Subconscious: Definition, Thoughts, & Behaviors

By Charlie Huntington, M. A., Ph.D. Candidate
Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.

Our subconscious is the subject of much psychological research. How do you study something that, by definition, we are mostly unaware of? Here’s what psychology has to say about subconscious thoughts and behaviors.

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Perhaps you, like me, have often had experiences where you acted in ways that you could see no good reason for. Sometimes I have done things so obviously unhelpful or even hurtful to myself that I could find no conscious justification for my behavior. Was it just a fluke? A brain fart? Or was there some subconscious belief or need I had that I simply couldn’t access in the moment?

Psychologists have developed many interesting ways to try to study our subconscious feelings and thoughts, perhaps for this very reason. After all, wouldn’t it be great if we could dip under the surface and see what’s happening in those inaccessible parts of our brain? I’m sure I could avoid at least a few more embarrassing or mystifying moments of self-sabotage. Let’s look together about what the subconscious is and what psychology research tells us about it.

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What Is The Subconscious? (A Definition)

Our subconscious is all the activity in our brains that occurs without our realizing it (Malim & Birch, 1998). This includes not just thoughts and feelings, but also the activity of your brain as the control center for your body, such as its signals that make your body successful in things as basic as breathing and as complex as parallel parking a car or improvising on the guitar. In other words, the subconscious is both things we do not realize we are doing and also thoughts and feelings we do not realize we have.

Subconscious vs Conscious Mind

In contrast to the subconscious mind, our conscious mind is all the thinking and feeling we are aware of. We can clearly see the difference by way of example: Suppose I am at the park with friends and somebody throws a frisbee in my direction. I might have some conscious thoughts as the frisbee is headed my way – “Do I know this person?” “Is it rude to stop the conversation I’m having?” “Will the frisbee hit my friend if I don’t catch it?” – but once I consciously decide that I want to catch the frisbee, it is subconscious mental processes that will guide my body through the motions of catching the frisbee.

Subconscious and conscious happen at the same time
Subconscious and conscious thinking and processing are happening simultaneously in our lives, all the time. We know this in part because of research conducted to understand psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). People with PTSD are often highly attuned to potential threats in their environment. While they may be consciously aware of why they feel unsafe in a given moment (e.g., “I’m smelling burning rubber and it reminds me of the car accident.”), their subconscious mind is reacting to the threats at the same time (Lanius et al., 2017). In fact, they may be subconsciously responding to the threat in their environment on a physiological level, even as they are deliberating trying to regulate their conscious response to what is happening.

Psychologists also know this from creative studies in which they have shown people images of emotional facial expressions in intervals that are either just too short to be consciously noticed or just long enough to enter into our conscious awareness (e.g., Watanabe & Haruno, 2015). They have found that we learn things more effectively when the things we aim to learn are paired with these emotional facial expressions – even if the exposure to the facial expression was so quick as to only register subconsciously. This is one way that psychologists know subconscious processing is happening and has an impact on our functioning.

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Subconscious vs Unconscious Mind

The subconscious and the unconscious might sound like they’re going to be the same thing, but they are not quite the same. A clever example of this comes from research into the placebo effect (Mommaerts & Devroey, 2012). In case you haven’t heard of the placebo effect, it is the phenomenon of people experiencing changes in their lives merely because they believe they are having an experience that should create those changes.

The classic example of this is when people participate in a study of antidepression medication: everybody gets pills that look identical, but some pills contain the medication and others are simply sugar pills. The people who get sugar pills experience some psychological benefits, even though there is no pharmacological reason for this to happen.

How is the placebo effect helpful for understanding the difference between subconscious and unconscious? For people who experience a placebo effect, some of the benefits from it are subconscious: they behave differently without consciously thinking every time, “this is because of the pill I took.” Now, suppose they were being secretly given that sugar pill in a crushed up form in their morning coffee. Would it have the same effect? No, because they would be unconscious of the fact that they were receiving the pill.

Subconscious Feelings

We experience emotions on both the subconscious and conscious levels (Goleman, 1996). Oftentimes, emotions are present but not yet strong enough to break into our conscious awareness. Personally, I think listening to music is one way to grasp this distinction. Have you ever known you were feeling something only to have listening to music clarify it for you? I know my emotions often cohere into a clearer sense of sadness, nostalgia, or hopefulness once I add a musical soundtrack to my experience.

It seems that playing music can also help people tap into emotions that are currently subconscious, too (Kaser, 1993). In fact, there are somatic therapies that aim to use physical activity, ranging from making noises out loud to improvisational movement, to help people access emotions locked in the subconscious (Brom et al., 2017). This kind of therapy seems to be particularly helpful for people experiencing PTSD, where subconscious emotions can erupt into conscious awareness in challenging ways (Levine, 2010).

Subconscious Anxiety

Subconscious feelings also manifest in our physical behaviors in ways of which we may not be aware; subconscious anxiety is a good example of this (Abbass et al., 2008; Davanloo, 2000). For example, sighing and clenching one’s hands may be subconscious or conscious signals of experiencing anxiety or of efforts to reduce feelings of anxiety. When people experience symptoms such as hypertension, stomach pain, or migraines, but are not aware of stressors in their lives to which they can connect these symptoms, they may have subconscious anxiety that they are unaware of trying to repress. Finally, we may try to ignore feelings of anxiety to the point that we experience symptoms such as blurred vision or even hallucinations, but still have trouble identifying that there are subconscious feelings at the root of this.

Subconscious Thoughts

We have subconscious thoughts as well as subconscious feelings. For example, we can be primed by things in our environment to think subconsciously about certain goals we have, which in turn affects our behaviors (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). Psychology researchers have used different experimental procedures to trigger subconscious judgments, stereotypes, and changes in perception in their participants (Higgins, 1996). For example, I might not consciously be thinking about my desire to be a good friend to others, but if you remind me of role as a friend and you put me in a situation where somebody I care about needs help, that goal can automatically and subconsciously get activated (Bargh et al., 1996).

Activating subconscious beliefs
There are at least two ways to activate subconscious beliefs and make them influence our conscious behavior. One can be prompted through exposure to something subliminal – too brief or small to be consciously recognized – or one can be primed through a message that comes in a disguised form (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). The research study I mentioned earlier, in which facial expressions were shown to participants for a fraction of a second, featured subliminal exposure.

Another form of subliminal exposure could be when something called micro-expressions flash across people’s faces. These are very brief demonstrations of emotion that we try to control as they happen; they usually last less than one second and are not always consciously observed by other people (Yan et al., 2013). However, they impact how we respond to the other person, suggesting that they are subconsciously impacting us (Datz et al., 2019).

For an example of triggering through priming, we can look to what is sometimes called playing the race card in American politics – the pattern of using very specific examples of individuals of a certain race to trigger (usually negative) stereotypes about that race (Hurwitz & Peffley, 2005). The use of the term “welfare queen” by Ronald Reagan and the deployment by George H.W. Bush’s campaign of the Willie Horton ad have both been criticized for using priming to associate Democratic candidates with negative stereotypes about Black people.

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Subconscious Behavior

It is often thought that our behaviors are the result of the conflict or tension between our conscious and subconscious drives (Freud, 1936; Rost & Barker, 2000). We have much more ability to influence or respond to our conscious desires than our subconscious ones, and whether we realize it or not, we are often working hard to suppress our subconscious desires.

In addition, many aspects of our behaviors are performed subconsciously, especially as knowledge of the behavior grows more ingrained over time (Rost & Barker, 2000). This happens because it is more efficient for our subconscious to direct many of our daily functions. For example, if you needed all of your conscious mind to successfully drive from home to the grocery store or the office, you would actually not drive very effectively. Most driving behaviors are the same each time you get behind the wheel – they do not need to be consciously considered. If you have ever arrived home from a short errand with very little conscious awareness of what actually happened while you were driving, you have your subconscious competence at driving to thank for it.

Subconscious Learning

We learn subconsciously as much or more than we do consciously. In fact, one model of learning describes us as moving through stages from being unconsciously unaware of what we do not know, to knowing things on a subconscious level (Cutrer et al., 2013).

I have been learning to rock climb in the last year, and I think I have passed through these stages with regards to several rock climbing skills. For example, somebody suggested to me that I could turn my body to be perpendicular to the climbing wall, because this can help with holding certain positions. It had never occurred to me to do this. With time, I was able to consciously remember this piece of advice, and with more time, it became something I noticed myself doing automatically. I had internalized the subconscious knowledge of this skill.

Quotes on The Subconscious Mind

“The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind and impotent.” – Carl Jung
“The unconscious mind writes poetry if it’s left alone.” – Stephen King
“Your subconscious mind makes all your words and actions fit a pattern consistent with your self-concept and your innermost beliefs about yourself.” – Brian Tracy
“When the subconscious mind must chose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.” – T. Harv Eker
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
“The conscious mind determines the actions, the unconscious mind determines the reactions; and the reactions are just as important as the actions.” – E. Stanley Jones
“Once you learn to do something consciously, you can move it into the subconscious and do it well. Everything you do well will be done subconsciously.” – Zig Ziglar

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Articles Related to the Subconscious

Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to the Subconscious

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on the Subconscious

We have covered the many ways that we know we have subconscious activity – thoughts and feelings that influence our behaviors – going on in our brains all the time. As you might imagine, many people have dedicated their time and energy to understanding as well how we can optimally interact with our subconscious to make it more helpful in our lives. I suggest you try a video such as the following one if you are curious about how to change your subconscious in ways that will improve your wellbeing:

Video: 5 Minutes To Reprogram Your Subconscious Mind

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References

Abbass, A., Lovas, D., & Purdy, A. (2008). Direct diagnosis and management of emotional factors in the chronic headache patients. Cephalalgia, 28, 1305–1314.
Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462–479.
Bargh, J. A., Chen, S., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230–244.
Brom, D., Sokar, Y., Lawi, C., Nuriel-Porat, V., Ziv, Y., Lerner, K., & Ross, G. (2017). Somatic experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30, 304-312.
Cutrer, W. B., Sullivan, W. M., & Fleming, A. E. (2013). Educational strategies for improving clinical reasoning. Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care, 43(9), 248-257.
Datz, F., Wong, G., & Löffler-Stastka, H. (2019). Interpretation and working through contemptuous facial micro-expressions benefits the patient-therapist relationship. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(24), 4901.
Davanloo, H. (2000). Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. Central dynamic sequence: Phase of pressure. In H. Davanloo (Ed.), Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy: Selected papers of Habib Davanloo (pp. 183–208). New York: Wiley.
Freud, A. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of defense. New York: International Universities Press.
Goleman, D. (1996). Emotional intelligence. London: Bloomsbury.
Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility, applicability, and salience. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (pp. 133–168). New York: Guilford Press.
Hurwitz, J., & Peffley, M. (2005). Playing the race card in the post–Willie Horton era: The impact of racialized code words on support for punitive crime policy. Public Opinion Quarterly, 69(1), 99-112.
Kaser, V. A. (1993). Musical expressions of subconscious feelings: A clinical perspective. Music Therapy Perspectives, 11(1), 16–23.
Lanius, R. A., Rabellino, D., Boyd, J. E., Harricharan, S., Frewen, P. A., & McKinnon, M. C. (2017). The innate alarm system in PTSD: conscious and subconscious processing of threat. Current Opinion in Psychology, 14, 109-115.
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Malim, T., & Birch, A. (1998). Introductory psychology. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.
Mommaerts, J. L., & Devroey, D. (2012). The placebo effect: how the subconscious fits in. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 55(1), 43-58.
Rost, J. C., & Barker, R. A. (2000). Leadership education in colleges: Toward a 21st century paradigm. Journal of Leadership Studies, 7(1), 3-12.
Watanabe, N., & Haruno, M. (2015). Effects of subconscious and conscious emotions on human cue–reward association learning. Scientific Reports, 5(1), 1-6.

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