PDF Summary:The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, by Joseph Murphy

In the self-improvement classic The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Joseph Murphy claims that all of your life experiences are the result of the interaction between your conscious and subconscious minds: Your subconscious mind creates your life experiences according to your habitual conscious thoughts and ingrained beliefs. Murphy argues that you can dramatically improve your life experiences by using your conscious mind to imprint positive thoughts and beliefs upon your subconscious mind.

In this guide, we’ve reorganized Murphy’s ideas into four distinct parts, first exploring Murphy’s philosophy and then diving into the actionable ideas you can apply in your own life. Additionally, we’ve compared and contrasted each key concept with up-to-date psychological research and advice. We’ve also expanded on Murphy’s methods with actionable ideas from other self-improvement practitioners and psychologists.

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Part 2: Negative Thoughts Create Failure and Disease

According to Murphy, the impressions your conscious thoughts leave on your subconscious mind influence the way it interacts with the positive flow of Universal Consciousness. If you’re not entirely happy with your life experiences, it’s because you're thinking “false” negative thoughts that contradict the positive force of Universal Consciousness. Let’s explore this idea in detail.

Why Your Negative Thoughts Are “False”

Murphy argues that negative thought patterns arise due to your lack of faith in your benevolent higher power. If you trusted it to work on your behalf, you’d have nothing to fear and no need to struggle because you’d know that this higher power is working to help you. But, your lack of faith leads you to the false conclusion that you have to struggle by yourself and force things into place if you want to achieve any sort of success or happiness in your life. As a result, you feel alone and unsupported, and, when things don’t go the way you want them to, you suffer from low self-confidence and poor expectations. Your subconscious mind then fulfills these expectations by creating difficult and uncomfortable experiences.

Faith in God Leads to Inner Peace and Fulfilment

Murphy’s claim that lack of faith leads to difficult life experiences lies at the heart of many dominant religions. For example, Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, explains that God created you to fulfill a specific purpose that he planned for you. This purpose underlies the meaning of every aspect of your life.

According to Warren, when you don’t trust that God has assigned you a specific purpose, you fail to understand the meaning of your life. This is because you allow yourself to be driven by a variety of external, emotional, and moral factors to motivate your thoughts and behaviors. Warren argues that these motivations destroy the possibility of peace in your life because you always feel anxious and unsure about why you’re on this earth. Consequently, your anxiety makes you feel like you always have to struggle through difficult life experiences.

On the other hand, when you believe that God has a purpose for you, you understand the meaning of your life and feel at peace. Warren claims that this is because, instead of relying on different motivations, you feel as if you’re being guided by a single clear motivation: to fulfill God’s purpose for you. As a result, you're able to appreciate the significance of your every life experience. This allows you to focus your thoughts and behaviors in a way that aligns with God’s purpose and leads to inner peace and fulfillment.

How Your Negative Thoughts Create Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Murphy argues that every time you think negative thoughts, you block your subconscious mind from accessing both the useful information you have stored in your mind in your subconscious and the positive energy flowing from Universal Consciousness that creates positive experiences. As a result, your subconscious mind creates negative experiences that align with your fears and worries. According to Murphy, your negative thoughts impact your mental and physical health and your ability to create success and happiness in all areas of your life.

(Shortform note: Research on the topic of cognitive distortions supports Murphy’s argument that negative thoughts contribute to negative life experiences. Cognitive distortions are irrational thought patterns that manifest as negative emotions, increased anxiety, depression, and mental illness. These negative mental states lead people to take actions that lead to negative experiences. According to this research, cognitive distortions are more likely to occur when you habitually think negative thoughts. This is because your subconscious mind gets used to processing everything it perceives in a negative light so much so that you wire your brain to always respond negatively to your experiences.)

Part 3: Train Your Subconscious Mind to Create Positive Results

According to Murphy, the process to retrain your subconscious mind is very simple: You just need to use your conscious mind to imprint positive thoughts and images upon your subconscious mind. Murphy explains that there are two steps to making this process work for you: First, you need to decide to think positive thoughts. Then, you need to trust that your subconscious mind will create experiences that align with your positive thoughts. Let’s explore these two ideas in detail.

Step 1: Decide to Think Positive Thoughts

Murphy argues that you need to take control of what thoughts your subconscious mind identifies with by consciously deciding to get in charge of your thoughts. Recall that your conscious mind is active and your subconscious mind is passive. Even though your subconscious mind creates your life experiences, it can only follow the habitual conscious thoughts—or in other words, instructions—from your conscious mind. He suggests that you explicitly tell your subconscious mind that, from now on, you’re only going to think positive thoughts. This will give you the conviction you need to change your conscious thoughts and improve your life.

(Shortform note: The process to take control of and change your thoughts may not be as easy as Murphy makes out. This is because your thoughts and your state of mind reinforce one another to create an internal feedback loop that’s difficult to break out of: Your thoughts determine your state of mind (thinking about problems makes you feel anxious) and your state of mind determines your thoughts (you feel anxious so you think about your problems). However, research reveals that making the effort to become more aware of your thoughts allows you to disentangle yourself from this feedback loop. Instead of feeling as if you’re stuck within an uncontrollable cycle of thoughts, your awareness allows you to view and change your thoughts objectively.)

Step 2: Trust the Process to Work for You

To explain why you need to trust the process of your subconscious mind creating positive thoughts for it to work, we’ll first explain Murphy’s beliefs about how your body heals from mental and physical injuries. Recall that your subconscious mind regulates all of your vital bodily functions—this includes the healing process. For example, it regulates the little paper cuts that heal overnight or the headache that fades away without intervention.

When you rely on intervention to heal yourself, such as surgery, psychology, or spiritual help (you pray for your healing), you assume that an outside source has healed you: “I am healed now because of that doctor or that religion.” However, Murphy argues that this is not the case—your subconscious mind is always in control of your healing process, and it is your faith in the healer (your method, doctor, or religion) that heals you, not the healer itself. Your conscious faith that the process will work imprints upon your subconscious mind and instructs it to heal you.

This faith isn’t restricted to the healing process but applies to all areas of your life, from your relationships to your general success. Your subconscious mind operates according to your beliefs and expectations. Therefore, Murphy concludes that you must trust that your positive thoughts will create positive experiences for you if you want the process to work.

Your Expectations Shape Your Life Experiences

In this section, Murphy argues that having faith that something will happen—that you’ll be healed from an illness, or that thinking positively will lead to positive experiences—is crucial in making this thing actually happen. This concept is similar to the well-known placebo effect: the idea that people can actually heal from an illness simply if they believe or have faith that they’ve been treated with medicine, even if the “medicine” is actually fake. Therefore, to further explore Murphy’s argument, we’ll look at recent research studies that examine the impact of positive expectations and the placebo effect.

Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) explains that the placebo effect demonstrates how all of your experiences are shaped by the expectations you have going into them. According to Ariely, this phenomenon operates on two mechanisms: faith and conditioning.

Faith: If you have faith in the drug or the procedure, it’s more likely to make you feel better.

Conditioning: Your body naturally releases chemicals in expectation of what’s to come. If you have faith in your treatment, you feel more confident and you expect to get better. This prompts your body to produce chemicals that do make you feel better. For example, when you have a headache and you decide to take some painkillers, your body expects to feel relief and starts releasing opiates and endorphins before you even put the tablet in your mouth.

Ariely argues that the placebo effect plays out in all areas of your life because your expectations heavily influence your perception of events. For example, if you walk into a dark alley expecting to come across danger, you experience a heightened awareness of danger. As a result, your heart rate increases and you notice every slight sound and flicker of movement. On the other hand, if you walk into this alley feeling relaxed and confident, your physiology remains the same and you’re not as alert to your surroundings.

Since your expectations alter your perceptions, they also alter the outcome of your experiences because your behavior is a result of how you respond to your perceptions. Therefore, if you have positive expectations about Murphy’s methods—you believe that practicing his methods and thinking positive thoughts will improve your life experiences—your perceptions will reflect this. You’ll find yourself paying more attention to what’s working and improving in your life, and this awareness will lead you to shift your behavior and open you up to new experiences. On the other hand, if you approach Murphy’s methods with low expectations, your perceptions will remain the same, and you won’t feel the impetus to change any of your behaviors.

Part 4: Methods to Realign Your Thoughts

Murphy suggests five methods you can use to take control of your conscious thoughts and train your subconscious mind to create positive experiences in your life:

Method 1: Choose Thoughts That Make You Feel Happy

Murphy believes that you need to focus on thinking only positive thoughts if you want your subconscious mind to create positive experiences. But how can you know whether your habitual conscious thoughts are positive or not? According to Murphy, you just need to judge how you feel. If you feel happy and you have positive expectations about your life, you’re thinking positive thoughts. On the other hand, if you don’t feel good about your life experiences, you’re thinking negative thoughts.

Shortform note: Research backs up Murphy’s claim that your thoughts and emotions are inextricably linked and confirms that positive thoughts make you feel happy. However, sometimes it’s not so easy to force yourself to think happy thoughts. Fortunately, there is a way to trick your brain into believing that you’re happy: smiling. Neuroscience research reveals that smiling spurs a chemical reaction in the brain that releases specific hormones including dopamine and serotonin. These hormones increase your happiness and reduce your stress levels. In short, smiling makes you feel happy. When you feel happy, you’re more inclined to think positive thoughts that continue to make you feel happy.)

Method 2: Identify With What You Want

To develop positive expectations, Murphy suggests that you think only about what you want to experience. Instead of worrying about how you’ll achieve something, focus on the end results and imagine the gratitude you’ll feel once you have it. This process will set a clear direction for your subconscious mind to move towards.

(Shortform note: Like Murphy, Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich), argues that you shouldn’t worry about how to achieve what you want. Instead, just expect everything to work out in your favor. Wattles suggests that imagining your desired end result and practicing gratitude in advance of receiving what you want, not only sends a clear message to the universe, but it also keeps you from becoming dissatisfied with your current life experiences. This is because, when you imagine feeling grateful for something you don’t yet have, you feel positive regardless of what’s actually happening in your life. The more positive you feel, the more likely you are to adopt behaviors that move you closer to what you want.)

Method 3: Create Automatic Behavior Using Conscious Repetition

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

(Shortform note: While it’s true that repetition leads to automatic behavior, opinions vary on exactly how long it takes for your subconscious mind to become accustomed to your new thoughts. Research studies reveal that it can take between 18 and 254 days, or an average of 66 days, for habits to become automatic. The timeline depends on how consistently you practice your new habits—the more often you consciously practice thinking your chosen thoughts, the quicker your subconscious mind will align with these new thoughts.)

Method 4: Visualize What You Want

Murphy claims that, when you visualize an image, you add weight to the impression your conscious thoughts form in your subconscious mind. This is because your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality—it only knows that you’re thinking about something often enough to create a detailed picture in your mind. The more you dwell on this image, the more likely your subconscious is to accept this image as an instruction about what it should create.

(Shortform note: While Murphy argues that visualization can help to create your life experiences, research shows that visualization may negatively impact your subconscious mind when you apply it to your goals. In Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday claims that visualization can confuse your subconscious mind and create the opposite effect of what you want to achieve: When your mind believes that you’ve already achieved something, you feel that you’ve made progress despite not having taken any measurable steps toward achieving your goal. This feeling of progress feels good, but it’s based on a false sense of achievement that may cause you to lose interest in trying to progress toward your goal.)

Method 5: Relax Your Mind to Reduce Interference From Your Conscious Mind

When you're awake and alert, you can’t help but think about and judge everything around you. According to Murphy, this is what your conscious mind is designed to do. Unfortunately, this creates problems for you when you’re trying to retrain your subconscious mind. This is because you can’t just 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 creates confusion for your subconscious mind because it’s not receiving clear instructions from your conscious mind.

For example, you want your subconscious to believe that you’re wealthy, But your conscious mind knows that you’re not rich. Each time you imagine yourself as wealthy, it offers counterproductive thoughts such as: “That’s not true because you’re not rich.”

Why Your Conscious Mind Sabotages Your Self-Improvement Efforts

Research backs up Murphy’s claim that your conscious mind interferes with the changes you seek to make. This is because your subconscious mind influences the way your conscious mind perceives and responds to your environment. Part of this influence includes protecting you from reliving painful experiences that it has recorded: Your subconscious mind inhibits you from repeating painful experiences by encouraging your conscious mind to engage in self-sabotaging thoughts such as, “I failed last time so there’s no point in trying again.”

Moving forward, be patient with yourself when attempting to change your thought patterns. Your conscious mind will offer resistance but, with time and practice, your subconscious mind will become accustomed to your new thoughts and beliefs. As a result, it will encourage your conscious mind to work with you instead of against you.

Set Intentions Before You Sleep

Since your subconscious mind is more receptive to your thoughts when your conscious mind is relaxed, Murphy recommends that you make the habit of thinking about what you want before you go to sleep. In addition, if you have problems that need solving, instruct your subconscious mind to come up with solutions while you sleep. According to Murphy, your subconscious mind will provide these solutions to you in the form of urges and inspiration when you awake.

(Shortform note: In Deep Work, Cal Newport backs up Murphy’s idea that sleep and relaxation help you to find solutions. Newport discusses the benefits of “productive meditation”—using your relaxation time as a constructive way to solve problems. He suggests that you’re more likely to do your best work when you alternate between periods of intense focus and relaxation. While you’re relaxing, your mind will work through the problems you’ve lined up for it and, without your conscious interference, can more quickly or creatively arrive at a solution.)