Matt Cooke explains why overthinking blocks you: your conscious mind processes 40-50 bits per second, while your subconscious handles 11 million. Intuition and dreams are how your subconscious solves problems. Before sleep, set an intention about something complex, then let your dreaming mind work on it without analysis.
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Whatever dream you have right now, you have created that dream in the part of your brain that sits in your neocortex, your prefrontal cortex. It's like the CEO. It's your ability to make decisions, your ability to think about a future. It lives in your conscious brain. Now, the conscious brain, the neocortex, that, that layer on the top of your brain processes about 40 to 50 bits of information per second. Now, 95% of who you are is subconscious. Those are the two layers underneath the limbic brain and then the brainstem that sits underneath that. And that part of your brain, the subconscious, processes about 11 million bits of information per second. So what does that even mean? If you get a feeling, if you get intuition, if you have a dream that comes to you and tends to give you some form of guidance, you have to trust it. So many of us get caught up in our conscious mind trying to figure out how the thing that we want is going to manifest. The subconscious mind is working so much faster than the conscious mind. It's able to pick up information so much faster, meaning that when you put your intention out, when you send it out into this unconscious universal mind, data is going to be picked up from your subconscious. Now, your subconscious doesn't speak in the language that you're aware of here in your left brain, the voice in your head that's telling you. The subconscious is more feeling, it's more intuitive, it's holistic. Meaning that a lot of the time it doesn't make sense. And that's why when we do this work, you've got to become more like a detective. So if I'm personally ever struggling to surrender control or let go, or struggling to understand how a manifestation will come to fruition, I know that I'm trying to consciously figure it out, and it is not my job to do that consciously. So if you've read my book, you'll know that there's a specific technique that I learned from Jose Silva which is where you take a situation, a complex situation, and you use the dream state to try and solve it. Because when you, when you dream, you drop out of this analytical part of your brain, you're in the subconscious. It never sleeps, right? So when you fall asleep holding this intention of trying to solve this complex situation, it comes to you in your dreams. Remember that it is not your conscious job to try and solve it. It is always your subconscious, and it is always trying to communicate and tell you, trust me.
