Caroline Cavanagh explains how your subconscious mind operates only in the present moment and can't tell the difference between real threats and imagined ones, treating your anxious thoughts as immediate danger. Hypnotherapy works by quieting your conscious mind so you can reprogram what triggers your subconscious survival response.
Chapters
So our minds are in 2 parts. Front part of the brain here is the bit we call the conscious mind. It's rational, logical, deductive. Also has the ability to go out into the past or out into the future. But back here is the part of the brain we call the subconscious, which is irrational, illogical, immature, and only works in the now. And that's the part that primarily still makes us cavemen. And it's the part that's the strongest of all. That part of the brain, the subconscious, its primary role is survival. It's doing all the things we don't think about, like it's making your heartbeat, it's making you breathe, although you're probably now thinking about breathing because your conscious mind went, oh yeah, I know I can do that. And it's also looking for any form of risk. And it's like we all have this big radar that's searching for risk, and if that radar pings, It bypasses the conscious mind and goes straight to the subconscious for a solution in that moment, which is brilliant if you've got a saber-toothed tiger in front of you because you need to be able to either run away or fight it like cavemen did. But the slight deficit in how this biology works is the subconscious can't tell the difference between reality or imagination. So if this part is thinking about something that's already happened isn't real, something that hasn't yet happened, may happen, may never happen, it will still treat it as if it's in the now. And so that's where hypnotherapy really comes in very well. It gets the sub— it gets the conscious mind just to quieten down so we can work directly with the subconscious to see what it's responding to, which typically are just thoughts.
