PDF Summary:The Master Guides: Rewire Your Subconscious for Lasting Change, by Shortform

Ever intended to change a habit, only to find yourself attempting new behaviors and reverting to old ones? It's a common struggle many relate to.

Many authors have tackled this subject. While they take different approaches, they agree that habits are unconscious decisions—that is, they’re decisions you make without actually thinking about them. The only way to change these unconscious decisions is to address them at their source: your subconscious mind.

In this Master Guide, we’ll explore the role of the subconscious mind in habit formation and how you can train it to overwrite unwanted habits with wanted ones. Our guide compiles research and methods from a range of authors, including self-help guru Tony Robbins, journalist Charles Duhigg, holistic psychologist Nicole LePera, and developmental biologist Bruce Lipton.

You’ll come away understanding why you engage in your current habits, what makes it difficult to change them, and actionable methods for programming your subconscious mind to support your chosen habits.

(continued)...

Why Conscious Goals Conflict With Internal Programming

Why does this incongruence between your conscious goals and your internal programming occur? Robbins suggests that, at some point, your subconscious mind associated your conscious goals with pain. For example, previous attempts to adopt healthy eating as a habit left you feeling deprived. Your subconscious mind categorized this feeling as painful and something you should avoid. On the other hand, each time you indulged in junk food, you felt satisfied. Your subconscious mind categorized this feeling as pleasurable and something you should move toward.

How Your Subconscious Mind Steers You Away From Pain

LePera argues that, since your subconscious mind believes that your automatic routines keep you safe (away from pain), it resists any attempts to change them. This resistance takes the form of mental and physical discomfort that you experience each time you attempt to deviate from your default patterns. For instance, you might experience anxious or negative thoughts, uncomfortable cravings, tension headaches, or stomach cramps. Your subconscious mind creates this discomfort to convince you to revert to your automatic routines—even if those routines cause you emotional or physical harm, the subconscious mind considers them “safe.”

• For example, you want to adopt healthier eating habits because you know that over-indulging in junk food is bad for you. However, because your subconscious mind associates eating healthy with feeling deprived (unsafe, painful), it sabotages your efforts by heightening your cravings for junk food.

Part 3: It Is Possible to Change Your Automatic Routines

Since your subconscious mind permanently stores and resists any attempts to change your automatic routines, you might be wondering if changing your habits is even possible.

In sum, yes: While you can’t delete unwanted automatic routines from your mind, Duhigg argues that through self-awareness and conscious control, you can override them with new automatic routines that align with the habits you want to practice.

In The Law of Success, Napoleon Hill explains that your subconscious mind is malleable and adapts to reflect your habitual thoughts. This means that, by consciously controlling your habitual thoughts, you can retrain your subconscious mind into alignment.

Murphy clarifies why taking control of your thoughts can retrain your subconscious mind: Your conscious mind is active and your subconscious mind is passive. Even though your subconscious mind creates your automatic routines, it can only follow the habitual conscious thoughts—or in other words, instructions—from your conscious mind.

Maltz adds that thoughts are subjective and may or may not be true—but the more often you think specific thoughts, the more your subconscious mind accepts them as truth. He explains that this is because your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality; it can only create automatic routines based on what you think or imagine to be true.

• For example, if you habitually think you dislike exercise, your subconscious mind accepts this as truth, creating automatic routines that discourage physical activity. However, if you shift your habitual thoughts to enjoyment, your subconscious mind will eventually accept this new perspective as truth, creating automatic routines that encourage regular exercise.

Take Small Steps to Overcome Your Subconscious Mind’s Resistance

But what about your subconscious mind’s resistance to change? Though changing your beliefs and behaviors will create discomfort, LePera suggests that you can minimize and overcome the discomfort by taking small daily steps to consciously address your thoughts and behaviors. Small daily changes will add up and eventually lessen your subconscious mind’s resistance to change. (Shortform note: Robert Maurer (The Kaizen Way) confirms that small daily changes are more likely to bypass your subconscious mind’s resistance to change. Each time you introduce a new change, you’ll demonstrate to your subconscious mind that you are safe, and you’ll eventually train it to expect and adapt to these changes.)

Additionally, LePera says that practicing daily conscious awareness will help you break free from the tendency to act on autopilot—thus, making it easier for you to consciously choose your behaviors.

Part 4: Align Your Subconscious Mind With Your Chosen Habits

Now that we’ve established that you can change your automatic routines by aligning your subconscious mind with your chosen habits, let’s explore how to do so. Many authors emphasize that cultivating a positive attitude is key to achieving this alignment.

Hill suggests that cultivating a positive attitude helps overwrite unwanted automatic routines with more productive ones. He explains that your attitude toward life determines the nature of your habitual thoughts—that is, whether they’re negative or positive—and the overall impression they make on your subconscious mind. This impression then influences your ability to act in alignment with your chosen habits.

Murphy adds that your subconscious mind operates according to your expectations: If you cultivate a positive attitude, you’ll naturally form positive expectations about adopting your chosen habit, and your subconscious mind will amend your automatic routines to reflect these expectations.

Let’s look at six methods that, when combined, will help you think more positively about your chosen habits—and make your subconscious mind want to adopt them.

Method #1: Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

According to Murphy, when you first try to change your habitual conscious thoughts, you’ll need to apply conscious effort to think positively. But, with repetition, your positive thoughts will eventually imprint upon your subconscious mind to form positive expectations and outweigh any negative expectations. As a result, your subconscious mind will influence you to think and behave in positive ways without conscious effort.

Method #2: Imagine the Benefits

Duhigg says that you’re more likely to think positively about your chosen habits—which will convince your subconscious mind to create supportive automatic routines—by reflecting on how rewarding they’ll feel or what specific benefits they’ll offer. He suggests you find ways to actively dwell on these benefits—by visualizing, anticipating, or imagining them.

Robbins adds that the more specific you are about your chosen habits, the easier it will be to imagine their benefits and develop positive expectations about adopting them. In addition, the more specific you are, the easier you’ll find it to plan and prepare for potential obstacles that might tempt you to revert to your unwanted habits.

Method #3: Redefine Your Beliefs

According to Clear, as well as focusing on the benefits of your chosen habits, you also need to define the beliefs that will support your disassociation from your unwanted habits. This is because your habits are inextricably linked to what you believe about yourself. Your beliefs about yourself encourage your habits and your habits encourage what you believe about yourself: for example, “I smoke, therefore, I believe that I need cigarettes to be happy.”

He suggests that you replace your current beliefs with healthier ones that support the changes you seek to make: for example, “I am healthy and enjoy taking care of my body.”

Method #4: Use Affirmations and Visualizations

Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life) suggests that the most effective way to update your beliefs and convince your subconscious mind to create corresponding routines is to “affirm” what you want. For example, change your belief from “I don’t think I can be happy without cigarettes” to “I’m happy, healthy, and relaxed” and repeat this multiple times a day. Eventually, you’ll come to believe this affirmation, and your automatic patterns will align with your new beliefs.

However, Maltz argues that affirmations are not enough—your mind will automatically reject thoughts that don’t align with your established beliefs. He explains that the only way to change your beliefs is to regularly visualize and feel yourself behaving the way you want. This is because your subconscious mind operates according to how you feel, not how you think—this practice will train your mind to become more comfortable with the feeling of who you want to be, and it’s the only way to overcome old and unproductive beliefs.

Murphy also advocates visualizations, saying that they add weight to the impression your conscious thoughts form in your subconscious mind. Since your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality, it will only know that you’re thinking about something often enough to create a detailed picture in your mind—and therefore, it must be true. The more you dwell on this image, the more likely your subconscious is to accept this image as an instruction about what routines it should create.

Method #5: Tune Into Your Subconscious Mind by Relaxing

When your mind is relaxed, it’s more receptive to affirmations and visualizations. According to Maltz, practicing physical relaxation will enable you to consciously control your imagination and, subsequently, your subconscious mind. He explains that when your mind is alert, your negative thoughts create tension in the body that makes it difficult for your subconscious mind to accept new ideas or possibilities. On the other hand, when you’re in a state of relaxation, negative thoughts tend to disappear and your positive suggestions have space to thrive.

Murphy adds insight into why Maltz equates being alert with having negative thoughts: When you're awake and alert, you can’t help but think about and judge everything around you—this is what your conscious mind is designed to do.

This creates problems when you’re trying to retrain your subconscious mind, because you can’t change your habitual conscious thoughts and beliefs instantaneously—your mind needs time to get used to your new way of thinking. During this time, your conscious mind questions and contradicts the beliefs you want to change. This conflict between what you want to believe and what you do believe confuses your subconscious mind because it’s not receiving clear instructions.

• For example, you want your subconscious to believe that you’re energetic, but your conscious mind knows that you’re not. Each time you imagine yourself as energetic, you have counterproductive thoughts such as, “That’s not true because I’m always tired.”

When you practice relaxation, Murphy suggests, you lull your conscious mind to sleep and have direct access to your subconscious mind without interference. Since your subconscious mind is more receptive to your thoughts when your conscious mind is relaxed, Murphy recommends that you regularly ponder how you want to think and behave before you go to sleep.

Practice Meditation

Self-help speaker Joe Dispenza (Becoming Supernatural) offers a different take on how relaxation helps reprogram your subconscious mind: According to him, it helps your brain drop into lower-frequency brainwave states, such as theta or delta waves. This puts you into a trance-like state that makes your subconscious mind more susceptible to messaging. He suggests that you can use meditative practices to train your brain to drop into these lower-frequency states.

Explore Energy Psychology Techniques

Like Dispenza, Lipton (The Biology of Belief) emphasizes that the only way to effectively train your subconscious mind is to drop into lower-frequency brainwaves. In addition to practicing meditation, he recommends that you explore “energy psychology” techniques such as hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), or kinesiology (the study of body movement). These methods help lower your brainwave frequency before using implicit messaging (sometimes called “subliminal” messaging) to reach your subconscious and overwrite the existing automatic routines.

Method #6: Create New Feedback Loops With Behavioral Changes

Another essential part of retraining your subconscious mind is to behave in ways that reflect your chosen habits. Recall: Your subconscious mind creates routines based on what you habitually do as well as what you think and feel. Dispenza puts it like this: Doing things the same way every day trains your subconscious mind to always expect the same things and to reinforce the status quo. This means nothing in your life can change unless you change your behaviors.

Maltz offers practical advice for changing your behaviors and, by extension, your habits: Begin with what you can realistically achieve. He explains that you’ll find it easier to complete small, achievable actions. And each time you do so, you’ll feel pride and boost your self-confidence. These positive feelings will train your subconscious mind to associate your new behaviors with pleasure. This in turn will create a positive feedback loop that will reinforce the new habits you want to adopt.

For example, you want to run 10 kilometers a day, but you don’t have an exercise routine nor do you believe that you’re healthy enough to adopt this habit. You begin by introducing a light exercise routine into your life so that you can start to view yourself as a healthy person. The more you view yourself as a healthy person, the more likely you are to continue exercising and feel the benefits. The more benefits you feel from exercising, the more likely you are to see yourself as a healthy person and adopt even more behaviors that support your chosen habit.

Shortform Resources

For more advice on reprogramming your subconscious mind, see the following Shortform guides:

• Atomic Habits, James Clear
• Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins
• Becoming Supernatural, Joe Dispenza
• The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton
• How to Do the Work, Nicole LePera
• The Law of Success, Napoleon Hill
• The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy
• Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz
• You Can Heal Your Life, Louise Hay