific right tone at the right time. And like you go into this full tizzy. Is it about them? Or is it that you like maybe always secretly question whether anyone could truly love you? Because your parents didn't show you that much affection? Or because a relationship in the past made you feel worthless?

• 34:17Jemma Sbeg?

  It's worth asking. Once you are aware of these markers and these reactions that just seem really disproportionate. You are basically more aware than I would say ninety percent of people, probably higher. So like noticing it feels very shameful sometimes and feels very much like awkward and weird. Um, and I actually think that's the greatest place to start. In that discomfort of recognizing behaviors you don't like about yourself. Because it isn't your fault. It definitely isn't your fault most of the time that like this is who you are and this is how you were programmed. And this is how your, this is what your unconscious mind chooses to prioritize. It is your responsibility though, which really sucks. It's just an extra, another one of those extra fun things about being an adult.

• 35:02Jemma Sbeg?

  But we can definitely do it. We can definitely take responsibilities for the, for these behaviors and, and change the outcome and change the behavioral loop. So we're going to take one final break here. And then when we come back, I want to give you three ways to do this. And to reprogram your unconscious mind as much as we possibly can as conscious individuals. So stay with us.

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• 36:02Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their Everyday Seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on, and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is. Lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 36:39Jemma Sbeg?

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• 37:24Jemma Sbeg?

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• 38:00Jemma Sbeg?

  I've been really trying to prioritize my health in a realistic way this year. And something that has kept me really motivated is my Whoop. I am such a data person, which is why I love Whoop. Because I can genuinely see why my body feels differently depending on the day. Why I'm running differently, why I'm maybe less focused. Whoop effortlessly tracks my sleep, it tracks my strain, my recovery, my stress. And most importantly, my overall health. And it just gives me all that data and all those patterns. So I can make better decisions, which includes knowing when to go easy and knowing when to go hard. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join.whoop.com/psychology for your free month of Whoop.

• 38:44Jemma Sbeg?

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• 39:29Jemma Sbeg?

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• 39:52Jemma Sbeg?

  I personally think one of the biggest signs of intelligence in somebody is choosing not just to accept your situation or learnt behaviour for what it is. Choosing not just to say like, this is the way I am and this is how I've always been. So why do I have to change? But instead, instead, taking action on behalf of your better self and on behalf of the person you want to be, even if you are not there yet. In fact, research has shown, research has shown time and time again, that one of the biggest signs of low mental flexibility and therefore low mental intelligence, or emotional

• 40:32Jemma Sbeg?

  intelligence, I should say, is being unable to take accountability or see any issue with our own behaviour. That is not going to be us though. That is not going to be us because we know, we know what we're responsible for. Now we're going to change it. Recognising ways you may be self sabotaging is not a weakness. Most people will never do this in their entire lives. So this is what we're going to do next. The first step, according to the incredible author, Brianna Weist, I think her name is Brianna West, Weist. You will know her though, she wrote the book, A Hundred and One Essays to Change the Way You Think. She also wrote The Pivot Year, The Mountain is You.

• 41:15Jemma Sbeg?

  I think she has another book coming out, but one of the best things that she said about this, about this rewiring of the unconscious is if you want to change your behaviour and you want to rewire how your unconsciousness or unconscious brain responds to things, you have to signal to your subconscious and your unconscious that another reality is possible. Essentially, you have to be able to imagine a new scenario and a better scenario for yourself. And the more you practise that imagined scenario in your brain by rehearsing it, by visualising it, the more it feels real. So you've recognised the response that you want to change.

• 41:54Jemma Sbeg?

  Now you are essentially reprogramming the outcome that the the possibility of a different outcome that could come off could come afterwards. Your brain often treats objective reality and your thoughts about a potential reality or your imagination is the same. And that means that if you think it can be true, your brain starts to believe it as well. That's cognitive rewiring. It's literally the same neurological patterns that create anxiety, just in the reverse, right? Your brain, like your brain cooks up these like, what if possibilities and over invest in them because it can't always tell imagined reality from actual reality. In this situation, though, we're going to overthink the best case scenario.

• 42:39Jemma Sbeg?

  We are like reverse, reverse engineering this to help us out. As Brianna says, you have to be willing to see it's possible before the reality of possibility follows. Whether that is in a relationship, whether that is imagining how you are going to break out of um your cycle of dating emotionally unavailable people, you have to imagine that that's possible. Whether it is um breaking out of a pattern of rage and and anger, you have to imagine it's possible first. Whether it is breaking out of a pattern of not communicating with your friends and always having these like dramatic friendship blowups. If you cannot imagine a different way of doing it, you're not going to be able to do it.

• 43:22Jemma Sbeg?

  So part of this practice is like almost kind of like a creative writing, creative rewiring exercise of like, write your own adventure, write your own ending, how is this gonna go? Second, once you have the imagined alternative scenario, just keep the programming really, really simple. Choose one behavior, one reaction, one automatic choice you make that you don't particularly like and target that. This was advice that was written about in The New Scientist in two thousand and eighteen. They actually did this whole series on like reprogramming your unconscious if you want to pay for a subscription. But essentially what they said or what the author of this article said was that.

• 44:09Jemma Sbeg?

  We have to start small. We have to start on the most micro level to gain access to our unconscious and rewire it. So creating a singular if then plan, where the then is the desired behaviour, that is what we're talking about.

• 44:27Jemma Sbeg?

  If I am in this situation, then this is how I'm gonna respond. There's actually such strong evidence, it's been written about so many times, this is not an original idea for me, by the way, at at all. This has been written about and studied so often that one of the simplest ways to gain more control over automatic impulses is to pre-decide what your response is gonna be in advance. It's also a way that people recover from addiction, you know, one behaviour at a time. There was a major two thousand and six meta-analysis, so a little bit old now, but this big meta-analysis that pulled together results from dozens of studies.

• 45:06Jemma Sbeg?

  And they tested what what these are called, these are called implementation intentions, right, those if then plans, like if it's ten P M, then I'm in bed. Um, if it's the morning, then I'm not on my phone, that's a bad one. Like, if I feel the urge to people, please, then I will email somebody and say, I'll go back to you, then I will give myself twenty minutes to respond. If I'm angry at my partner, then I'll take a walk, those kind of implementation intentions. Across all these studies, people who had these in place, people who had the imagined better scenario were significantly more likely to follow through on their new habits and intentions.

• 45:50Jemma Sbeg?

  Than people who just set a general broad desire to change. So people who are like, I wanna, I wanna be better, I wanna be a better person, I wanna be healthier, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They weren't able to really do it.

• 46:04Jemma Sbeg?

  But when you could say, this is my trigger, or this is the situation I normally unconsciously respond to, and this is how I wanna respond differently, when you could really identify A and B, your chances of success skyrocketed. And the explanation for that, sorry, just to drill into this a little bit more. The explanation for that is that the if part is the crucial part. Because it makes you more sensitive to what is queuing the automatic response that you would normally perform.

• 46:39Jemma Sbeg?

  If, the if is making you aware of what in your environment triggers a response. What in your environment makes you particularly sensitive? What in your environment your past has made you particularly reactive to? And then it interrupts the normal loop that your unconscious or automatic behaviours would wanna perform. And is like, this is our exit, then we will do something else. Another way to feel more in control of the impulses of the unconscious mind, especially the ones, again, I keep saying this. The ones we don't want your unconscious mind does great things, but another way to feel in control of those that we don't particularly enjoy. Is really simply to just move slower.

• 47:23Jemma Sbeg?

  When we talk about impulses, we're often really talking about bottom up automatic, like automatic processing. And like automatic emotional responses, right? It's coming from something very deep in us. And these responses are often generated by much older ancient brain systems. The ones that would have, would have come about first. The amygdala, the limbic system, the midbrain structures. Literally, if you looked at a cross section of the brain, they are right in the, they are right in the centre. They're the most protected because they're the most important. These systems, they are fast, they are efficient, they are designed for survival.

• 48:10Jemma Sbeg?

  It doesn't want you to wait for nuance. Your automatic behaviours don't care about your long term goals. They don't wanna consult you about how your reaction might meet your, your vision of your ideal self. When you are stressed, when you are sleep deprived, when you are overstimulated, when you are emotionally flooded. The balance between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex shifts. So that your ability to intentionally interrupt a behaviour or intentionally interrupt, I don't know, reaction. It just goes way down. Like it's hard to get in front of that bus. In high arousal states, you are, again, more likely to return to

• 48:52Jemma Sbeg?

  the default or to your habitual behaviours. And so your window for tolerance of discomfort and your ability to interrupt it, it just narrows. Slowing down, on the other hand, interrupts that, like, that cascade of stuff that's happening. From a neurobiological perspective, deliberately, you know, reducing even your walking pace, deliberately making yourself in less of a rush all the time. Slowing down your breathing, slowing down your speech, slowing down your physical movement, slowing down how you eat even, whether you rush breakfast over the counter or you sit down

• 49:33Jemma Sbeg?

  and enjoy it. Slowing down all of that stuff increases parasympathetic nervous system activity, which means better emotional regulation and stronger, like, top-down control rather than bottom-up response. You are literally making it biologically, neurologically easier to choose a better, a better outcome for yourself rather than just reacting. You can't manage what is unconscious if you are always in a reactive state. It's just not possible. So this is probably the most important thing of all. Do do the talk therapy, do the inner child healing, do all of that to the historical work, but

• 50:20Jemma Sbeg?

  if your nervous system is not regulated, if you are not going about life more intentionally, and I feel like intentionality is such a buzzword, but it's true. If you do not work on these high-level intentions and slowing down your life and reducing stress in whatever way you can, I know it's a busy life, but reducing stress in whatever way you can, your ability to Signal to your body that you want to perform this new set of narratives and that you want to respond differently is going to be very, very difficult. But I still think you're able to do it. I still think that even just recognizing to begin with

• 50:57Jemma Sbeg?

  the role of your unconscious mind and the and what it's kind of doing, not doing to you, but what it's trying to do for you. Based on the past, based on past hurt, based on past fear, trauma, even good things, th- that is a great place to begin. I know for me, and I feel like I've been talking about this a lot in recent episodes. You can tell I'm really, this is what I'm going through at the moment, but my big thing has been realizing how I unconsciously like respond to social threats, especially with my friends. And reflecting on, you know, how when I was a kid, like I wasn't accepted and I I was bullied and I didn't have many friends and I was very lonely. And so I would always have this weird reaction when like people would hang out without me or um

• 51:42Jemma Sbeg?

  I don't know, things of that nature would happen where I would get really irritated and I would so I would self sabotage in a way where I would put even more distance between myself and that friend, even when they were kind of like, hey, what the heck is going on? Um, that's been a big thing for me, realizing that unconsciously everything that my brain is trying to do is is to make life safer for me and is trying to protect me from past hurt. And the thing is, is that I'm not in that situation anymore. I'm not that child or that teenager or that kid who was like feeling very socially rejected. I'm an adult who has a brilliant life and who has really focused on brilliant friendships. Those patterns from my past like don't fit here anymore. And if I keep them up and if I keep

• 52:28Jemma Sbeg?

  performing them, like I'm gonna lose a really good thing. So just noticing it and being as intentional as possible and being like, I don't wanna be this person anymore. Just one of the most brilliant things that you can do or start, like not just in your twenties, but like at any age, it could be in your sixties and It's still gonna be great. You could be in your nineties and this is still an effective, wonderful thing for, for us to do. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it's given you some insight, stirred up some conversation. As always, thank you to our brilliant researcher, Libby Colbert for her help with this episode. So much research went into this and it's just like always such a fascinating topic

• 53:08Jemma Sbeg?

  to return to, whether you're like in the intro stages of psychology or like more advanced. I feel like it's one of my, yeah, it's one of my favorite things to discuss. If you are listening on Spotify, leave a little brain emoji below so I know that you made it to the end of the episode and thank you for sticking around. I very much appreciate it. Make sure that you are following us on Instagram, on Substack if you want the, yeah, if you want the links to this article and to look at all the research we used. You can also watch us now on Netflix. If you're in the US or Canada, please tag me in your pictures, tag me in your stories of you watching the podcast. The vibe is amazing.

• 53:52Jemma Sbeg?

  You can see all these cool props behind me right now. It just brings, I don't know, a whole deeper level to what we're doing today and what we're talking about. So thank you again for listening. Hopefully I see you over on Netflix if you are in the US or Canada elsewhere. I'm sorry, I can't, I can't help you with that right now, but hopefully soon. And until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very shortly.

• 54:21Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over fourteen years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.

• 54:59Jemma Sbeg?

  I've been approaching my health really differently this year. I used to be really focused on maximizing and doing more. And now I'm just realizing that if I listen to what my body needs, I perform way better. And that's why I am obsessed with my Whoop. Truly, you guys, you know I'm such a data and information-driven person. And I love opening my Whoop app and seeing how my sleep, my stress, my strain is correlating with my mood, with my running performance, with how I'm just feeling day to day. I'm not an elite athlete by any means, but I do really benefit. And I also just really enjoy knowing more about my body. And Whoop also gives me these actionable, personalized insights

• 55:42Jemma Sbeg?

  that have made me more intentional and meant that I make smarter decisions day to day about what I need, rather than just putting my foot on the gas and just going, going, going, going. New members can try Whoop with a 30-day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join.whoop.com/psychology for your free month of Whoop. Hi, this is Jemma Sbeg. Taking care of yourself doesn't have to mean completely changing your routine. Naturewise Vitamin D3 is an easy way to support immune, bone, and muscle health every single day. And because quality matters, Naturewise has one of the first NSF-certified Vitamin D3 currently on the market.

• 56:26Jemma Sbeg?

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• 57:28Jemma Sbeg?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.