By: David Othus
I know the question in many of our heads is “can I really control my own mind?” In many instances you may not want to control parts of your non-conscious mind, this is why bodily functions such as breathing and blinking are involuntary. For most of us, this is good and preferable. In that sense your brain controls you, but as you grow and your brain develops, you can learn to control your mind more and more.
Your mind is essentially divided into three sections, the Conscious, Subconscious and Unconscious mind and though we only pay attention to the first two sections, they all work together to make you the person you are now.
Your conscious mind is what you control indefinitely. It can be referred to as the gate keeper of your subconscious mind; it is responsible for logical thinking and reasoning. If you are presented with an idea that does not match your beliefs, your conscious mind filters that out. The same happens when someone criticizes you, your conscious mind will either take it as constructive or destructive criticism and that is completely up to you.
The subconscious mind stores all our recent memories and relies on the unconscious mind to remind us why we don’t do certain things or why we don’t like a certain person. The unconscious mind, however, stores all our memories, whether good or bad. From the memories and experiences that are stored in the unconscious mind comes our habits, beliefs and our behavior and personality.
For example, if your become sad because of an external influence and your conscious mind starts to dwell on that problem, eventually that experience will be passed on to your subconscious mind as a recent memory. If you still insist on dwelling on whatever this influence was, your unconscious mind then stores it and it starts to affect you; you become depressed. This can be avoided if we choose not to dwell on the sad things; don’t dwell on bad experiences and disappointments.
Your thoughts are truly a reflection of who we are: “I think therefore I am”. In other words, if you think your life is horrible and you’ll never make it through this, then you won’t. Many of us don’t realize that you can indeed control your conscious mind, you can control what thoughts seep into your unconscious mind and this is what separates us from other animals.
This is much easier said than done but it is possible and necessary if you want to truly be happy and lead a positive life. Wayne W. Dyer once said “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at will change.” Instead of being jealous because your best friend got the promotion and you didn’t, be happy for her, she is your friend, remember that. Look at how you can learn from your failure instead of focusing on how much your failure has set you back.
Change your mind and your world will become significantly better and you will see that the world doesn’t control you.
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