Jake Burhans argues that 95% of our daily actions run on subconscious patterns built from a lifetime of stress and urgency. Even on vacation, your body stays wired for anxiety. He explains how to rewire these habits through deliberate relaxation practice, using the principle that neurons firing together wire together.
You ever wonder why you can't relax on vacation? Like, you get to the vacation, you've been thinking about it for weeks, for months, for years. Oh my God, it's gonna be so good when I get to this vacation. You sit down by the pool for 5 minutes, and then what are you doing? You're pulling out your phone, checking your email, you're getting back on your laptop, you got to do this, you got to do that. You literally can't sit still. Why? Because you have trained your body, which is the subconscious mind. The body is the subconscious mind. You ever hear the subconscious mind? That's actually your body. You've trained it to operate in ways before your conscious mind even comes online. For example, driving a car. How can you drive a car down the highway for 30 minutes and not even be thinking about the road? 'Cause your body knows how to do that. The same way you have trained your body to run around in urgency and fear and stress and anxiety. So that's all it knows. Subconsciously, it does that all day long. Your subconscious behaviors run 95% of your actions every single day. So you can tell yourself, oh, I'm gonna relax. And the second you stop consciously thinking about it, what happens? Your subconscious patterning kicks in. So we need to understand how to rewire that subconscious conditioning and familiarize it with actually being relaxed and being at peace. And when you familiarize the body, the subconscious mind with these states of being, you begin to hardwire yourself, right? Neurons that fire together wire together. So the more that you act in a new way, soon you create new neural connections and the new way of being becomes more familiar than the old way. And that's when you create lasting change.
