Reprogramming The Unconscious Mind

So how do we go about reprogramming the unconscious mind? How does the mind get programmed in the first place?

The events in our early years have the greatest influence over us in many cases. If we received powerful ideas which came at a time when we didn't have the ability to critically analyse what we were being told, we would have accepted the ideas without question.

Many of our most deeply held beliefs come from our parents and our culture. Even our grandparents have brought their heritage into our lives in some way.

Powerful beliefs based on real life experience will have made their way into our subconscious mind. As we grow older, we develop the ability to be critical of new ideas and concepts. This becomes a filter for the subconscious mind. However, we often still carry old, outdated ideas about money, life, work and relationships with us from our childhood.

If our parents struggled financially, for example, there's a strong change that we developed some negative ideas around money. This can become a belief and hold us back in life when we want to move forwards. If we've picked up some negative emotional baggage around finances, you can bet that they will be holding you back from making more money.

But how do we change these ideas, if they are rooted in our subconscious mind, out of view? One answer is to start observing how you talk and think about the subject you are attempting to change in your life. What do you say about money, work and yourself? Your ideas around money will lightly stem from your beliefs around money. If you have a negative belief from your childhood around money, you're probably creating a blockage. To change this, you can route it out and stop giving it more energy.

Use an affirmation to use in place of your negative belief. For example, if your rhetoric around money is something like "You must work hard for money", you can replace it for "money comes easily and frequently". By repeating mantras which are contrary to your old beliefs, you can loosen the effect of your old beliefs and replace them with the new ones.

Think about how often you have repeated to yourself or someone your old view on money or on what you need to do to earn it. Over the years, this becomes a belief which you cling to as if your life depended on it. But what if it was a lie? Creating a new belief will take some time. You need to counteract your old belief by repeating your new affirmation over and over.

You can also use meditation to learn how to quieten your mind. This can have a two fold benefit. Firstly you can notice your inner dialogue much better. By watching your mind, you can see exactly how you continually talk to yourself. This inner dialogue feeds into your subconscious mind and creates the cornerstones of your belief system over time. Listen to what you say closely if you want to change things in your life. Replace limiting beliefs with new, more empowering ones.

Your self image too, is responsible for many of your ideas about what life has to offer you. Self image is a powerful focus for your unconscious mind. It controls how you think about yourself. If you consciously want something, but unconsciously you don't believe it's possible, your unconscious belief will prevail.

Or, if you consciously want something but don't believe you're worth it, you'll find ways to sabotage your conscious efforts to prove yourself right. Then, you'll justify not achieving your desired outcome in some way which agrees with your self image and prevailing mental attitudes.

This is why reprogramming the unconscious mind can be so powerful. Your subconscious mind has a large part to play in your life's decisions and outcomes. By reprogramming your subconscious mind, you can change things from within far more quickly and easily, than by struggling against a negative belief system and only acting on the 'outside' in the physical and conscious world.

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Hebbian Learning - The Value of Repetition

You have always heard that "practice makes perfect." Have you wondered why? It might just be related to the synaptic plasticity of the brain. How many times does a thought need to be repeated before it becomes sufficient hard wired into the brain?

In 1949, Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb postulated a theory in which he said that "the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability." Another way of saying this is "cells that fire together, wire together." Hebbian Learning is a theory that explains that some types of associative learning in which simultaneous activation of cells leads to increases in synaptic strength. Indeed, this may explain why repeated thought or practice strengthens the hardwiring of neurons in the association areas of the various lobes of the brain.

Biologically this means that a dominant thought created through our will power will stimulate new synaptic connections in our brain. Once these connections are made, repetition of the same thought (or action) will stimulate more corresponding connections. These redundant connections become engrams, which are holographic stores of memories. These engrams involve a network of connections which facilitate synchronized synaptic firing thus producing a more efficient expression of a given thought. The more a thought is held, the easier for that thought remembered or activated. For instance, think of acquiring a new physical skill such as dancing or the martial arts or learning a new language.

Conversely there are thoughts or memories that have reached that level of engram efficiency, but are no longer rationally desired. This could be a phobic memory that somehow is hardwired into our survival mechanism. This means that this gestalt (a collection of memories) is connected to the hypothalamus and pituitary and thus creates neuropeptides, which in turn encode this memory at the cellular level. Therefore, any contrary thought will be resisted as our body will have a defensive reaction to the contrary feeling. So, how to be rid our self of these unwanted thoughts? How can be get out of our way?

Again, our will power is a key factor. But, often this is not enough. Obviously, if you follow the postulate of Hebbian Learning, you would say "use it or lose it." If you could select a contrary (hopefully positive) thought, make it as vivid as possible, and have it recurring, you will biologically rewire your brain to develop new neural pathways while weakening the unwanted neural networks thought disuse.

Hypnosis is a great tool for helping bypass resistance and to install new thought patterns. However, repetition is still the key. Repeated hypnotherapy or self-hypnosis sessions can be used effectively to create new neural networks and to allow unwanted networks to atrophy.

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