How to Control Your Subconscious Mind Using Science and Habits

Controlling the Subconscious Mind: How and When?

Hook: The morning your hands knew before you did

One morning, you reach for your phone before your eyes are fully open. You don’t remember deciding to do it. Your hand simply moves. Somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, a quiet part of your mind has already acted.

This happens all the time. You drive a familiar road and arrive without recalling the last five minutes. You brush your teeth on “autopilot.” You feel a twinge of anxiety before a presentation even though you know you are prepared. These are not accidents. They are signs of a powerful system working beneath awareness: the subconscious (or, in scientific terms, largely unconscious and automatic mental processes).

For more than a century, psychologists and neuroscientists have tried to understand this hidden layer of the mind. Can we control it? And if so, how—and when?

The surprising answer from modern science is both humbling and hopeful: we cannot command the subconscious like a remote control, but we can train it, much the way a gardener shapes a landscape—by choosing what to plant, how often to water, and what to remove.

What “controlling the subconscious mind” means in this interpretation

In this article, controlling the subconscious mind does not mean forcing hidden thoughts to obey your will or reprogramming yourself overnight. Instead, it means systematically shaping automatic thoughts, habits, emotional reactions, and behaviors through learning, repetition, and environment.

Think of the subconscious as a vast collection of learned shortcuts:

• Habits (how you start your day)
• Emotional associations (what makes you tense or calm)
• Skills (driving, typing, speaking your native language)
• Biases and expectations (what you assume will happen)

These shortcuts are not chosen each time. They are activated. And crucially, they are learned.

So the real question becomes: How do we teach the mind better lessons? And when is it most receptive to learning them?

The science behind it (in simple terms)

Two systems, one mind

Many psychologists describe the mind as working with two interacting modes:

• Deliberate, conscious, slow thinking (planning, reasoning, choosing)
• Automatic, fast, largely unconscious processing (habits, intuitions, emotional reactions)

Daniel Kahneman popularized this as “System 1” and “System 2,” but similar ideas appear throughout cognitive science.

The subconscious is not a separate “place.” It is a mode of processing—fast, efficient, and mostly outside awareness.

The brain as a prediction and habit machine

Your brain is constantly trying to predict what will happen next. When a prediction works, it gets reinforced. Over time, this creates neural pathways that become faster and easier to activate.

This is closely tied to:

• Neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change its structure and connections with experience.
• Reinforcement learning: behaviors followed by reward or relief become more likely.
• Cue–routine–reward loops (popularized by Charles Duhigg): a cue triggers a routine that leads to some form of reward.

The subconscious is, in large part, the sum of these learned loops.

Emotion is the teacher

One crucial point: the subconscious learns especially well from emotion. Experiences that carry fear, pleasure, relief, or pride are remembered and repeated more strongly than neutral ones. This is why a single embarrassing moment can shape years of behavior—and why a single powerful success can change self-image.

Experiments and evidence

Let’s look at several landmark lines of research that show how automatic, subconscious-like processes are formed and shaped.

1. Pavlov and classical conditioning (1890s–1900s)

• Research question: Can an automatic biological response be linked to a neutral stimulus?
• Researcher: Ivan Pavlov
• Method: Pavlov repeatedly rang a bell before giving food to dogs.
• Sample/setting: Laboratory dogs in Russia.
• Results: After enough pairings, the bell alone caused the dogs to salivate—even without food.
• Why it matters: This showed that automatic, involuntary responses can be learned. Emotional reactions in humans (fear, comfort, excitement) often work the same way—linked to cues by experience.
• Publication context: Pavlov’s work was published across multiple reports and later summarized in Conditioned Reflexes (1927).

This is one of the earliest demonstrations that what feels “automatic” is often trained.

2. The Iowa Gambling Task and unconscious decision signals (1990s)

• Research question: Do people’s bodies and brains “know” a good decision before they can explain it?
• Researchers: Antoine Bechara, Antonio Damasio, and colleagues
• Method: Participants chose cards from different decks; some decks were risky, others safer. Skin conductance (a stress/arousal measure) was recorded.
• Sample/setting: Adult participants in laboratory studies.
• Results: Long before participants could consciously explain which decks were bad, their bodies showed stress responses when reaching for them.
• Why it matters: This suggests that non-conscious processes learn patterns and guide behavior before conscious awareness catches up.
• Publication: Bechara et al., 1997, Science.

Your subconscious is often learning and adapting ahead of your explanations.

3. Habit formation in the real world (Lally et al., 2010)

• Research question: How long does it really take to form a habit?
• Researchers: Phillippa Lally and colleagues
• Method: Participants chose a simple daily behavior (like drinking water after breakfast) and repeated it while researchers tracked automaticity over time.
• Sample/setting: 96 people in everyday life, not just a lab.
• Results: On average, it took about 66 days for a behavior to become mostly automatic—but with huge individual variation (from ~18 to ~254 days).
• Why it matters: This shows that automatic behaviors are gradually built, not installed overnight.
• Publication: Lally et al., 2010, European Journal of Social Psychology.

The subconscious is not changed by declarations. It is changed by repetition in context.

4. Implicit bias and the hidden mind (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 onward)

• Research question: Do people hold attitudes and associations they are not consciously aware of?
• Researchers: Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and others
• Method: Reaction-time tasks (like the Implicit Association Test) measure how quickly people link concepts.
• Results: People often show automatic associations that differ from their stated beliefs.
• Why it matters: It demonstrates that the subconscious contains learned patterns shaped by culture and experience, and these patterns can influence behavior.
• Publication: Greenwald & Banaji, 1995, Psychological Review (with many later studies).

Importantly, later research suggests these implicit patterns can change, but usually through long-term exposure and practice, not slogans.

Real-world applications

1. Building better habits

If you want to “control” your subconscious around habits:

• Start tiny. The brain resists big changes but accepts small, repeatable ones.
• Tie new habits to old cues. (After I brush my teeth, I floss one tooth.)
• Make the reward obvious. Even a small sense of completion helps.

Over time, the action moves from effortful to automatic.

2. Reducing anxiety and fear responses

Therapies like exposure therapy work by retraining emotional associations. If the brain learns that the feared situation is not followed by catastrophe, the automatic fear response weakens.

This is not positive thinking. It is re-learning through experience.

3. Improving performance

Athletes, musicians, and speakers rely heavily on subconscious skills. Practice is not just about knowledge—it is about embedding patterns so deeply that they run without conscious control.

That is why under pressure, people often fall back on their most practiced behaviors, not their best intentions.

4. Changing self-image

Your sense of “who you are” is partly a story—but partly a collection of learned emotional expectations. Repeated experiences of keeping small promises to yourself can slowly retrain the subconscious expectation from “I usually fail” to “I usually follow through.”

A thought experiment you can try (safe and simple)

The two-minute retraining experiment

For the next 7 days:

1. Pick one tiny behavior that takes under two minutes (e.g., writing one sentence, doing one stretch, drinking a glass of water).
2. Attach it to a fixed cue (e.g., after morning prayer, after brushing teeth, after opening your laptop).
3. Do it every day, even if you do nothing else.

Pay attention not to your motivation, but to how the resistance changes. Many people notice that after several days, the action starts to feel “odd to skip.” That feeling is the subconscious beginning to expect the behavior.

Limitations, controversies, and what we still don’t know

1. You can’t directly command the subconscious

There is no reliable evidence that affirmations, subliminal messages, or “instant reprogramming” can deeply change complex behaviors by themselves. Some priming effects exist in labs, but they are usually small, fragile, and context-dependent.

2. Not all automatic patterns are easy to change

Trauma-related responses, addictions, and deeply entrenched habits often require professional help and long-term work. The brain protects some patterns because, at some point, they were associated with survival or relief.

3. The science of unconscious processing is still evolving

Even today, scientists debate:

• Where exactly to draw the line between conscious and unconscious
• How much control awareness really has
• How stable or flexible deep automatic patterns are over decades

So we should stay humble and avoid magical claims.

Inspiring close: Becoming a quiet architect of your mind

You are not the absolute ruler of your subconscious—but you are not powerless either.

You are more like an architect who works slowly, changing the structure not by shouting at the building, but by:

• Repeating certain paths
• Reinforcing certain supports
• Letting unused corridors fade

Every small, repeated action is a vote. Every repeated experience is a lesson. Over months and years, these lessons become instincts.

The most hopeful part is this: your brain is not finished. It is still learning. And in that ongoing learning lies a gentle, realistic kind of control—not the drama of instant transformation, but the quiet power of direction over time.

Key takeaways

• The subconscious is largely a collection of learned automatic patterns, not a separate magical mind.
• You cannot control it directly, but you can train it through repetition, cues, and experience.
• Habits, emotions, and reactions change gradually, not instantly.
• Science shows that automatic processes learn first, and conscious understanding often comes later.
• Small, consistent actions are one of the most reliable ways to reshape what feels “automatic.”

References (compact)

• Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., & Damasio, A. R. (1997). Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science, 275(5304), 1293–1295.
• Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition. Psychological Review, 102(1), 4–27.
• Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed? European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
• Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes. Oxford University Press.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.