In this short video, Jake Burhans explains that the subconscious mind governs roughly 95% of our behaviors, emotions, and reactions, functioning as an energy‑saving survival system. He uses the example of learning to drive to illustrate how repetitive actions become automatic, freeing conscious effort. Burhans then describes how conditioned emotional responses—such as automatically reacting with anger when provoked—are programmed into the subconscious before conscious awareness can intervene. He argues that attempting change solely with conscious will is like “swimming upstream” because the subconscious controls the majority of our actions. To reprogram the subconscious, he suggests deliberately feeding it new thoughts and emotions repeatedly, each acting as a “drop in the bucket” that builds a new identity and rewires the operating system of the mind.
Chapters
What is the subconscious mind? It's 95% of your behaviors, emotions, it's all automated. It's like a survival mechanism for efficiency. It's there to benefit you, but we just don't know how it works because it takes a lot of conscious brain power and willpower to consciously do things. Like if I have to get in the car and activate, okay, hand at 10, hand at 2, I can put my foot on the gas, I gotta put my foot on the brake, I gotta do this, that's a lot of mental energy. So as I learned how to drive, my body was just like, hey, we can take this, you don't need to consciously think about it anymore. That's why I can drive, you know, you can drive somewhere and not you can't even remember the last 10 minutes that you drove because your body has made that a subconscious program because it's trying to— it's like a physiological thing, it's a survival mechanism. So it's like, hey, we're trying to conserve energy and resources so you can go do what you need to do. But we don't know that we've been— we, we've programmed our subconscious for like survival. So the way that we have our subconscious programmed is someone says something at work that aggravates, aggravates us, and before we can even consciously respond, we're responding in anger because we've conditioned ourselves every time someone says something that aggravates us to respond in anger, right? So before our conscious mind can even think of what to do, we're responding like that. And that's our subconscious program. So trying to change your state of being with just your conscious mind alone is literally like swimming upstream. It is like, it's like trying to, it's so difficult. It's so freaking difficult because 95% of your automatic behaviors, emotional responses, everything is an automatic behavior. So you have to get into the operating system and actually change how you act. And you do that through every thought and emotion that you think is a drop in the bucket of the new identity, I say, right?
