麻豆传媒

Almost all the brain鈥檚 activity happens below the level of consciousness. Your unconscious has many vital functions听鈥� from controlling breathing to processing incoming information 鈥� but there are also a few glitches. Tweak these听and you can make the system work better for you.

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Conscious vs Unconscious

Most unconscious thinking happens deep within the brain, while conscious thoughts tend to occur at the surface

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Bad habits and how to break them

As much as 40 per cent of our daily behaviour is habitual. This can be very useful. For example, while your unconscious is busy driving to work, your conscious mind is free to focus on something else.

Automated behaviours are grouped into distinct routines, or 鈥渃hunks鈥� 鈥� having a cigarette when drinking coffee, perhaps 鈥� making bad habits hard to break.

To reprogram your unconscious, you must first derail the existing problematic habit. If you always reach for a snack when you walk into the kitchen, for example, move the snacks so that they are out of easy reach.

Use prominent cues to trigger a more desirable habit. So, to replace snacking with fruit eating, buy a different fruit bowl and put it in a new, easily accessible position in your kitchen.

Repetition is the key. It can take anywhere between 15 and 254 days to form a new habit.

As well as cues, contexts trigger habitual behaviours, so try breaking a bad habit while away from your normal environment. Quit smoking while on holiday, for instance 鈥� but be careful not to let your good habits slip too.

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Know your biases

biases influence much of your thinking and decision-making. They evolved to help our ancestors act fast and effectively, but these days they often trip us up. Knowing how cognitive biases shape your thinking is the first step to consciously controlling them. Here are some to look out for:

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Anchoring听鈥撎�Focusing on one factor, often the first encountered, when making a decision

Clustering illusion 鈥撎�Seeing phantom patterns in random events

Confirmation bias 鈥撎�Preferentially seeking and recalling information that confirms your preconceptions

Congruence bias 鈥撎�Testing ideas by seeking evidence that supports rather than refutes them

Endowment effect 鈥撎�Valuing things more highly simply because they belong to听you

Fundamental attribution error 鈥撎�Attributing people鈥檚 behaviours to their personality, not the situation

Gambler鈥檚 fallacy 鈥撎�Believing that past random events alter the likelihood of future ones

Hyperbolic discounting 鈥撎�Overvaluing what鈥檚 available now relative to what you can have later

In-group bias 鈥撎�Overestimating the abilities and values of your own group relative to others

Negativity bias 鈥撎�Paying more attention to bad news and feedback than good

Projection bias 鈥撎�Assuming that most people think like you and hold the same听beliefs

Status quo bias 鈥撎�Favouring decisions that will leave things just as they are

In addition, we all have our own implicit biases: prejudices about things like race and gender that affect our judgements of others. Discover yours at

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Five ways to game your unconscious

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1. Take a hot bath

If you鈥檙e feeling lonely, a hot bath may make you feel better. Why? Research reveals that . Conversely, holding an ice pack can make you feel lonelier.

2. Think yourself full

Looking at pictures of particular foods . Similarly, spending just a minute imagining that you are full .

3. Smell something fishy

It 鈥渟mells fishy鈥� is a metaphor for distrust in more than 20 languages. Intriguingly, , perhaps because unconscious vigilance for rotten fish makes us more wary in general.

4. Get your house in order

Crime rates are famously linked with broken windows, litter and graffiti. But . Such visual disorder may activate mental metaphors such as 鈥渃rooked politician鈥�, which affect behaviour.

5. Don鈥檛 be deceived

We are surprisingly bad at consciously spotting liars, partly because we look for behaviours, such as fidgeting and averted eyes, which don鈥檛 actually signal deception. To avoid being duped, it is better to trust your intuition, since we do have an unconscious sense of who is lying to us.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淟ifting the lid on the unconscious鈥�