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  • Writer's pictureamelton

The Unconscious Mind

Updated: Jun 22, 2018

The unconscious mind is considered "thinking without thinking".



The unconscious mind is our thoughts we do not know we are having or are having at times. Sometimes experiences are stored away in the unconscious mind until they are needed. There is research that shows that our unconscious mind shapes our day-to-day interactions. We react to stressful situations or people sometimes with our unconscious mind. People make judgements of others with the unconscious mind because people assume others should act a certain way and automatically if they are not then they think badly of them. This is called reflexive reaction. Controlling our thoughts and directing the unconscious toward positive sides can be very hard especially if you are stressed. The unconscious mind also affects the behavior of people. This is why people do not understand how they are acting sometimes because the unconscious mind has taken over.


There is a book called "Blink", it is a book of eight stories that speaks about how stress affects the unconscious mind an why people do the things they do because of it. This is a really great book of scenarios that the reader can understand stress and the unconscious mind in life situations. I recommend reading this book if you are curious about the unconscious mind and real life situations.


 


Experimental studies


There is a research study that is called "Mind over Matter". This study is conducted to see how the mind and body react to stressful situations. The research was given to fifty people, twenty five each, and evaluated in different stressful situations to see how the cognitive responses reacted. One of the stressful situations that is used is public speaking. (If anyone is like me, public speaking is very stressful). They monitored their heart rate and emotional facial responses to the stressful situation. During the experiment the people were monitored at all times to check on their status of stress. There were other situations added to the different groups to show increased stress while being monitored. The results were fascinating. The people that demonstrated more adaptive physiological responses also had reduced stressful threat.


If you would like to read about another great study the name of it is "Increased neural responses to empath for pain might explain how acute stress increases prosociality". This study was very interesting as well but a little lengthy for this webpage. You can find this at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5465825




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