How Your Unconscious Mind Guides Your Behavior Every Day

Raise your hand if the concept of the unconscious mind brings to mind a cartoon iceberg, showing 10 percent of its mass above water shining brightly in the sun, and 90 percent underwater, dark, gloomy, and mysterious—something you probably saw in your Psych 101 textbook.

Some people consider the unconscious a discredited notion, a fusty old concept associated with Sigmund Freud, his Viennese couch, and his cigars—something people once believed could only be reached through dreams or fantasies. But no! The unconscious mind is alive and well in each of us, and has powerful effects on our everyday functioning.

Our emotions, our memories, and even the way we see ourselves (and those who are dear to us) are deeply influenced by unconscious beliefs and feelings. These effects have been studied extensively over the past few decades, offering plenty of evidence for the power of the unconscious mind.

Take emotions, for instance. It’s not hard to understand how your feelings can be affected by unconscious beliefs and desires; it’s face valid, as a social scientist might say. (Perhaps you’re romantically interested in someone you believe you shouldn’t want to be with—a conflict that can generate a lot of frustrated energy.)

In fact, every school of thought in the field of psychotherapy—from psychoanalysis to CBT to relational treatment—is premised in large part on the notion that your past experiences will influence the present. (To say it another way, the way you feel now is filtered through your expectations, which are derived from your previous experiences.)

In psychoanalysis, as Jonathan Shedler, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UCSF says, feelings and conflicts from the past can be retained and can “leak out” into the present (Shedler, 2022). “Conflicts involving anger are… commonplace,” Shedler writes. “Some people, especially those with a certain kind of depressive personality, seem unable to acknowledge or express anger toward others but instead treat themselves in punitive and self-destructive ways.”

Personally, I saw this in a former patient, T, a woman with obsessive-compulsive disorder: She repeatedly worried over, checked, and re-checked the leftovers in her family refrigerator. T’s main concern, which came out as therapy progressed, was her chronic worry that her mother’s food had been poisoned, to which she responded by checking the food for any such poison. But in so doing, T became concerned that she might have accidentally put poison in the food herself… which motivated her to go back and check it again.

Beneath her worry, T acknowledged, was the anger she felt toward her mother, which caused T to fantasize about getting revenge with poison and to cover those fantasies with an act ostensibly undertaken to save her mother’s life. T’s compulsive symptoms, as I saw it, represented a defense against her own disavowed anger.

Unconscious knowledge and beliefs can also affect the way you see yourself and the other people around you. Neuroscientists might put this in the context of conceptual activation—which is to say, the notion that within your “neural network,” two different but similar ideas can be lightly activated by each other.

Drew Westen, professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, puts it this way: “When we attend to something, our brain simply enhances activation of the same… circuits that represent information that is peripheral to consciousness or even outside of awareness.” Practically speaking, this is the neural mechanism through which new people are experienced through the lens of your memories of people from the past.

Likewise, I saw this effect play out in my own private practice: M, an adult male patient who argued frequently with his romantic partner, told me that his father had abandoned his family when he was a teen. His feelings of betrayal pervaded many of his relationships, and they intruded into our therapy as well: When M cancelled a session just hours before it was scheduled to begin, I urged him to come in to see me later in the day, and told him that I’d have to assess my late-cancellation fee if he did not do that.

M became enraged, accusing me of using him only for the sake of profit and fully discounting our long working relationship. When I told him that the fee that his particular insurance company would pay me for our session was actually less than my standard late-cancellation fee, he stopped mid-rant. The reality of our work together no longer matched the assumptions about human relationships that he’d drawn from his tragic personal experience, and it was difficult for him to see me in a new light.

Unconscious processes can also affect what you remember and how you remember it. Quite often it is possible for one’s memory to record knowledge or experience while leaving no conscious trace of having done so.

People suffering from prosopagnosia—who have lost the ability to recognize different faces—“nevertheless produce differential electrophysiological responses to familiar versus unfamiliar faces” (Bruyer, 1991). And experiments with people whose brains are damaged in the hippocampal region—a part of the brain utilized in creating new memories—suggest that people whose memories are impaired, and who cannot remember events in their own histories, can still somehow retain the emotional significance of those events.

The well-known and well-studied amnesiac Henry Molaison (often referred to as “H.M.”), became unable to form new memories after brain surgery in 1953. After visiting his mother in the hospital, Molaison remembered nothing of the visit, but “was nevertheless able to feel in some vague way that something had happened to his mother.”

He could also learn to carry out new tasks (using procedural memory, which is said to be distinct from the autobiographical memories that Molaison could not make), like writing words upside-down and backward. Although Molaison was able to learn to do this through regular practice, Westen said in 1999 a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group, “he had no idea that he had ever seen the task before.”

Even without priming, though, a basic understanding of the unconscious and its effects on human behavior can lead to a new, more fruitful perspective. It’s not always possible to be aware of the influence of the past on your present-day feelings and decisions, but it’s important to acknowledge that this influence is there and that it can run deep.

I’ll close with a telling anecdote about a 1996 study of college students, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, entitled “Positive Illusions About the Self.” It’s probably not too difficult to think of someone suffering from excessively positive illusions in that way; what this experiment suggested was that these people might be unconsciously using these illusions to defend against inner self-doubt.

In the study, Richard Robins and Jennifer S. Beer gathered a large number of first-year college students, matched them according to grades and standardized test scores, and separated out the students who were prone to self-aggrandizement of their academic skills and artificially heightened expectations of their college performance. After two years in school, these self-enhancing students were no more pleased with their performance than the other, more realistic group—but they were 32 percent more likely to have dropped out of college entirely. Unconsciously, perhaps, they had always suspected that their abilities wouldn’t hold up in a college environment, but instead of acknowledging their fears and seeking assistance, they defensively overstated them.

All of us, then, can learn from the example of these students: Understanding the influence of our unconscious minds can offer useful and important information about ourselves, and we ignore this information at our own risk.