The Conscious Mind

This is the layer of our mind that is available to our awareness. It helps with our daily decision-making processes and deals with our perception of external reality. It is proactive, realistic, logical and intelligent. It applies rational thought to use our experiences to work out what to do in new situations. However it is easily overloaded, and can only deal with between five and nine things at any time.

The Unconscious Mind

This, the biggest layer of our mind, is hidden from our everyday awareness.

The unconscious operates on automatic pilot reacting by seeking to avoid pain and obtain survival and pleasure regardless of external considerations. It is involved with our emotions, imagination and memories as well as with our autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system controls all the workings of our body - the beating of our heart, the respiratory system, digestion, the release of our hormones - in fact everything that our bodies do in order to function - non of which is under our conscious control. It is easy to understand therefore, why the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. In reality, the mind and body are indivisible.

The unconscious mind is powerful and can deal with many complex instructions at any one time but is not 'intelligent.' Behaviours and body reactions that are outside our conscious control come from the unconscious. The unconscious always has a reason for what it does but the reason may not be easily understood by us and may be outdated or no longer useful to us.

When we use hypnotherapy it is the unconscious mind that we are tapping into. Hypnotherapy enables us to talk directly to the unconscious persuading it and enabling it to change preconditioned ways of reacting. This is achieved by a variety of different methods, including hypnotic suggestion - perhaps the technique most familiar to the lay-person.