What hidden forces shape our decisions without our awareness? How can we harness the power of our unconscious mind rather than being controlled by it?
Leonard Mlodinow reveals how our unconscious mind constantly processes information beneath our awareness. Learning how to use your unconscious mind effectively means recognizing gut feelings, questioning automatic judgments, and developing greater self-awareness of these hidden processes.
Keep reading to discover practical strategies that will help you work with your unconscious mind rather than against it.
How to Use Your Unconscious Mind
While we can’t directly control our unconscious processes, Mlodinow explains that understanding them can help us make better decisions and align our behavior more closely with our conscious goals and values. As he emphasizes, the goal isn’t to eliminate unconscious influences—they’re an essential part of how our brains work—but rather to understand them better so we can make more informed choices about when to trust our automatic responses and when to be more deliberate. We’ll examine Mlodinow’s advice for how to use your unconscious mind more effectively.
#1: Recognize Your Gut Feelings
First, Mlodinow says to pay attention to your intuitions and gut feelings, even when you can’t immediately rationalize them. Your unconscious mind often picks up on subtle patterns and cues that your conscious mind hasn’t yet processed. For instance, you might have an inexplicable feeling of unease during a job interview. While you can’t consciously pinpoint why, your unconscious mind might be picking up on subtle inconsistencies in the interviewer’s body language or tone that suggest they’re not being entirely truthful about the role. However, don’t simply accept these feelings uncritically—use them as data points to investigate further.
| The Body-Mind Connection While Mlodinow encourages us to pay attention to our gut feelings, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (Feeling & Knowing) helps explain why these feelings are worth heeding: They’re not just abstract hunches but actual representations of our bodily states. Our unconscious mind constantly monitors subtle changes in our muscles, blood vessels, and organs, creating what one therapist calls “expansive” or “contractive” sensations—physical signals that can guide our decisions before we consciously understand why. This understanding offers a practical way to work with our unconscious mind. Instead of trying to “think through” our gut feelings, we can tune into their physical manifestations. Does a situation make us feel light and energized (expansive) or tight and heavy (contractive)? These bodily sensations aren’t rudimentary intuitions but sophisticated information-processing systems shaped by evolution to help us navigate complex environments. By learning to recognize these physical signals, we can better access the wealth of information our unconscious mind is processing. |
#2: Question Your Automatic Judgments
Second, Mlodinow recommends that, when you’re making important decisions, you should pause to examine your initial reactions. Are you making snap judgments based on unconscious categorizations or biases? Give your conscious mind time to evaluate options rationally, especially in situations involving:
- First impressions of people
- Decisions under time pressure
- Emotionally charged or highly personal issues
#3: Counter Your Tendency to Use Motivated Reasoning
Third, Mlodinow explains that it’s important to consciously counter your unconscious mind’s preference for motivated reasoning. To combat your mind’s tendency to favor information that confirms your existing beliefs:
- Actively seek out contradictory evidence.
- Consider alternative perspectives, especially from credible sources that challenge your views.
- Question your thought process and assumptions, particularly when evaluating issues that matter to you personally.
#4: Cultivate Better Self-Awareness
Fourth, Mlodinow recommends cultivating habits that help you notice the influence of unconscious processes, building a better awareness of what your unconscious mind is doing and how deeply it influences what you think, do, and experience:
- Practice mindfulness meditation to become more attuned to your thoughts and feelings.
- Pay attention to nonverbal cues in social situations.
- Notice patterns in your emotional reactions and decision-making.
- Embrace ambiguity rather than rushing to black-and-white judgments.
#5: Diversify Your Experiences
Finally, Mlodinow points out that your unconscious mind can become entrenched in familiar patterns, so he recommends that you deliberately expose your mind to a wide variety of different experiences. He recommends seeking out:
- Different perspectives and viewpoints
- New experiences and environments
- Diverse social connections
- Unfamiliar information sources
For example, if you typically socialize with people who share your professional background and political views, your unconscious mind might develop overly rigid patterns for categorizing and judging others. By deliberately expanding your social circle to include people with different life experiences and viewpoints, you can help your unconscious mind develop more nuanced and flexible ways of processing social information.
| The Limits of Looking Outward Mlodinow recommends both cultivating self-awareness and seeking diverse experiences to counter your unconscious mind’s judgments, and research on travel and empathy reveals why these two strategies must work in tandem. Simply exposing ourselves to new experiences—even seemingly transformative ones like travel to a country that’s new to us—isn’t enough to reshape our unconscious patterns of thinking. Our good intentions often contradict what actually happens when we encounter difference without adequate self-reflection. True growth requires what scholar Hazel Tucker calls “unsettled empathy”: not just experiencing difference, but consciously examining our reactions to it. This means paying attention to when we fall into “othering” biases, noticing our tendency to interpret new experiences through old mental frameworks, and sitting with the discomfort of having our assumptions challenged. In other words, diversifying our experiences only works when paired with the kind of mindful self-awareness that helps us recognize and revise our unconscious patterns of thought. |
Exercise: Working With (Not Against) Your Unconscious Mind
Understanding how your unconscious mind processes information can help you make better decisions. This exercise helps you apply Mlodinow’s strategies for working more effectively with your unconscious processes.
- Think of an important decision you’re currently facing. What physical sensations arise when you consider different options? Try to distinguish between “expansive” feelings (light, energized) and “contractive” ones (tight, heavy).
- What perspectives or information sources have you not yet considered? List three specific ways you could expose yourself to viewpoints that challenge your current thinking.
- What assumptions are you making about this decision? Question each one by asking, “How do I know this is true?”
