391. The unconscious vs. conscious mind

I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast "Doubt, the Case of Lucy Letby," we unpacked the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? "I've just been made to fit." "The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed." What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? "Oh my God, I think she might be innocent." Listen to "Doubt, the Case of Lucy Letby," on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Jo Interesting, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today, I'm talking with my dear friend, Crystal Williams. It can change you in the best way possible, dance with the change, dance with the breakdowns, the embodiment of Pisces Intuition, with Capricorn Power Moves. "You're so I'm like delusionaly proud of my chart." Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast, starting on February 24th, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. "I'm Clayton Nekkerd, in 2022. I was the lead of ABCs, the Bachelor." But here's the thing. Bachelor fans hated him. "If I could press a button and rewind it all I would." That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. "The media is here, this case has gone viral." "The dating contract." "Agreed to date me, but I'm also suing you." "This is unlike anything I've ever seen before." I'm Stephanie Young. Listen to Love Traped on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the "Birden of Guilt" season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpride became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. "I was a monster." Listen to "Birden of Guilt" season 2 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. "Ago Woda is your host for the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards. Live at South by Southwest." "Hello, is anybody there?" Raised by a single mom, "Ago" may have a few father-related issues. "Are we supposed to talk about your dad?" Her podcast "Think's Dad" is full of funny heartfelt conversations with actors, including fellow SNL alums, comedians, musicians, and more, about life and their wonderfully complicated relationships with their fathers. "I think and hope that's a good thing." Get to know "Ago." Follow "Think's Dad" with "Ago Woda" and start listening on the pre-iHeart Radio app today. "Hello, everybody. I'm Gemma Spek and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology." "Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode. As we, of course, break down the psychology of our 20s today, I have something really fun and scientific for you guys. So if your favorite episodes of the podcast are when we kind of go deep into concepts and deep into research, you are going to love today's topic. And even if you don't, I still think this is one of those ones you should definitely listen to because it will tell you so much about how you operate, your behaviors, your decision-making, why you make decisions that you don't always actually want to make rationally, because today we are talking about the conscious versus unconscious mind and the role each of them plays in our lives and why we kind of, again, yeah, make decisions that feel bizarre and hard to justify while we have these reactions that come out of nowhere and yet we still keep doing them and we can't quite figure out how to change. This is the unconscious mind. This is the part of our existence and how we interpret the world. We're going to really drill into today. The idea that there are parts of us operating outside of our deliberate rational control is not a new idea. What's just changed over time and over the years is how we explain it. And we cannot talk about the unconscious versus conscious mind without doing a little bit of a history lesson first. So long before we had these words that I think we use so often these days, unconscious, subconscious, a lot of brilliant ancient thinkers were describing basically the same thing. This feeling that we as humans are split between what we know rationally and how we choose to behave emotionally. This goes like all the way back to like Plato and Aristotle and Spinoza who basically distinguish between what they called intuitive passions or appetites and then on the other hand, deliberate reason. Plato, for example, I like this metaphor. He described the human solace having three parts and he kind of described it as if we are sitting behind a chariot and the chariot represents us and represents our reason. And we think we're the ones that are guiding it. But really what's guiding the chariot are these two horses. We're guided by these two in his mind, two winged horses. One represented nobility. It represented our emotional and social knowledge and our desire to be good and to be reasonable and rational. And then the other horse represented like our wild side. Like it represented our desire and the appetite of like the unbounded parts of the soul. That is a very early representation of how we might now view our rational mind and how we might also view our impulses and emotions. Or our I guess beliefs or our social behavior each of them leading us in different directions. If this sounds familiar to Freud's idea of the ego and the super ego and the id, it's because it is Freud took a lot of his ideas from Plato and some of these ancient thinkers. He is obviously one of the most famous psychoanalysts of all time. And yeah, he based a lot of his work and the foundation of a lot of his theories on some of these metaphors. And he kind of took those initial ideas and tried to format them or flesh them out even more. And in his mind, the mind is divided into three parts. The conscious mind, so what you are aware of right now, you know, I'm sitting in this room, I'm looking around, there's a microphone in front of me, I'm recording my podcast, my pre-conscious mind, things that are kind of just sitting below that I want to talk about where this idea is going, what I have to do next, how my mood is being impacted by things that happened earlier this morning, and then the unconscious mind. Material that to him is kept out of awareness, but is still influencing you. So you may have seen this, especially in like psych 101 classes, represented as an iceberg, that's a pretty classic way of representing it. I still remember having that iceberg diagram in my psych textbooks, but all of these things, the conscious subconscious or pre-conscious and unconscious all kind of work together to form the person that we know as ourselves. One thing Freud really emphasized though, was the role of dreams in being able to basically understand what the unconscious mind is doing below the surface. So in his mind, like we could never directly know what's happening unconsciously in our mind. He basically said that dreams are one of the only ways of really being able to understand what's going on. He wrote a whole book about it, it's literally called the interpretation of dreams. He also claimed that our dreams fulfill that unconscious wishes. So like if you want to be famous, your dreams may reveal to you how you should do that. Or if you feel guilty, your dreams may reveal to you how you're not or how you should forgive yourself. He also says they reveal what we desire most and what we fear the most. Some other ways that he said we could get in touch with the unconscious mind were the famous Freudian slip, artwork, repressed memories. These days we know that's all probably less inaccurate. There may be some slight truth to it, some slight truth to our dreams kind of working out some deep emotional wounds, but Freud did get a lot of stuff wrong. I think he did the best that he could with what he had, but he is still a controversial figure. And this is a great place to kind of shift gears and talk about what we know about the unconscious and conscious mind now in the modern day with a bit more technology, with a bit more scientific experimental practice going on. Pretty simply, the conscious mind in psychological terms is the set of mental processes that you can deliberately direct. What you can hold in awareness, what you can reason about, what you can talk about, what you can see. The big thing about the conscious mind, sorry, is that it's relatively slow. It's a very intentional effortful. It's kind of limited in its capacity as well. So for example, you can't you really can't juggle more than a couple of things in your conscious mind at any one time. It's why we're bad at multitasking. It's why we get mentally overwhelmed. It's why you say things automatically. You don't really mean when a lot's going on around you. I like to think of your conscious mind as like the spokesperson. It is the person that like the company puts in front of the cameras who was like reading off the script that the unconscious mind has given it. Or it's kind of more like it's putting together a speech from a bunch of dot points that the unconscious mind has given it. It has some some decision making powers. It directs a small amount of information. It definitely applies a lot of reason and it interprets the small things that the unconscious mind gives it. But beyond like directing impulses and directing things around you, it also doesn't completely, your conscious mind cannot be aware of absolutely everything. It's just responsible for constructing the story of who you are based on what it has access to. Just basically it interprets your human experience for you. But it doesn't always have a good grip on everything that's going on in kind of the back offices of the mind. Again, think of this spokesperson or CEO analogy. Let's let's use the CEO analogy. The CEO may be up front, but she is like nothing without the staff whose jobs she can't possibly do or by herself. And she can't possibly be aware of everything that's going on in the back offices all the time. That's the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is just the front man. There's a lot going on behind the scenes. One key aspect that the unconscious mind is responsible for is rapid evaluation that our conscious mind just isn't quick enough for. You know, whether something is good or bad, whether something is safe or unsafe, whether to approach or avoid how to react in a situation of danger. Before you consciously decide how you feel about a situation or even about someone's tone or their physicality or their presence, your body often already knows. Automatic evaluations, they are what help us really move quickly in social and physical environments. For example, if you meet somebody and you instantly feel uneasy, but you can't explain why that's your unconscious mind. Like your mind has picked up on subtle cues like micro expressions or mismatch between their words and their tone without conscious awareness. It's like that feeling in your gut, right? Interestingly, actually, maybe not a surprising fact for many people, but women are better at this. Women are better at unconsciously picking up on these micro expressions. There was a study in 2020 that basically gave participants a bunch of portraits of people, either with an authentic or an authentic non-authentic smile. Women, we're picking up on that incredibly quickly and with much higher accuracy. This is because your unconscious mind is also responsible for always having this idea of what are we going to do next or action preparation. If this person is dangerous, it knows what you're immediately going to do before you even know about it. It's also responsible for a sociative learning, right? That study, right, where these women could tell if people are inauthentic and the smile was not to be trusted, definitely your unconscious mind has picked up on times in the past where that's probably happened, where you've trusted somebody and they had a smile like that person and then they betrayed you, or you've trusted somebody and they've had an authentic smile like that person and they've ended up being a great friend. Really, it's this embodied reaction. We often label it as a gut reaction that comes from all these past experiences. Childhood hurt memories we've forgotten about that have lingered on in some form or another often through automatic behaviors and sometimes this is amazing, right? Intuitive reactions are really helpful knowing how to follow your intuition is an amazing human ability, but other times this reaction can be really faulty. It can be encoded through bias and through fear so that we often do respond in weird self-sabotaging ways or in a way that we don't really want to because our conscious mind didn't sign off on it. That's the final thing the unconscious mind or the theory say the unconscious mind is also really responsible for and plays a role in is your habits and your context to triggered behavior. Habits aren't just repeated actions. They are learnt links between acute a response and a feeling. For example, choosing to exercise or not. Yeah, your conscious mind might make the final decision and you might think that you have a say in whether you choose to exercise tonight or not, but behind the scenes are all these associations that are pushing you towards one decision or another, like how you felt the last time you exercised. Your beliefs about people who exercise that one time you were a kid and you were picked last for the full team or you fell over and now you forever resent exercise and there's always this weird dark memory about it even if you can't consciously remember that happening. Another way we see this really interestingly is with a lot of our food choices, like how we choose what we buy at the grocery store. So why is it important to separate the conscious from the unconscious? What does that actually help us with behaviourally and emotionally and psychologically? We're going to talk about all of that and more and the important lessons we can really take from unconscious impulses after the short break. Stay with us. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on-purpose podcast. My latest episode is with Hillary Duff, singer, actress and multi-platonom artist. Hillary opens up about complicated family dynamics, motherhood and releasing our first record in over 10 years. We talk about what it's taken to grow up in the entertainment industry and stay grounded through every chapter. It's a raw and honest conversation about identity, evolution and building a life that truly matters. You desire in family like this picture and that's not reality a lot of the time it's for people. My sister and I don't speak, it's definitely a very painful part of my life and I hope it's not forever, but it's for right now. Listen to on-purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Jo Winterstein, host of the Spirit Dollar podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller and unapologetic, aquarium visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives and I find a lot of people with strong placements and Aquarius like are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms on different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Dollar podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Levy. Lucy Levy has been found guilty. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox and in the new podcast Doubt, the case of Lucy Levy, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it. To ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Levy was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Levy on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Nackered and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected. The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agreed to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search for it. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. This season, an epic battle of he said she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. I have done nothing to get hurted by the f*ck bachelor! Listen to Love Trap on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guild Season 2 podcast. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun. He tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Termaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termaine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, "Lord, this can't be real." I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, only two people knew the truth. Until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guild Season 2 on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So why can't we just lump our conscience and our unconscious together and call it a day? Like, that's our mind. It just is what it is. Like, why do we actually have to understand them separately? Well, these habits we were talking about, right? Those like repetitive behaviors or things that we keep doing, that is why it's important to know what comes from your conscious goal directed you, your higher self, and what comes from something deeper. The quote I always use. I feel like I've been quoting Carl Jung a lot in recent episodes, but this quote is spectacular for what we're talking about today. Carl Jung, one of the grandfathers of modern psychology, he said, "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and we will call it fate." And this is what we're talking about. I think a lot of us assume that we're pretty self-aware as people, especially if like you've done a lot of that deep emotional work or you've been in therapy, especially if you talk openly about your feelings. You're like, "Yeah, I know myself. I know what's going on." But a lot of research says that most of these behaviors and this knowledge is really just scratching the surface. There is a pretty famous piece of literature, psychology literature from the 1970s, where essentially these researchers, Nisbitten Wilson, realized that, "Wait, we really don't know why we make certain choices. We really don't know what produces our judgments." And when we're asked to explain when we make certain decisions, often we'll just give an answer that sounds reasonable, even if that is not the true reason. Just to kind of make out unconscious actions make sense. And this study was like fundamental in showing this. So essentially they put these participants in a room or I don't know how they actually did it, whether it was one by one, I think it was. And they put them in front of like a clothing rack and there were these series of clothing items and they didn't have any tags on them and they just asked them to choose which item was the best. So which item was the best, had the best quality, which one did they prefer the most? The thing was the items were almost identical. And most people chose the item that was simply the furthest to the right. They just, for whatever reason people kept going back to this one, they were all the same. This one at the very end. And they would feel all these items, whether it was because it was the last item they felt because it was on the very end or the last item they saw it didn't really matter. For some reason they were all choosing this particular piece. And when they were asked, why did you choose this item? Participants never mentioned the positioning. They never mentioned anything about that. They weren't even consciously aware of it. Instead they just gave these explanations. Like this one had this very particular sense to it or this very particular texture and I could tell it was better. Or this one, the fiber count reminded me most of like this sweater I had as a kid that my mom spent a lot of money on. Like they were just, it wasn't that they were lying. It's just that they were these underlying unconscious processes that were impacting their choices that they didn't have access to and yet their conscious mind had to justify it. And this is a way that human behavior can be manipulated. That is one of the biggest reasons why we have to understand it. The group who know a lot about this and know very well how do we manipulate these unconscious shortcuts or choices are actually advertisers. And also this may surprise you. We talked about grocery stores before. The people who stock your supermarket shelves. They know a lot about the unconscious mind. Did you know that most of our shopping decisions are based on placement alone. So the majority of us, if we were given let's say 20 options for like jam or pasta or sauce or whatever, we're just going to buy what's like directly in our line of sight, make 90% of the time. Yeah, like price and quality will sometimes come into play but big brands will literally pay top dollar to buy shelf space right in the middle, right in that line of sight. And that's why the most popular brands will often sit there. Even if you choose not to buy that product, why you buy a different one is also due to your unconscious mind. For example, supermarket always put the most expensive items at the top. That slightly higher price makes it feel slightly better and makes you feel slightly better about yourself being able to afford something that isn't the basic choice because it feeds your ego. It feeds some unconscious part of your mind that needs validation. Maybe you choose a certain pasta sauce because one time somebody really attractive who reminded you of your childhood crush, you saw them buying that pasta sauce. You don't remember that happening, but now that's someone you always buy. Maybe it was someone that your parents always chose. That is a huge influence. What our parents buy is often what you know continues to influence us even when we think we're making our own conscious decision. You need to understand the unconscious mind. Again, because people are using it to direct your behavior maybe against your actual wants. People can manipulate it, but also because imagine when not in a grocery store. Imagine we're around our friends. Imagine with somebody that we're dating. Those same automatic ingrained mental shortcuts that dictate your grocery choices. Also, then dictate how you behave in those situations as well. Like, while you pick a fight over something small that seems to mean absolutely nothing. Why you get so defensive towards criticism, even though you rationally know it's like a healthy part of a relationship. Why, for some reason, your friend interrupting you drives you mad. But she could be as late as she want. She could literally steal money from you and you don't care. But as soon as she's mad, that's this weird disrespect that you don't know why you respond, but you do. Your unconscious mind is trained to respond to whatever you repeatedly experience, rehearse and emotionally encode, especially when it happens early, often or intensely. That is really how your unconscious mind is trained. Early, often, or intensely, frequency, intensity, or the age at which it occurred. A big aspect that impacts our unconscious mind is obviously, you may have guessed this, our early learnings, our family, our childhood experiences, even, and some would say this, experiences you had in the womb or generationally. Literally, there is this idea called collective unconscious, which says that our deepest beliefs in our ways of seeing the world are spiritually inherited before our, before we even are conscious beings. Your unconscious mind is being formed way before your conscious mind even catches up. Whilst, I think that's pretty hard to prove scientifically, and there's yet to be a lot of proof, scientific proof for it, we do know that you absorb the rules of your environment before you are consciously aware of them. Things like how love is shown, what happens when you're upset, whether mistakes when you were a child were punished or repaired, whether your needs were welcomed or inconvenient, whether you were bullied, how you were taught to behave, things that really traumatized you or excited you as a kid, they are what are creating the rules for your unconscious mind, and they become the template for how life works, how relationships work, how everything in the world works. Even in adulthood, your body will keep running these childhood rules until you consciously update them, and this is why therapeutic tools like, you know, like talk therapy or learning to repair it yourself or reprocessing or processing for the first time or trauma are so effective. You know, these are the stuff that we're not necessarily aware of all the time. We kind of know it happens, we don't really get the wounds that it's causing, and it's not until you like, really like getting the trenches and like dig deep, almost like an archaeologist and you bring up this stuff with a professional, right, that you get yourself a bit more and you really understand what causes these patterns in your behavior. So how can you recognize when your unconscious mind is, is really steering things in a way that isn't benefiting you because your unconscious mind is steering a lot. Some of it's great, we don't need to touch that. How do we figure out when we do, we do need to like do some of that again, archaeological digging. As Freud said, there will be signs, it's probably not going to be dreams though, or just sterbing art or Freudian slips. That's probably not the only way, that's what the best way to get access to this. Instead, and I hate to say it's probably going to be the natural consequences of your actions and of your behavior. I wish we could interpret everything that was wrong with our subconsciously throughout dreams, it'd be a lot easier, no, it's probably going to have a bit more realistic tangible, a more realistic tangible feel to it. One way to know is when you keep repeating a pattern even though consciously you want something different, you might genuinely want to rest but you keep overworking and you feel terrible about it because you're not seeing your family or your friends but you cannot stop. You might really want a healthy relationship. You really want to be with somebody who loves you but you keep choosing emotionally unavailable people. Repetition with regret. You might really want to stand up for yourself and you really want to stop that business and you really want to be a self-made success. But when it comes down to it, you put yourself in a box, you apologize, you can't put yourself out there, you feel this kind of stagnation, like there is like this ceiling to how much you can achieve. You know, your wiring says to you that is not something that is available to us, that is not who we are based on past experiences. That gap, that gap is important. The gap between what you consciously want and what you repeatedly do or believe is the clear sign of an automatic reflex that is built on unconscious, unhelpful mechanisms. Another time that you can notice that your unconscious is like in control in a way that's not great is when your reactions feel bigger than the situation that is in front of you. A useful, a very useful tool or clue is when you feel this real sense of urgency to respond in a specific way to a situation. If it feels like I have to do this right now to feel okay, otherwise like I don't have any other way or don't have any other way to respond to this, that is often the unconscious mind, trying just to reduce discomfort as efficiently as possible and it's just trying to protect you in the way that made sense in the past. If a small comment sends you into panic and rage and shut down and you just like don't know where that has come from or if you find yourself like overreacting just like rapidly and then you feel super confused afterwards. That is often an automatic threat response and these kinds of situations we are responding through memory and we're responding based on past meaning rather than what is actually happening in the present moment and it definitely is a sign like something deeper is being activated of triggered here that maybe we're not aware of or maybe we are but we don't want to think of just to give you some more examples like I'm trying to think about what would be a good one. So for example if your friend always chooses the restaurant and you start getting like really annoyed at them, really annoyed at them and you do not know why is it really them or is it because you don't like being directed or because you're not in control of plans because somebody else choosing a restaurant probably shouldn't elicit that much of an emotional reaction but you think it really says something about you or if your partner doesn't say I love you back in like the specific right tone at the right time and like you go into this full tizzy is it about them or is it that you like maybe always secretly question whether anyone could truly love you because your parents didn't show you that much affection or because a relationship in the past made you feel worthless. It's worth asking once you are aware of these markers and these reactions that just seem really disproportionate you are basically more aware than I would say 90% of people probably higher. So like noticing it feels very shameful sometimes and feels very much like awkward and weird and I actually think that's the greatest place to start in that discomfort of recognizing behaviors you don't like about yourself because it isn't your fault it definitely isn't your fault most of the time at like this is who you are and this is how you were programmed and this is how you're this is what your unconscious mind chooses to prioritize it is your responsibility though which really sucks it's just an extra another one of those extra fun things about being an adult but we can definitely do it we can definitely take responsibilities for these behaviors and change the outcome and change the behavioral loop so we're going to take one final break here and then when we come back I want to give you three ways to do this and to reprogram your unconscious mind as much as we possibly can as conscious individuals to stay with us. Hey I'm Jay Chetty host of the on-purpose podcast my latest episode is with Hilary Duff, singer, actress and multi-platinam artist Hilary opens up about complicated family dynamics, motherhood and releasing our first record in over 10 years we talk about what it's taken to grow up in the entertainment industry and stay grounded through every chapter it's a raw and honest conversation about identity, evolution and building a life that truly matters. My sister and I don't speak it's definitely a very painful part of my life and I hope it's not forever but it's for right now. Listen to on-purpose with Jay Chetty on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi this is Jo Winterstein host of the Spirit.org podcast where we talk about astrology, natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life and I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16 you're going to have a terrible time with men. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms on different houses and different places but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity and real life this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit.org podcast starting on February 24th on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. In 2023 a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The moment you look at the whole picture of the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox and in the new podcast Doubt, the case of Lucy Levy, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Levy was. No voicing of any skepticism are doubt. Listen to Doubt the case of Lucy Levy on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Nackered and in 2022 I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately it didn't go according to plan. The media is here. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search for this is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. This season an epic battle of he said she said and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. I have done nothing to get hurted by the brats. Aigo Woda is your host for the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards live at South by Southwest. Hello, is anybody there? Raised by a single mom, Aigo may have a few father related issues. Are we supposed to talk about your dad? Her podcast thanks dad is full of funny heartfelt conversations with actors including fellow SNL alums, comedians, musicians and more about life and their wonderfully complicated relationships with their fathers. I think it can help that's a good thing. Get to know Aigo. Follow Thanks Dad with Aigo Woda and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today. I personally think one of the biggest signs of intelligence in somebody is choosing not just to accept your situation or the behavior for what it is. Choosing not just to say like this is the way i am and this is how i've always been. So why do i have to change? But instead taking action on behalf of your better self and on behalf of the person you want to be even if you are not there yet. In fact, research has shown. Research has shown time and time again that one of the biggest signs of low mental flexibility and therefore low mental intelligence or emotional intelligence, I should say, is being unable to take accountability or see any issue without own behavior. That is not going to be us though. That is not going to be us because we know we know what we're responsible for. Now we're going to change it. Recognizing ways you may be self-sabotaging is not a weakness. Most people will never do this in their entire lives. So this is what we're going to do next. The first step according to the incredible author, Brianna Weast, I think her name is Brianna West West. You will know her though. She wrote the book 101 essays to change the way you think. She also wrote the pivot year, the mountain is you. I think she has another book coming out. But one of the best things that she said about this, about this rewiring of the unconscious is if you want to change your behavior and you want to rewire how your unconsciousness or unconscious brain responds to things, you have to signal to your subconscious and your unconscious that another reality is possible. Essentially, you have to be able to imagine a new scenario and a better scenario for yourself. And the more you practice that imagined scenario in your brain by rehearsing it, by visualizing it, the more it feels real. So you've recognized the response that you want to change. Now you are essentially reprogramming the outcome that the possibility of a different outcome that could come afterwards. Your brain often treats objective reality and your thoughts about a potential reality or your imagination is the same. And that means that if you think it can be true, your brain starts to believe it as well. That's cognitive rewiring. It's literally the same neurological patterns that create anxiety just in the reverse, right? Your brain cooks up these what if possibilities and overinvest in them because it can't always tell imagined reality from actual reality. In this situation though, we're going to overthink the best case scenario. We are like reverse reverse engineering this to help us out. As Brianna says, you have to be willing to see it's possible before the reality of possibility follows. Whether that is in a relationship, whether that is imagining how you are going to break out of your cycle of dating emotionally unavailable people, you have to imagine that that's possible. Whether it is breaking out of a pattern of rage and anger, you have to imagine it's possible first. Whether it is breaking out of a pattern of not communicating with your friends and always having these dramatic friendship blow-ups. If you cannot imagine a different way of doing it, you're not going to be able to do it. So part of this practice is like almost kind of like a creative writing, creative rewiring exercise of like write your own adventure, write your own ending. How is this going to go? Second, once you have the imagined alternative scenario, just keep the programming really, really simple. Choose one behavior, one reaction, one automatic choice you make that you don't particularly like and target that. This was advice that was written about in the new scientists in 2018. They actually did this whole series of like reprogramming your own conscious if you want to pay for a subscription. But essentially what they said or what the author of this article said was that we have to start small. We have to start on the most micro level to gain access to our unconscious and rewire it. So creating a singular if then plan, whether then is the desired behavior, that is what we're talking about. If I'm in this situation, then this is how I'm going to respond. There's actually such strong evidence that's been written about so many times. This is not an original idea for me, by the way, at all. This has been written about and studied so often that one of the simplest ways to gain more control over automatic impulses is to pre-decide what your response is going to be in advance. It's also a way that people recover from addiction. You know, one behavior at a time. There was a major 2006 meta-analysis. So a little bit old now, but this big meta-analysis that pulled together results from dozens of studies and they tested what these are called, these are called implementation intentions, right? Those if then plans, like if it's 10 p.m. then I'm in bed. If it's the morning, then I'm not on my phone, that's a bad one. Like if I feel the urge to people please, then I will email somebody and say I'll get back to you, then I will give myself 20 minutes to respond. If I'm angry at my partner, then I'll take a walk, those kind of implementation intentions across all these studies. People who had these in place, people who had the imagined better scenario were significantly more likely to follow through on their new habits and intentions than people who just set a general broad desire to change. So people who are like, I want to be better, I want to be a better person, I want to be healthier, blah, blah, blah, blah. They weren't able to really do it, but when you could say, this is my trigger, or this is the situation I normally unconsciously respond to, and this is how I want to respond differently when you could really identify A and B, your chances of success skyrocketed. And the explanation for that, sorry, just to drill into this a little bit more, the explanation for that is that the if part is the crucial part, because it makes you more sensitive to what is queuing the automatic response that you would normally perform. If the if is making your aware of what in your environment triggers a response, what in your environment makes you particularly sensitive? What in your environment your past has made you particularly reactive to, and then it interrupts the normal loop that you're unconscious or automatic behaviors would want to perform and is like, this is our exit. Then we will do something else. Another way to feel more in control of the impulses of the unconscious mind, especially the ones again, I keep saying that's the ones we don't want your unconscious mind, that's great things, but another way to feel in control of those that we don't particularly enjoy is really simply to just move slower. When we talk about impulses, we're often really talking about bottom up automatic like automatic processing and like automatic emotional responses, right? It's coming from something very deep in us and these responses are often generated by much older ancient brain systems. The ones that would have come about first, the amygdala, the limbic system, the midbrain structures, literally if you look at a cross-section of the brain, they are right in the center. They're the most protected because they're the most important. These systems, they are fast, they are efficient, they are designed for survival. It doesn't want you to wait for nuance. Your automatic behaviors don't care about your long-term goals. They don't want to consult you about how your reaction might meet your vision of your ideal self. When you are stressed, when you are sleep deprived, when you are overstimulated, when you are emotionally flooded, the balance between your limbic system and your prefrontal cortex shifts so that your ability to intentionally interrupt a behavior or intentionally interrupt, I don't know, reaction, it just goes way down. It's hard to get in front of that bus. In high arousal states, you are again more likely to return to the default or to your habitual behaviors and so your window for tolerance of discomfort and your ability to interrupt it just now. It's slowing down on the other hand, interrupts that cascade of stuff that's happening. From a neurobiological perspective, deliberately reducing even your walking pace, deliberately making yourself, unless of a rush all the time, slowing down your breathing, slowing down your speech, slowing down your physical movement, slowing down how you eat even, whether you rush breakfast over the counter or you sit down and enjoy it, slowing down all that stuff, increases parasympathetic nervous system activity, which means better emotional regulation and stronger like top down control rather than bottom up response. You are literally making it biologically and urologically easier to choose a better outcome for yourself rather than just reacting. You can't manage what is unconscious if you are always in a reactive state. It's just not possible. So this is probably the most important thing of all. Do the talk therapy, do the inner child healing, do all of that to the historical work but if your nervous system is not regulated, if you are not going about life more intentionally and I feel like intentionality is such a buzzword but it's true. If you do not work on these high level intentions and slowing down your life and reducing stress in whatever way you can, I know it's a busy life but reducing stress in whatever way you can. Your ability to signal to your body that you want to perform this news that of narratives and that you want to respond differently is going to be very very difficult but I still think you're able to do it. I still think that even just recognizing to begin with the role of your unconscious mind and what it's not doing to you but what it's trying to do for you based on the past, based on past hurt, based on past fear, trauma, even good things, that is a great place to begin. I know for me and I feel like I've been talking about this a lot in recent episodes. You can tell I'm really this is what I've gone through at the moment but my big thing has been realizing how I unconsciously like respond to social threats especially with my friends and reflecting on how when I was a kid like I wasn't accepted and I was bullied and I didn't have many friends and I was very lonely and so I would always have this weird reaction when people would hang out without me or I don't know if things of that nature would happen where I would get really irritated and I would self sabotage in a way where I would put even more distance between myself and that friend even when they were kind of like hey what the heck is going on. That's been a big thing for me realizing that unconsciously everything that my brain is trying to do is to make life safer for me and is trying to protect me from past hurt and the thing is is that I'm not in that situation anymore. I'm not that child or that teenager or that kid who was like feeling very socially rejected. I'm an adult who has a brilliant life and who has really focused on brilliant friendships. There was patterns for my past like don't fit here anymore and if I keep them up and if I keep performing them like I'm going to lose a really good thing. So just noticing it and being as intentional as possible and being like I don't want to be this person anymore. Just one of the most brilliant things that you can do or start like not just in your 20s but like at any age. You could be in your 60s and it's still going to be great. You could be in your 90s and this is still an effective wonderful thing for us to do. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it's given you some insight. Start up some conversation. As always thank you to our brilliant researcher Libby Colbert for her help with this episode. So much research went into this and it's just like always such a fascinating topic to return to whether you're like in the intro stages of psychology or like more advanced. I feel like it's one of my yeah it's one of my favorite things to discuss. If you are listening on Spotify leave a little brain emoji below so I know that you made it to the end of the episode and thank you for sticking around. I very much appreciate it. Make sure that you are following us on Instagram on Substack. If you want the yeah if you want the links to this article and to look at all the research we're used you can also watch us now on Netflix. If you're in the US or Canada please tag me in your pictures. Tag me in your stories of you watching the podcast. The vibe is amazing. You can see all these cool props behind me right now. It just brings I don't know a whole deeper level to what we're doing today and what we're talking about. So thank you again for listening. 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