The subconscious mind plays a significant role in our decision-making process. It influences our choices in subtle, yet powerful ways. If we can understand how our subconscious mind affects our decision making, then we can take steps to use our subconscious mind for our benefit instead of allowing unconscious thoughts to dictate the way we live our lives.
Intuition and Gut Feelings
The subconscious mind processes vast amounts of information and experiences from our daily lives. This happens beyond our conscious awareness. It records things that our conscious mind doesn’t have the capacity to either process or store. These insights, based on subconscious processing, can provide valuable information and influence our choices. The subconscious mind taps into this wealth of knowledge and presents it to us as intuitive insights or gut feelings that guide our decision-making. Our subconscious mind is aware of so much more than what our conscious mind can even fathom. We should learn to trust our intuition and gut feelings. Afterall, our subconscious mind is more aware than we could possibly know.
Emotional Influences
The subconscious mind is closely linked to our emotions. In turn, our emotions have a strong impact on our decision-making. The subconscious mind contributes to the emotional evaluation of our choices. It draws on past experiences, beliefs, and memories that are stored in the subconscious to evoke emotions that shape our preferences and biases, ultimately influencing our decisions. This is why you always hear people say to really put emotions into your visualizations when you are trying to manifest anything. Our subconscious mind works on primal instinct and we can manipulate that by choosing to feel a specific way and focus on that feeling long enough for our subconscious mind to adapt it into acceptance as reality so much that the reality is brought to our conscious world.
Implicit Bias
The subconscious mind can harbor implicit biases, which are the unconscious attitudes and prejudices that have been developed due to our social and cultural conditioning. In other words, the way we have been socialized to view the world around us has a very strong impact on the decisions that we make. These biases have the power to affect our perceptions and decision-making. They can influence our choices without our conscious awareness. Becoming aware of and addressing implicit biases is important for making more conscious unbiased and informed decisions. We can choose to not be a product of our environment and instead be who we really were born to be if we can notice and acknowledge these implicit biases.
Cognitive Bias
Various cognitive biases can impact our decision-making, and many of these biases are rooted in subconscious processes. Biases like confirmation bias (looking for things that confirm our already established beliefs), availability heuristic (making decisions based on what we perceive as being common e.g. buying a dog over buying a monkey as a pet because we can familiarize ourself with dogs more than monkeys and can come up with examples of people who have dogs as pets, monkeys are a less common pet which could lead us to make the decision that dogs are easier to care for than monkeys), or anchoring bias (relying heavily on the first information we receive about a topic whether the information is relevant or not, valid or not) can lead to irrational or skewed decision-making. Being aware of these biases and actively challenging them can help make more objective and rational decisions.
Pattern Recognition
The subconscious mind excels at recognizing patterns and making connections between seemingly unrelated information. It can identify trends, similarities, and associations that the conscious mind may overlook. This pattern recognition ability of the subconscious mind can aid decision-making by providing insights and helping us to make connections between different factors. It can also influence our decision making process if we don’t see any connections or can’t find similarities, it may make us believe that the choice is a bad one with a lack of connections and a good one with a lot of connections. You may identify this pattern recognition as seeing synchronicities in your life. Your subconscious mind sees the patterns that your conscious mind does not see. So when you start seeing synchronicities in your life, pay attention to what your subconscious mind is bringing to your awareness.
Subconscious Processing
The subconscious mind will continue to process information even when you are not consciously focused on a specific decision. It sifts through data, recalls relevant memories, and evaluates options in the background of your mind. This subconscious processing can influence your decision-making by bringing forward insights or preferences that you may not be consciously aware of. This is one reason why when you are trying to manifest something in your life, you need to focus on the thing you want, in such a way that you already have it, so that your subconscious mind can go to work for you to find a way to make what you are focusing on a reality in your conscious world.
Habitual Responses
The subconscious mind is responsible for automating many of our routine behaviors and responses. When faced with familiar situations or decisions, the subconscious mind tends to default to previously established habits and patterns. This can result in decisions that are influenced by ingrained habits rather than deliberate conscious evaluation. Make sure to check yourself when you are wanting to change something in your life and be sure you are not operating on auto-pilot.
Understanding the influence of the subconscious mind on decision-making allows us to approach the process with greater awareness, have better manifestation results, and see the science behind the mystical. By cultivating mindfulness, practicing reflection, and engaging in conscious decision-making techniques, we can bring the subconscious factors into conscious awareness and make more informed and intentional choices. We have but one life that we are consciously aware of during our time on this planet. Choose to live it well. Choose on a conscious level how you will live your life and work with your subconscious mind to achieve it.