Subconscious vs. unconscious.
These aren’t just terms buried in psychology textbooks or slapped on Buzzfeed quizzes to tell you what kind of bread you are. Nope, these are two distinctive states of your mind.
And they run your life whether you’re aware of it or not.
If lasting change is what you’re after, it helps to work with both in the deep terrains of your mind. They’re the place where real inner work begins.
What are the differences between the subconscious and unconscious mind?
The subconscious mind runs your habits. The unconscious mind, on the other hand, runs your instincts. Both are invisible engines, but they drive different “vehicles.”
To understand how your reality is shaped, you need to understand the subconscious vs. unconscious mind distinction.
Forget the Instagram life-coach quotes and TikTok therapy buzzwords that seem to confuse the two..Contrary to what pop culture would tell you, these two aren’t interchangeable.
Each plays a different role in how you think, feel, and act, even when you’re not aware of it. And knowing the difference is the first step to reprogramming both.
Here’s a quick look at what each represents:
| Aspect | Subconscious mind | Unconscious mind |
| Function | Stores habits, beliefs, and learned behaviors | Houses instincts, emotional imprints, and inherited survival patterns |
| Access | Semi-accessible through repetition, visualization, and altered states | Inaccessible through conscious effort; accessed via trance, therapy, dreams |
| Examples | Driving on autopilot, reacting out of habit | Flinching from trauma, emotional triggers you can’t explain |
| Trainability | Highly programmable | Hardwired but can be reconditioned indirectly |
| Tools that work | Creative visualization, affirmations, meditation | Hypnosis, trance, shadow work |
| Brain wave association | Alpha, theta | Theta, delta |
| Core influence | Shapes your patterns | Shapes your primal responses |
What is the subconscious mind?
The subconscious mind is the part of your brain that runs the show without asking for your permission. It stores your habits, learned behaviors, beliefs, and emotional patterns, then plays them back like a loop.
Brushing your teeth, driving your car, doomscrolling on Instagram—that’s the subconscious pulling the strings. And boy, is it super busy.
One study estimates that it handles 95% of your brain activity while your conscious mind just gets a sliver of the action. Additionally, your brain processes about 11 million bits of info per second, yet you’re only aware of around 40 of them.
So yes, most of your decisions, reactions, even what you feel, are all happening way before you “think” them. It’s why “the human nervous system doesn’t know the difference between real and imaginary,” says Vishen, the founder and CEO of Mindvalley, in his program, The Silva Ultramind System.
This is why tools like creative visualization and hypnotherapy for trauma, anxiety, and all kinds of mental conditions work. They plug into your brain’s “operating system” through your human capacity to imagine scenarios of outcomes and goals.
What is the unconscious mind?
The unconscious mind is the part of you that stores what’s instinctual, inherited, and involuntary. Think primal urges. Emotional imprints. Deep-seated fears. Old survival codes. The stuff that runs whether you know it or not.
If the subconscious is your inner autopilot, then the unconscious is the entire operating system humming beneath the surface. It’s not loud, but it’s powerful. And it influences everything from your attraction patterns to your intuition to the way you flinch before a loud bang.
It’s why you:
- Instinctively swerve to avoid danger,
- Feel safe around someone who reminds you of a parent’s voice, or
- Tear up at a childhood song, even if you don’t remember why.
You don’t control the unconscious, but it shapes what you trust, what you fear, and what you chase. “Your beliefs are not you,” says Vishen in his program. “Your beliefs possess you.”
So, until you bring any unrealized emotion or behavior to light, it will keep “coloring” your responses to life for you.
Subconscious vs. unconscious in psychology
To fully grasp the subconscious vs. unconscious mind differences, start with the pioneers who laid the foundation: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Their contributions became cornerstones of modern psychology, and they still guide how we explore the mind today.
Sigmund Freud: The part of your mind you don’t see is what controls you
Freud, the guy who basically put psychoanalysis on the map for humankind, saw the mind as layered.
He believed your conscious mind—the part you “think” with—is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s what you’re aware of right now: reading this sentence, planning your grocery list, wondering if you left the stove on.
Just below that, he said, lives your preconscious mind. This is where all your memories and stored knowledge sit that you can recall if you try, like your childhood phone number or what you had for dinner last night.
Then, there’s the unconscious mind. It’s the hidden “vault” containing everything else: your fears, instincts, repressed memories, and unresolved wounds. You don’t access this stuff easily, yet it calls the shots in your life.
His famous iceberg model explains it perfectly:
Notice that Freud didn’t use the word “subconscious.” And here’s why: he didn’t believe that it’s a distinct layer. Anything hidden and shaping you without you knowing, he said, belongs to the unconscious. He viewed it as the primary driver of human behavior and the preconscious as the bridge between conscious thought and deeper instincts.
“We shall also avoid the term ‘subconscious,’ because of its ambiguous and inaccurate connotation,” he once wrote in The Unconscious (1915).
“If someone speaks of ‘subconscious mental activity,’ we cannot tell whether he means latent, capable of becoming conscious, or repressed, and hence incapable of becoming conscious. And yet these two situations are fundamentally different in their psychological nature.”
Carl Jung: The unconscious is ancestral, not just individual
Jung, Freud’s protégé-turned-challenger, agreed that a vast unconscious shaped human behavior. But he believed Freud didn’t go far enough.
To Jung, it wasn’t just about your personal repressed emotions or childhood wounds—those are only one layer. He introduced the concept of the collective unconscious: a psychological blueprint we inherit across generations.
And this blueprint carries:
- Universal patterns of behavior
- Shared emotional symbols
- Storylines that show up across cultures and across time
You didn’t learn roles like “the mother,” “the trickster,” or “the hero” from experience. You were born with the instinct to recognize them.
Or why certain films, myths, or books hit you like a gut punch even if it’s your first time exposed to them? That’s the collective unconscious at work. These “archetypes”—or universal roles that humans play—live deep in your psyche and shape how you dream, intuit, and respond to life.
As for the term “subconscious,” Jung used the word early in his work. But like Freud, he, too, found it too vague and doesn’t distinguish between what’s simply below awareness and what’s truly buried. So, over time, he dropped it.
For Jung, unconscious was the more accurate and layered term. It’s no wonder why he’s known for saying, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
So where did “subconscious” come from, and why does everyone still use it?
Even though Freud rejected the word and Jung eventually ditched it too, the “subconscious mind” somehow became the go-to term in everyday language.
Why? Simply put, it sounds intuitive and feels accessible. And you don’t need a Ph.D. to wrap your head around it. When the self-help movement exploded in the 20th century, that’s exactly what made it stick.
The term itself was first coined by Pierre Janet, a French psychologist predating Freud and Jung who studied dissociation and automatic behaviors in the 1880s. He used “subconscious” to describe mental processes that happened beneath conscious awareness but weren’t quite as inaccessible as Freud’s “unconscious.”
But here’s the plot twist: Janet’s use of the term was closer to what modern psychology now calls the automatic mind, or the part of you that stores learned behaviors, patterns, and emotional reactions. It’s what runs habits, conditioned responses, and implicit memory.
So even though the OGs of psychoanalysis dropped “subconscious” out of their lexicon, the modern world picked it back up. Neuroscience has circled back around to validate a lot of what Janet was hinting at.
So, the subconscious, however you define it, is real because it runs the bulk of your behavior. But unlike the unconscious, it’s much more malleable to suggestions for change.
5 examples of how you use subconscious vs. unconscious mind in real life
Understanding the subconscious vs. unconscious psychology for anyone who’s ever wondered, “Why did I do that?” or “Where did that reaction come from?” (Perfect soul-searching practice, by the way.)
Your conscious mind only tells part of the story. Most of what drives your behavior happens deeper—below the surface and often outside your awareness, in an everlasting unconscious vs. subconscious dance.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.
— Carl Jung, the father of modern psychology
Here are some scenarios to explore the interplay between the two mind states:
1. You’re driving on autopilot, then slam the brakes
Ever cruised down a familiar route, lost in thought, only to snap back when a car suddenly cuts you off? Your subconscious handled the routine driving tasks—steering, signaling, merging—by pulling from habit and muscle memory.
But when a child leaps out of nowhere in the middle of the road? Suddenly, your unconscious mind leaps into action. It triggers a survival response by pumping the brakes well before your conscious brain can even compute what’s happening.
This is the split-second handoff: the subconscious keeps you moving; the unconscious keeps you alive.
2. A song triggers unexpected emotions
You know that moment when a song comes on, and you’re suddenly overwhelmed with emotion? Your subconscious may have stored the association of playing that track over and over during a breakup or a summer you never forgot.
But the emotional wave that hits you now? That’s your unconscious pulling memory, mood, and meaning from deep storage.
Functional MRI studies show music activates the amygdala and hippocampus, the brain’s emotion and memory hubs. They show that together, your subconscious builds the link, and your unconscious fires the feeling.
3. You instinctively recoil from a food
Ever had food poisoning and suddenly couldn’t stand the sight—or smell—of the one dish that caused it? After the unfortunate episode, your unconscious mind instantly files it under “danger” and tags it with a strong emotional charge.
And with your subconscious playing backup, you’ll now avoid said dish every time you encounter it. You’d make a face or turn your head away from it without thinking.
The science behind this boils down to the insula cortex, a brain region tied to disgust and bodily awareness. It “wires” these taste aversions, no verbal reasoning required.
So even if the event happened years ago, your subconscious and unconscious minds will team up to tell you to stay the heck away from aunt Jenny’s beef stew at Christmas.
4. You feel uneasy around someone without knowing why
Sometimes, you meet someone who just puts you on edge.
Technically, they haven’t said or done anything wrong to you. But your body reacts anyway, picking up on “cues” that you could be in danger.
See, this reaction starts in your unconscious, where you hold emotional blueprints of past experiences, like when someone crossed a line or broke your trust. So when you encounter micro-cues in the present—tone of voice, posture, even eye contact—that match the past situation, your unconscious cross-checks them with patterns from past experiences.
And when it finds one? Your subconscious pulls from its library of behavioral patterns and activates a response: You stiffen up. You avoid eye contact. You feel like leaving.
This entire protective loop kicks in through what’s called implicit memory. Think of it as the quiet collaboration between your subconscious and unconscious that shapes how you respond, even when your conscious mind is still catching up.
5. You develop a new skill without much conscious effort, despite thinking that you can’t
Before you ever learn a new skill, your unconscious mind has already voted on how it’ll go.
Maybe someone once said you were clumsy. Or maybe you picked up the belief that tech “just isn’t your thing.” Those hidden scripts, formed early and buried deep, shape your expectations long before you ever touch a bike or open a laptop.
But then, the subconscious enters the picture. Once you start deciding to heck with it and learn the new task, this is the part of your mind that starts handling the practice. It absorbs what you do on repeat and transforms the new skill into second nature.
That’s why riding your bike eventually becomes reflex, and typing becomes rhythm.
Together, the two states of mind form a loop, a signature of implicit learning (the kind where the mind learns by doing, not analyzing):
- The unconscious sets the emotional tone.
- The subconscious builds the behavioral pattern to reframe it.
- Over time, you move from effort to flow.
When both systems are in sync? That’s when transformation sticks.
Subconscious vs. unconscious in practice: 7 expert-backed techniques
Freud gave us the iceberg. Jung gave us the archetypes. But neither left us a manual for how to actually work with the mind.
That’s where expert-backed tools rooted in modern psychology come in.
Through The Silva Ultramind System, Vishen teaches you how to access altered states of consciousness, visualize with precision, and rewire deep-rooted mental patterns.
Then there are principles from the Mindvalley Certified Hypnotherapist program by Paul McKenna, one of the world’s most recognized hypnotherapists. With them, he guides you to reshape emotional triggers, rewrite limiting beliefs, and create rapid, lasting transformation.
“You don’t need years of therapy,” Paul says. “You need the right mental tools and the willingness to use them.”
Here’s a glimpse into some signature steps signed on by these experts:
1. Visualize the outcome, not the process
Most people try to manifest by repeating affirmations or grinding through to-do lists. But what actually works? Vivid mental rehearsal—not just of what you’ll do, but of how it will feel when it’s already done.
In Vishen’s words, “When you feel it as real, your nervous system can’t tell the difference. It responds as if it’s already happening.” That’s why creative visualization is one of the most powerful tools to reprogram the subconscious mind.
Athletes do it. CEOs do it. And yes, Doctor Strange did it too, rehearsing future timelines of his healed hands in his head before they played out in real life.
2. Step out of fear, and reframe it
Fear is an unconscious pattern. It’s the mind’s way of keeping you safe by holding you back. But in most cases, what you’re afraid of isn’t real; it’s just old wiring.
Vishen teaches a method where you recall the fear-triggering memory, then mentally shift it. “Float out of the image, turn it black and white, make it smaller,” he explains.
Doing this, you reduce the emotional charge around the memory, effectively cutting the cord between trigger and response.
The truth is, you can’t wish fear away. You outgrow it, by training your mind to associate it with calm instead of panic.
3. Train yourself to go beyond beta waves regularly
Brain waves are like radio frequencies, with each one—beta, alpha, theta, and delta—tuning your mind to different channels, or different levels of consciousness.
Here’s a quick look at what they are:
You live most of your daily life in beta. It’s fast, focused, and a little frantic. You’re solving problems, replying to texts, and remembering where you parked your car. Beta’s great for getting things done, but it’s also where stress lives.
To reach the subconscious, you need to drop into alpha. That’s your “in-the-zone” wave. It shows up during light meditation, creative flow, or that dreamy few minutes right before you fall asleep. Vishen calls this “going to level.” And it’s the brain state where visualization and subconscious reprogramming work.
Dive deeper, and you hit theta waves, which your brain switches to during REM sleep or hypnosis. You don’t need to live there, but you can train yourself to “visit” it. This is especially crucial when you’re working on deep healing or rewriting emotional blueprints stored in the unconscious.
Go even further down, and you hit delta, where the unconscious runs the show. This is your deep-sleep, no-dream, body-healing zone. You’re not aware of it, but your system’s doing its heaviest lifting here.
Why all of this work? Simple: to rewire your unconscious beliefs, you need to meet them where they operate. Get good at shifting to states beyond beta, and you’ll stop forcing change and start becoming it naturally.
4. Build a subconscious training routine that sticks
Once you know how to enter the right mental states, it’s time to work with them on a deeper level. Think of this as your subconscious and unconscious workout, except you won’t break a sweat.
These are the tools Vishen uses and teaches in his program to lock in deep change, clarity, and intuition:
- Dynamic meditation. An active, goal-driven, and engineered to sync your brain and body into deeper flow. Use it when you need clarity at work, before a big decision, or when you want to hit reset on a stressful day.
- The centering exercise. This gets you to alpha fast. It’s a tool to calm the chaos and sharpen your inner world, get more creative ideas, make better decisions.
- The mental screen visualization technique. You play out a goal—visually, emotionally, physically—on an imagined screen in front of you. It trains your mind to believe it’s already real, which makes it easier to manifest in the real world.
- Projection exercises. These techniques are about tuning into intuition. They help you “step outside” of your current perspective so you can see a problem, person, or path with fresh clarity.
“You’re expanding your consciousness beyond your body,” Vishen points out. “And getting answers you wouldn’t get through logic alone.”
5. Recode a memory like a movie editor
Ever wish you could delete a bad memory? You can, provided that you follow the right steps to master this skill.
Paul teaches a simple but powerful technique: to mentally step out of a painful or limiting memory, you drain the color, shrink the image, and push it far away. Why? Because how you picture a memory determines how strongly it affects you.
“When you’re inside a memory or an imagined experience, it has greater emotional intensity than when you’re outside of it,” he says.
So, by switching the view—turning it black-and-white, making it smaller, even imagining it fading out—you reduce the emotional grip it has on your nervous system.
6. Anchor confidence in your body
“Confidence is not something you have; it’s something you do,” Paul explains. “And you can train your body to access it instantly.”
That’s because confidence, while a great conscious choice, can transform into an unconscious state with practice. And Paul’s technique helps you hardwire it.
Here’s how it works: recall a moment when you felt unstoppable. Relive it fully—what you saw, heard, felt. As the emotional charge builds, press your thumb and forefinger together. That physical gesture becomes your “anchor.”
Now do it again. And again.
Each time you stack a confident memory onto that same “anchor,” your subconscious starts forming a loop. And it’s only a matter of time before your nervous system can link that gesture to the positive emotional state, and your unconscious picks up on the cue without needing the full memory.
No second-guessing. No overthinking. Just embodied certainty.
7. Get into a trance to rewrite unconscious beliefs
If memory is the software of the mind, trance is how you run the update. Through a guided experience, you get to enter a heightened state of focus where your brain is more open, suggestible, and ready to rewire its internal code.
It’s no wonder ancient cultures tended to rely on it during shamanic meditation, where consciousness is altered to access wisdom, healing, and transformation from within.
Now, Paul, for one, builds his life’s work around hypnotic trance, or what he calls “a state of focused relaxation,” to bypass the inner critic and speak directly to the unconscious mind.
According to him, you don’t fight the old belief but install a better one.
The unconscious mind loves what’s familiar. So you make transformation familiar. You make being confident, calm, successful, whatever you want—familiar. That’s how you install it.
— Paul McKenna, trainer of the Mindvalley Certified Hypnotherapist program
Here’s how the process works:
- Relax your body using deep breathing or gentle muscle release.
- Shift into trance by imagining a descent, like walking down a staircase or sinking into warm water.
- Visualize the change you want as if it’s already your reality. See it, hear it, feel it.
- Use present-tense affirmations like “I am strong” or “I choose peace” to ground your intention.
- Repeat the sequence to anchor the new belief at a deeper level.
“The unconscious loves what’s familiar,” Paul says. And with this practice, he says, you get to make transformation the new normal.
Frequently asked questions
Which is more powerful, the unconscious or subconscious mind?
Let’s not sugarcoat it—the unconscious is the heavyweight champ. It’s older, deeper, and way less accessible. Paul, for one, likens it to a faithful servant. “It takes everything you say and acts on it, whether it’s good or bad.”
On the other hand, the subconscious is more programmable. It’s not as deep as the unconscious, but it’s the one you can actively rewire.
“The subconscious is how we access the operating system,” says Vishen. So, if you want to rewrite the deeper code, you need to use it to “to go even lower.”
So which is more powerful? It depends on what you’re trying to do. The unconscious drives your core instincts, while the subconscious lets you rewrite the code from time to time.
But zoom out, and you’ll see that when the two work together… is when real transformation happens.
Is hypnosis subconscious or unconscious?
It taps into a state of focused relaxation—gatekept by the alpha waves—so that the hypnotherapists can speak directly to the unconscious.
The purpose? “To get the conscious mind out of the way so we can speak directly to the unconscious where all the real change happens,” Paul points out.
Through techniques like trance induction, future pacing, and guided visualization, hypnosis bypasses the critical filter of the conscious mind. Once that filter drops, suggestions land where they stick: the unconscious.
Vishen uses similar logic in The Silva Ultramind System: “When you enter altered states, like alpha or theta, you reach the level where beliefs can be rewritten.”
So yes, hypnosis can help reprogram the subconscious for the true purpose of cleaning up the unconscious. Because that’s where trauma lives, where the root of emotional blockages hides. Which is exactly where hypnosis needs to go.
Are dreams your subconscious or unconscious?
Dreams are your unconscious mind in cinema mode.
When you sleep, your conscious mind powers down. Your subconscious takes over the mechanics (like keeping your lungs pumping), but it’s the unconscious that starts doing the storytelling.
According to Paul, “Dreams are messages from the unconscious. Sometimes they come in metaphors. Sometimes they’re just pure emotion playing out as images.”
Meanwhile, Vishen teaches dream journaling as a method to turn to. “The dream state is a backdoor to your higher self,” he explains. “And the symbols your unconscious uses are often clues to emotional patterns you haven’t fully processed.”
Ultimately, dreams are your inner self’s “narratives,” shaped by your deepest desires, fears, instincts, and inherited symbols in the unconscious.
Learn how to read the signs, and the stories will start making sense.
Awaken your spiritual superpower
What you think is merely your mind is actually an inner universe wired for growth, clarity, and power… if you know how to access it.
And awareness of this alone doesn’t shift your reality. Ultimately, practice is where the magic kicks in.
That’s where Vishen’s free masterclass based on The Silva Ultramind System comes in. Based on The Silva Method principles established by the late, great José Silva, the 81-minute session teaches you how to:
- Train your brain to shift states on command,
- Visualize goals into existence,
- Tap your intuition for better decision-making,
- Rewrite beliefs at the source to align your inner and outer worlds, and
- So much more.
Julia Andina, an adult education teacher from Liepaja, Latvia, used these tools to break free from the clutches of old subconscious patterns and clear their emotional roots.
[The Silva Ultramind System program] helped me to get rid of my sugar addiction… I [used to] spend my days in autopilot, making the same decisions, following the same patterns.
— Julia Andina, a Mindvalley member
Like Julia, you too can rewrite your patterns and wake up to a life where your subconscious and unconscious finally work together for you, not against you.
Seize this reality the moment you put your faith in yourself… with Mindvalley opening the path forward.
Welcome in.
