Your Subconscious Runs 95% of Your Life

Yes. Between 90 and 97 percent of your daily actions are running on the subconscious mind. You do them, but you are not thinking about them. Everything from how you drive to how you react to a difficult conversation is happening downstream of a program that is already installed. The conscious mind, the part you think of as "you", is only witnessing a small fraction of what is actually being decided. More on this in 97% of Your Mind Runs on Autopilot.

Your senses are not neutral cameras. They are a confirmation mechanism. The subconscious mind holds the beliefs and stored emotions you have accumulated across your life, and it filters what you perceive so that reality lines up with what it already expects. If your subconscious carries the belief that "life is hard", it will find evidence for that in every situation, no matter what is actually happening. This is the same mechanism we covered in Your Brain Built the World Before Your Senses Reported It.

Think of your inner life as a television set. The signal is always there, broadcasting all possible realities. You are not creating the signal. You are tuning to a specific channel. The subconscious is the remote control. Based on what it has stored, on the beliefs and emotions it holds, it locks onto one channel out of infinite possibilities. That is the reality you then experience. This is the exact architecture we mapped as the series close in Why Some People Feel Deeply Alive — And Most Just Barely Function.

Because the conscious mind, the layer that reads self-help and repeats affirmations, is not the layer where the programs live. Traditional western psychology works with the conscious mind, and it can be genuinely useful for awareness. But awareness is only the first step. Until you actually access the subconscious in a relaxed state and release what is stored there, the pattern will keep running. Related: What Trauma Really Is and Why Your Nervous System Is Still Solving a Problem That Doesn't Exist.

Start with awareness. Meditation is the first door for most people, because it teaches you that there is a layer of you beneath your thoughts. Once that awareness is there, the deeper work begins: identifying the specific pattern showing up in your life, tracing it back to its origin (usually a childhood moment where a belief got installed), accessing the subconscious in a relaxed state, and releasing the stored energy. This is the exact sequence of a Quantum Diagnostic Session, and the deeper protocol behind The Science of Healing & Enlightenment course.

Below is the complete transcript of "Who's Holding the Remote Control of Your Life?" — the main conversation between Ale and Elisa. Read it if you prefer text, or want to search a specific point we covered.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. So well the first question what is subconscious? What are we talking about?

Well, let's start to understand what conscious is and then we can start to understand everything else that is not conscious. Conscious awareness is when we are aware that we are doing something. Every action that we literally put our rational mind and rational thoughts into it like this conversation that we are having is what it can be considered conscious. The problem though is that we've been trained in the west that we are doing everything conscious. But it turns out that merely 3 to 5% of our daily actions are actually conscious.

Think about your routine. Every morning when you wake up, think about the very first time that you drove a car and you were still learning. You had to consciously put your thoughts into actions. You had to think about where to put your hands, where to put your feet, how to move, the speed, etc., etc. The more that you got used to it, the more that you got the habit of driving, now you can drive while listening to a podcast, talking out loud to another person, being together with other friends, if you have kids, you know, taking care of them while you're in the middle of traffic.

So these are all things that the more that we do them consciously then slowly they start to get down and down and down into our kind of like autonomous driving program. And turns out that 90 to 97% of our daily actions are actually non-conscious. They're operated by the subconscious mind. So we don't we do them but we don't think about them. So you're kind of telling me that what we do is automatic in a way and that we follow a flow and then the few things that we really do consciously are just handpicked in the day.

Exactly. And even more so there are so many more unconscious things that we do that we don't even think about as unconscious. All of the movements of your body, all of the movements of your cells, the beats of your organs, all of these activities, they are driven by the subconscious mind. And in the west, we think at the mind as something that comes from here, from our head, from our brain. I still remember when I was younger that they were telling me, you know, the mind, the brain operates the heart and all of the other organs while you are non-conscious.

Like why you don't really think about your heartbeat. It turns out again that we were wrong and latest science is now proving what ancient wisdom has been saying forever is that each of every single cell in our body is kind of like autonomous and our organs are somewhat autonomous. You can control them when you go in states of deep meditation. When you are into very deep awareness of everything that happens throughout your body through breath work, for example, you can control and articulate and modify how your hormones are bit are getting secreted in your body, how your heartbeat beats and so on and so forth.

But consciously you're doing none of that. And it's not our brain that necessarily drives these operations. In the eastern and ancient wisdom philosophies, even in Latin Americans, when they ask you where is the mind, they always point here, right? We can go deeper into that. That the the the conventional western thing way of seeing the mind as something that comes out only from our head is completely wrong.

Yeah, I was curious because I was listening to you and I'm like I don't do we have to categorize what's one or what's the other or are the same.

It's more important to understand why do we need to understand that the perception of reality is driven by the subconscious mind. It's not driven by a rational objective perspective of reality. Our eyes, the signal that goes from our eyes to the brain takes more time to reach the brain than our subconscious reaction of the body to the same experience to the same stimula stimulus outside of our body. So this is telling us and science is catching up with this that you don't really see what is out there.

You confirm what is out there. Your senses are a confirmation mechanism to what the mind what the brain and also the subconscious mind is already planning to see and to perceive. Mhm.

So this is for me for example when I really understood and acknowledged this element it completely changed my perspective. I was very negative as a person. I was always looking at the the the glass half empty and I and it was so hard for me to understand logically how could people see differently while I was thinking I was clearly objective. You never objective. Reality is not objective. Reality is what you project out of your belief systems. And the beliefs and the trapped emotions that are caused by traumatic experiences in your life, by environmental imprints, your childhood, etc., etc., they all reside in the subconscious mind.

So imagine the subconscious mind as the main hardware with all of the storage the database of your life and based on all of these amount of data that gets saved throughout the years then it gets used to be reproed as a reality.

Yeah. I mean I'm I'm still curious to understand a little bit more about this topic of like your mind everything is a projection. No. So why can we actually say everything is a projection of your mind? Somebody could come to you and say, "Hey, but I know that at the end of the day, I don't know, this microphone I'm wearing is actually here. It's it's objective. It's not subjective." So, how would you explain that to somebody that doesn't really understand what you're saying? Think about the example of a television.

A television picks a signal through a cable, through a Wi-Fi. The signal is always there, right? And then you have a remote control that can shift into different channels. When you shift from channel one to channel three and you go from a horror movie to a love story is not that you are really starting the movie from zero except for they say if you watch it on Netflix, right? But the point is that movie is being played already. The signal is already there and it's us that switch from one channel to another.

We as the conscious awareness, we are the viewer of this movie. And the subconscious mind is the one that if you don't do anything, if you don't work on yourself, if you don't do meditation and all of the other exercises, let's say to develop better your conscious awareness, then your subconscious mind is the one that holds the remote control and keeps deciding whether you're watching a horror movie or a love story. So this is the best example because everything is pure energy. Let's say that this signal is everywhere and the example is clearly the one of the television but then you can pick even the same channel and one television may have the wrong visual settings of the screen and for example you see this love movie but it's all purple because the LED of the of the television are completely up while another person maybe has the right cinema kind of ambient lights of the screen and he watches somehow a a different movie, right?

So of course the signal is there. So the object of the microphone is there but the way you perceive it is completely different from one person to another because again we work exactly the same of a television. We pick up the signal from from the environment. Our body, our organs, our brain, our heart, they process this information and project it as the screen of the television. And whether you have certain beliefs or not, you're going to project certain reality or a different world.

Very interesting. So, how can we go a bit deeper into this idea of subconscious? Now, why do you keep saying that this is so important and so key for like having a serene life? Well, think about how much of your actions are included into this 90 to 97%. Right? So, it's so difficult because in the west we've been used again to use our brain so our logical awareness to look at things and we believe that what we see is what is there. But once we understand that what we see is what is the subconscious projecting that we want to see, then the only way that we can see something different is by working with the subconscious mind.

The best example is always to think about yourself in front of a mirror. If you look at the image in the mirror and you don't like it, do you want to change the mirror? Are you going to fight for changing the mirror or do you actually acknowledge and realize that you need to change yourself so that you can project a different image in the mirror? That's the difference between doing the conscious work versus the subconscious work. And I always get in troubles when I say this, but working with the conscious mind in the way that most western psychology and was western therapy has been doing for years and years with absolutely very little effects, positive effects is that you can completely analyze your life from a conscious perspective.

You can even go back and realizing that certain events in your past have had certain effects on yourself. But until you do the unconscious subconscious level work, nothing almost nothing of these kind of things and this kind of awareness is going to change the subconscious and therefore the projection of your life.

I love the example of the mirror. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's one of the few examples that I read in a few books and it always sticks with me to really understand, you know, what we're talking when we talk about the difference of like how can we work more with our inner side of things and and maybe really kind of talking more about that. Somebody that has not yet started doing this particular work or or somebody that has started but perhaps you know they looked at therapy as their way to go

Or even just meditation. You know a lot of people do the conventional level one kind of work which is meditation which is basic breath work and these kind of exercises. Maybe you're not consistent with them and what it does is that it does create a moment of peace for yourself. So this is absolutely super important. I still remember almost 10 years ago when I started myself. I started meditation because I had to stop the panic attacks. And the basic breath work exercises of meditation, they help you to relax.

And in Buddhism, they say they allow you to start to detach a little bit from the situation. So that when you start to kind of zoom out from the thing that you experience with such a pain and emotional charge, you start to realize, oh wait a second, this was not really so much of a problem. But after that, after the awareness that there is something more, it comes the the deep subconscious mind work that is energy release, that is heavy breath work, that is unblocking all of your chakras that eventually we can talk about in another podcast.

And all of this conversation that really goes into changing the data that is stored in your subconscious so that you can project something different.