The Power of the Mind

Your mind is a powerful machine.  Your mind houses your ability to think, feel, and take action and is separated into the conscious mind and subconscious mind.  Your brain is the physical organ that responds to the mind.

Your mind generates energy when thinking, feeling, and taking action.  The thoughts you think and the energy they create build and change physical structures within the brain which is called neuroplasticity (Davidson R. J., Lutz A. (2008). Buddha’s brain: neuroplasticity and meditation. IEEE Signal Process. Mag. 25 174–176. 10.1109/MSP.2008.4431873).  

Your brain is in a constant state of metamorphosis because it changes with every experience you have which is why your experiences in life are so unique. Understanding that your mind and brain are separate, but inseparable is empowering because you now recognize that YOU create and manage your thoughts, and then the  actions you subsequently take can re-wire your brain.  

Your subconscious mind stores all of the information of EVERY experience you have ever had.  It is also your navigation system on your life path — it monitors all of the information coming in through all of your senses and scans it for danger or opportunity which is then relayed to the conscious mind in order to take appropriate action.  

Your conscious mind is your present mind, what you are currently seeing, feeling, and experiencing.  Communicating thoughts from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind involves emotions.  

The stronger the emotions involved with an experience, especially if they are negative emotions, the faster that experience gets stored as a memory.  Negativity bias says that not only do negative experiences assimilate more quickly, they also stay longer than positive experiences as a defense mechanism.  

Your ancestors had to constantly scan their environment for threats of danger in order to survive and we have “inherited the genes that predispose us to give special attention to those negative aspects of our environments that could be harmful to us” says Timothy J. Bono, PhD of Washington University in St. Louis.  

Therefore, when negative emotions are present, your mind has to process incoming information much more thoroughly in order to rule out threats of danger.  Because your mind is giving these emotions more attention, you begin to prioritize them because you are made to feel that they are more important.  This is why, again, using negativity bias, you tend to remember and dwell upon the “bad stuff”.

Despite your genetic predisposition to seek out the negative, the most impactful way to overcome this negativity bias all boils down to how you talk to yourself about your experiences and how you interpret what you have been told throughout your life. YOU ultimately decide how these experiences shape your life and what you allow them all to mean.  

Autosuggestion is all about describing your own thoughts beliefs and emotions in a way that impacts and influences your state of mind (and ultimately your behaviors), and is an example of just how powerful our minds can be.  

As mentioned above with the negativity bias, when you experience something enough, it has the power to influence your subconscious thoughts and behaviors as well as your current and future outcomes.  Why? Because your minds learn through repetition.  Repetition is essential for creating new neural pathways which is how YOU are able to re-wire your brain.

Do you put yourself down or have negative self-talk?  Do you tell yourself that your goals are impossible to reach and berate yourself for not being realistic enough?  Have you ever vented to a friend about being “sick and tired” of being passed over for a promotion at work only to find yourself being described as having “low energy” and “unmotivated” on your latest performance evaluation?  Or repeatedly telling yourself “this job is killing me” only to find yourself experiencing random and unexplained illnesses with more and more frequency? These are all examples of auto-suggestion.

Conversely, choosing to focus on more positive emotions will impact your life more positively.  Affirmations are a great way to do this. Have you ever walked into a crowded room and told yourself to “just breathe” and take a moment to calm yourself?  Or told yourself to “concentrate” just before taking a test or listening to a lecture?  These are affirmations and likely something you’ve been doing without even knowing it.  Imagine what you can create for yourself by consciously using this tool to infuse your thoughts with positivity and gratitude.  

Your thoughts create your beliefs which shape who you are and ultimately who you will become.  “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” — Wayne Dyer.  This is the power of the mind.  

Amy W. Barbour, MS

Certified Hypnotherapist & Life Coach