Befriending Your Mind: The Secret to Inner Peace

Q: Does this mean I can control my reactions?

Not the first one. The instinctual mind will always fire and you would be in trouble without it. What you can move is the layer above it, and that is where most of your day actually happens.

Q: Why do I keep doing things I know are bad for me?

Because the part choosing is not weighing good against bad. It is checking whether you survived it last time. You did, so it repeats it. The habit is not weakness, it is a filing system doing its job.

Q: How does meditation fit into this?

It puts you in the third mind more often. That is the whole mechanism. You are not sitting there emptying yourself, you are just being present enough that the decision reaches the part of you that cares.

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In this episode

mindfulness · overthinking · anxiety

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Hello, and welcome to Stillness in the Storms, the podcast that helps you find inner peace amidst life's chaos. I'm

Steven Webb, your host. And in today's episode, you're going to find out how the mind works.

And not in the neurological way, in a practical way that will help you to become more of a friend

with your subconscious mind, rather than your subconscious mind controlling you. And take this analogy.

Have you ever wondered why a computer engineer never worries about their computer locking up or they just reboot it

and get on with it, or a mechanic never worries about a knocking in their car or anything like that?

Well, they don't worry about it because they probably know what it is. They're not worried about it and they

know they can fix it. That's the problem with us. In our mind, we very much don't understand it. So

therefore it's alien to us. Therefore it controls us. And it makes us anxious and it makes us. It takes

over and makes us stressed and we worry about it. And it's just like driving the car with a knocking

in it and we don't know how to fix it. We don't know what it is. We normally makes us

quite anxious. So let's understand the mind that's on today's podcast.

Just before we start, I want to say thank you to katherine for treating me to a couple of coffees

and to Jesse's girl in Australia for giving me a couple of reviews on the podcast. That makes a big

difference. It really, really helps helps me to know where I'm going in the right direction. It helps me to

know if I'm going in the wrong direction. So if you've got an idea for the podcast or if you've

want to donate and help. I don't have any sponsors. It's literally through the kindness of people like katherine that

treats me to a coffee, that helps me to get the show edited and out there each week and the

hosting of it. So thank you very much and you can head over to thankyousteven.com just to make it really

easy for you where you can contact me or treat me to a coffee. Anyway, let's get on with today's

show. Understanding your subconscious mind, different minds, and everything to do with your mind. That's today's show.

So let's back up a little bit. I can remember about seven or eight years ago, I went on a

course with Bob Proctor and he taught me about the subconscious mind and the really fast

mind, the subconscious mind and the human mind. I don't know if he called them those three things, but that's

basically what I called them in my book The Moving Road. Three Simple Practices for Lasting Success or something like

that. It's a book I wrote about seven, eight years ago and it's only available on Kindle. You could probably

find it. If you go to Amazon and type in Steven Webb, The Moving Road, you will find it. But

I explain the way what We've got three minds and every bit of information comes into the mind in the

same way, either in through our ears and through our eyes, through our senses, through the feelings of our body.

And it. The mind takes all this information and it passes them through three separate minds. And the first mind

is the instinctual mind. It's the reactionary mind. You've all heard of that. Flight, fight or freeze but that's the

mind that everything passes through. Everything. You know, if you pick up a hot tray of buns and you

drop it, that's because the mind has taken the information your hands are burning and it's made a decision without

consulting you drop it. Then you wouldn't overly drop them on the floor. If it had a little bit more

time, it might pass it to the subconscious mind and then to the human mind to get them to the

side as quick as possible. But in general, it will drop them or it will just, you know, panic. It'll

just do whatever it needs to do at any cost or expense. And that's the instinctual mind. That's everything

has to pass through that once it realizes that you're not in danger or it's not a threat or it

doesn't have to deal with it it'll then pass it over the subconscious mind. And what's the subconscious mind? The

subconscious mind is like the great big storehouse of information. Everything you ever do gets stored into the

subconscious mind. And it gets stored in such different ways of, you know, from the movies you watch to the

experiences you have. And like when I got really drunk, and I always use this analogy, but it really works.

But when I got really drunk on a particular drink and and I won't say it just in case they

sue me or something, but I got really, really drunk on a particular drink and now I only smell it

to be really ill because my body, my subconscious mind stored everything about it to protect me in the future.

So you're not going to have that again. So, you know, and I bet everybody out there that's ever got

really, really, really ill on any kind of alcohol or any kind of food or something, you only have to

come near it to like, that's it, I cannot go near it. I cannot even smell it. I almost cannot

be in the same room as it. And it's a way of protecting you. And it stores it full body,

it stores the feelings with it, the emotion, the taste, the smell, everything. And it stores it in

such a vivid way so make sure you don't come in contact with it again. And your subconscious mind stores

everything in that way, from experiences to from when you're very much very born. Even things before you're born, as

the mind's developing, you know, what you hear in the room and all that I I presume I can't remember,

you know, in the first few months, you remember if if some somebody leaned over you and frightened you and

they had a particular colour hair or they looked a particular way, your subconscious minds go, I'm going to clock

that. And it might be that when you're 20 or 30 or 40 years old, you'll come across someone that

looks similar. And you won't know why, but you'll feel this fear, but you won't know why. You won't have

a clue, but your subconscious mind does. So the information goes in. Your instinct your mind says, yeah, no, you're

all right And then your subconscious mind goes, ah, okay, we're not immediately a danger But I know that face.

I know, I know that tall person. And it might not be the same person, but it's stored in a

similar way. And it goes with music and it goes with food and drink and smells situations.

So you often wonder why you might fear a certain situation, but you don't know why. You've got the really

gut feeling that's because your subconscious mind has stored it and it's there to protect you, but it does the

other thing as well. It also brings out the things you enjoy. So you might have a really good

experience with someone when you're really, really young, like one or two years old. And from then on, you always

like that voice, the sound of that voice or that accent. Maybe you had an auntie with a Welsh accent,

for example. And for some reason your whole life you just like the Welsh accent because you remember the peace

and calm that it gave you, or the opposite. So your subconscious mind just stores everything and it

then looks and goes, well, okay, have I got the answer? Have I got. Have I already been in this

situation before? What did I do last time? Did it kill me? Let's do it again. And that's where all

your habits come from the subconscious mind is just repeating the same thing. Again, if it didn't kill you, let's

do it again. Whether it's good or bad. And what's really interesting is your subconscious mind doesn't, it's not your

friend. It's not like only giving you the stuff that's good. It's not like making a judgement of good or

bad in the world. It's just purely on a library or memory. It's looking it up and going, what did

I do last time? It doesn't have a class of good or bad. All it has is, how did this

make them feel last time? Did it create a big Emotion?

And let's do the same thing again, whether you run from it or not. And that's why sometimes we'll run

from things where we don't need to run from anymore or we're running towards things that we really shouldn't be

running towards and we still do and we know they're bad for us, but they didn't kill us last time

but a subconscious mind's like yeah, do it again. Like smoking when you get into the car or when you

get home from work or something like that. The habit is, well, didn't kill you last time, you enjoyed it,

let's have a cigarette. That's what we normally do in these situation. And that's why it's so subconscious. That's why

I call it subconscious. And then you have the next mind, which is the human mind, the one that developed

last of all. And when I talk about these three minds, I'm over simplifying the brain and the mind. But

you know, it's way for us to understand and the way in which we can befriend it and we can

stop it controlling us. So if you go back to evolution, you know nearly everything

that has like a spinal cord that has a hunting mechanism, it'll have the instinctual mind,

it'll have that flight, fight or freeze. Not all of them have a subconscious mind that stores things and memory.

Although we're learning now even goldfish that haven't got a three second memory span and even things like

lobsters and you know, everything has some kind of memory and they learn and they learn habits and they train

and things like that. So a lot more has a subconscious mind than we think. But everything has the instinctual

mind. Most things have a subconscious mind. But very few things have developed the human, the compassionate third

mind. And it's the one that cares. It's the one that is conscious and thinks about things. It's the one

that doesn't always know the answer but can look around and consciously be aware. So if I said to you,

what's one plus one? Instantly you know it's two. Your subconscious mind, well, first of all, your instinctual mind goes,

yep, not a threat pass it on to the subconscious mind. Subconscious mind said, no, that's two. And then you

reply two But you didn't work it out. You didn't go, oh, this is a sum. They're two numbers. I'll

add them together. What does it make? But If I say 47 and 148, well, you have to think about

that you You analyse it. Two numbers, let's add them together. And you do some kind of calculation in your

conscious mind, you're consciously adding them up. And if I said to you, spell London, you instantly

see the word London. You don't have to work it out. Subconscious mind again. And it comes down to

if you don't have to think and it's instantly there, it's your subconscious mind. But when your subconscious mind doesn't

know what to do with it. Like if I said to you, what colour is a thought? Well,

thoughts don't necessarily have a colour. So if you actually, if you ask someone what colour is a thought, they'll

go, okay, not a threat. Subconscious mind. Do you know the colour is a thought? No. Okay, human. So then

we, then we have a discussion and we think about it, and then we consciously go, okay, if a thought

had a colour, what would it be? And then we go into a dialogue with our mind. We have a

conscious um cognitive way of looking at these things. And very often we don't

go to the um the human mind. We don't go to that place. And bearing in mind the human mind

cares, that has empathy, and that that's the main thing. The human mind very often wouldn't hurt someone, wouldn't go

out of his way to make trouble. It wouldn't go out of its way to hurt you. But very often

the subconscious mind doesn't worry either way as long as it survives. And that's why very often when we make

snap decisions on a habit and then suddenly, four hours later go oh why did I do that? I can't

believe I did that. And that's the human mind coming online a few hours later and the guilt coming in

and things like that. But if the human mind was present at that moment, you wouldn't have made that decision.

And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to take over from the instinctual mind, which

will always go through. You can't really take over from that but it's taking over from the subconscious mind a

little bit, moving some of those thoughts and patterns and reactions into the conscious mind so you can choose to

make the decisions. And I think that's where when I started to understand this, it started to make me really

think. And I observed my mind. I was like, oh, yeah, I can see those thoughts coming up. I can

see that process. And suddenly I started having more control over what I was doing. I was conscious of what

I was saying and how I was saying things. Do I still argue? Yes. Do I still get frustrated? Yeah.

Do I still get anxious? Yes. But it affects me less

and very much more. So I think about it in the conscious mind of how this has affected other people,

how this has affected me um Should I go there? Should I make this decision um just because I did

that last time? Should I have to do it again? And it's those kind of things that really improve my

life and give me more inner peace because I'm just consciously making the decision rather than subconsciously.

So you're moving your habits into the conscious mind because there's lots of things that you would you do on

a daily basis that if you were really conscious, you wouldn't do or you would feel guilty doing.

You wouldn't mindlessly sit there and just keep on doing the same thing day in and day out. If you

moved in the conscious mind, you realise that it's probably not the most beneficial. Still not easy to change habits.

Don't get me wrong. But you first of all have to move where things are going into the conscious mind.

And what's wonderful with the conscious mind, it has a conscience. It has a way of knowing whether

it's feeling right or wrong, whether or not it's doing the right thing, whereas the subconscious mind doesn't.

The subconscious mind isn't worried about right and wrong. It's just worried about, let's repeat the same habit because it

didn't kill us last time. And that's basically the. I'm really, really simplifying it. But that's it in a nutshell,

really. And the more we befriend our mind, and when I mean befriend it, is be aware of the

process, watch the process, be entertained by the process. So when something comes into your mind, like, oh, you're feeling

cold, be aware of I'm feeling cold, what do I do? What's my brain do? What's my brain do with

it? What does my mind do with it? And when you're feeling angry, just be aware. Okay, I'm feeling angry.

Oh, my mind wants to do that. Okay, that's it that's interesting And you can be really entertained

by it and you can smile at it, and suddenly you have a massive amount of control over what you

do in life and the decisions you make and how you move forward, rather than just mindlessly doing the

same thing again and again. Very often we're just repeating the same habits, but that's purely because

we're not in the conscious mind. And this is what mindfulness and meditation does. Even if you do guided meditations,

which you can do on my other podcast, Inner Peace Meditations, even if you just do a few guided meditations

every single day, what that does, it just moves you into a more of a presence. You're here

rather than thinking about something else. You're making a decision rather than some subconscious mind

based on the past making the decision then it's okay. The subconscious mind is just there to protect you and

help you. And so is the instinctual mind. You know that they're not enemies, they are your friends, but don't

think they've got your back for the right reasons. They've got your back to protect you, and that's it. They're

not worried about whether or not it's the conscious or the right thing to do. They're just worried whether you

did it last time and whether you got killed or not, whether it went really, really badly or you managed

to get over it. And that's what it tends to repeat. It doesn't care about other people. And in the

chimp paradox, it explains it brilliantly. You have the fastest computer mind, which literally takes all

the processing information as like 20 times faster than the subconscious mind. Then the subconscious mind comes on,

which is way slower than the computer mind, the reactionary mind. And then you've got the final human mind, which

is 20 times slower again. And we know the mind has this processing power by one of the

experiments at university I stanford or somewhere I can't remember now. But what they did is they put two speakers,

one to the left and one to the right, and they got the person to close their eyes, and they

put two pips out the left one and one pip out the right one. And when they play each pip

between all three

more than, I think, about 130 milliseconds or something, you hear two pips on the left and one pip from

the right. But when they speed it up to bring it down below about 90 milliseconds, you hear one pit

from the left one pit from the middle in front and one pit from the right. Why is that? Isn't

that incredible? It's

because your mind is taking all that information and calculating it and then giving you what

it its interpretation of it, and that's what it's doing. It takes our mind about nine 80 to 90

milliseconds to process anything. So as much as you think you're online, you're actually about 90 milliseconds behind

everything.

Isn't that amazing isn't that An interesting fact. You're just totally behind. You know what we think

it's in almost in real time because it's so quick. You know, it's less than a tenth of a second,

but you are behind. We all are. You know, we're not ahead. Everything we're witnessing was just

about a tenth of a second ago. And

we think we're seeing it in real time as it happens the earth and the universe happens to work quite

okay with us working in that real time speed. And

our brains are what, I don't know, six inches across, something like that. I'm not very good with measurements, so

for a thought to go, it's got to go a good few inches across the brain. And when you see

these animals, and I noticed it first of all in the albatross movie from the Easter Islands, where

the albatross is dance incredibly quickly, moving their head in sync with each other way quicker than we ever could

do. And I thought about it and thought about it, and I read somewhere on the Internet well it's to

do with the size of the brain, size of the mind. So if you've got a mind that is only.

I don't know what size of an albatross mind I don't know, a centimeter, 18 millimeters or something. So

in order for that mind to have a thought, a complete thought, it's only got to fill the space of

about a centimeter. For us to have a complete thought and understand it, it's got to fill six inches So

that whole electricity going across the mind works in the same speed as everywhere in every animal. You know,

physics is physics. You know, there might be a slight fluctuation between the neurons and the way the brain works,

but essentially, they're all neurons. They're all that the brain tissue is essentially made up the same thing. It

has the same relative speeds to each other, but one's a lot smaller than the other. So therefore, it's a

lot quicker thought. And that's why when you try squatting a fly and you go to do it, and you

go to move your hand and the fly is like oh, yeah, you're going to move your hand. Yeah, well,

I'll fly around here a little bit and I'll move out of the way last minute. It's like, it's like

as if we're in slow motion to the fly, because the fly can see it, process it, take it all

in. And their brains are what, about two millimeters across? So they can have a complete thought pattern that fills

their whole entire mind in the time we've just thought about moving our arm. And that's why we're incredibly slow.

And the bigger the mind, the slower we react, the slower our thought pattern this So humans are one of

the slowest thinkers, one of the slowest animals on the planet Isn't that incredible that

amazing? And it's what it is. Nothing special about it. You know, what makes us so brilliant

is our bigger brains, but also is the floor So yeah, it's really interesting knowing how the physical side of

the brain works and how it stores information. And it stores information in a really ad hoc way. And

it's a mess. That's why when you're retrieving it, you might mix real life events with movies or with conversations.

And when you retrieve it, you create a movie of it. You're not re-watching the movie you recorded.

You create the movie of it just the same as if I said, can you recall a football rolling down

the street? But the street has a carpet on it, it's a red carpet, and the

football has pink and purple spots. You know, you're creating that movie in your mind as if it's real. So

when your mind recalls conversations or recalls thoughts, it recreates it

it doesn't It doesn't play you a recording of it. It recreates it quite

badly, actually. And I did a podcast when I realised this. I stopped arguing with my sister and different people

because I used to argue, well, you did say that. And they go, no, I didn't. I say, yes, you

did. I heard you. Well, of course, I realised I was replaying what they said in my head, but I

wasn't replaying what they said. I was recreating what I thought they said. But

it sounded clear to me because I was recreating it in their voice, in their dialogue, in their dialect. So,

you know, when we recall information, we do it incredibly badly. But that's part of what the mind makes the

mind brilliant. That's why we're more creative. That's why we can do these things. You know, we never store

Everything absolute You

know, whenever we recall things Otherwise if we did record things absolute they make it easier for solicitors and everything

in court. But that's why they need several witnesses because our recollection of things is quite terrible

and it's fascinating the way the mind works? So that's my podcast for today. It's just how the mind works

and when you befriend the mind when you understand the mind that you have this really quick instinctual mind, just

how to protect you. Then you have the subconscious mind that just is a storehouse of fighting cabinets of what

you did last time. And then you have the human mind which is just that heart opening, conscious mind that

we need to spend more time in. You know, you know which mind you're playing, you're batting from. If you're

driving through five villages and you're not aware you did, you're batting from your subconscious mind. You

know, if you drop those buns or you lash out at someone without even thinking, literally without thinking, you know,

you're you're in your instinctual mind. But

if you're conscious and you're aware and you're open-hearted to how they're feeling and you're seeing things in real time

to what's happening right now, then you're conscious, you're here and you're present and there's so much less

anguish here and present. Just just right here now. There's nothing we have to do with this moment. Just listen

to the podcast. Head over to thankyousteven.com

thankyousteven.com just to help. If you want to donate to the show or leave a review if you can, that'd

be awesome. I'm Steven Webb and I'm your host of Stillness in the Storms. Take care guys. I love you

and speak to you next week.

Befriending Your Mind: The Secret to Inner Peace

In this episode

With gratitude to

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The transcript

In this episode

One calm email.
Every Sunday.

Befriending Your Mind: The Secret to Inner Peace

In this episode

With gratitude to

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The transcript

In this episode

More honest conversations

One calm email. Every Sunday.

One calm email.
Every Sunday.