Your Greatest Tool for Getting Lean… and Why You Aren’t Using It

A mere 8% of an iceberg is visible above water, while a whopping 92% remains submerged in the frigid depths.

Similarly, the human mind is made of two components, one smaller but more “visible,” the other larger but more “hidden.” These are better known as the conscious and unconscious mind, respectively.

Most modern health and fitness advice focuses on using only your conscious mind to lose fat and build muscle, all the while neglecting the inexhaustible ability of your unconscious mind, your greatest tool for getting into amazing shape.

And no, this ain’t some kinda Eastern thing. Far from it, Dude.

The Ass-Kicking Unconscious Mind

The theory of the existence of an unconscious mind, toiling away day and night on tasks too immense and complex for the conscious mind, has existed in many cultures since antiquity.

More recently, renowned psychiatrists such as Freud, Jung, and Lacan have all spent a considerable amount of time and energy fleshing out this paradigm in more detail, and we can use their findings to create far more leverage in our quest to get fit and healthy than those who ignore it.

	Unconscious Mind	Conscious Mind
Size	Immense	Tiny
Function	Innate Drives and Environmental Conditioning	Willpower
Specialties	Physical and Emotional	Mental and Spiritual
Action Style	Reactive	Proactive

The reason the unconscious mind is said to be so large in relation to the conscious mind is that the latter is severely restricted in how many things it can do at once. You might have heard that you can only hold seven things in your consciousness at once, but recent evidence suggests that number may be closer to four. (I know that I, for one, can hardly walk and chew gum at the same time.)

In contrast, the unconscious is carrying out an unfathomable amount of tasks at any given moment. From respiration, body-temperature regulation, and blinking all the way down to food metabolism, muscle repair, and cell division. It reacts to cues in the environment, rather than being proactive like with conscious actions.

In short, you are doing many complex things unconsciously all the time, with no effort at all on your part.

How to Make Difficult Things Easy

But unconscious actions aren’t just the physiological ones we are “hard-wired” with from birth. They can also come from environmental conditioning. Put simply, conscious actions can become unconscious if they are repeated, and/or if they are your only option in a given scenario.

For example, do you ever let your mind wander when you are driving, walking, or biking to the same destination you have been going to for weeks, months, or even years? You leave the house and next thing you know you are at work or school, having never put any conscious effort into getting there. Your feet automatically moved you down the sidewalk. Your arms and legs deftly maneuvered your car along the streets.

But when you change your routine and go somewhere new, it’s a completely different story. You become completely engaged in getting there mentally, keeping the stereo down low, hunting around left and right, weaving through traffic to make a turn at the right intersection.

In other words, it takes up much more of your willpower to do something new than it does to rely on old habits.

Eat Less and Exercise More – Perfect in Theory, Disastrous in Practice

All health advice to “eat less and exercise more” is a recommendation to use your conscious mind to declare war on your unconscious mind, by definition. Drives such as hunger and laziness are your body’s attempt to keep you at a certain body composition, whether you want to be there or not.

And since the physical and emotional needs of the unconscious take precedence, from a survival and reproduction standpoint, over the mental and spiritual needs of the conscious mind, consciously cutting calories is unsustainable and will always fail as a long-term solution. (Again, look at what happened to the participants of The Minnesota Starvation Experiment.)

Now, this stuff may seem very “Ivory Tower” to you, but look around at how many people you know are able to stay on a restrictive diet and exercise plan long-term, compared to those who simply crash and burn soon after they start each new regimen, and I think you’ll agree that the people using up all their willpower are those who are failing the most.

As I’ll explain in my next post, the best skill you can have in your quest to get lean, strong, and attractive is making your unconscious mind, rather than your conscious mind, do most of the work, similar to the way you “automatically” drive to work every morning.

Tagged as: consciousness, psychology