The Neuroscience of Your Subconscious Mind:
How Beliefs Actually Work
You've probably heard the term "subconscious mind" thrown around in self-help circles. But what does it actually mean? And more importantly—how does understanding it change everything about how you approach personal transformation?
Let me break down the actual neuroscience, because it's way more interesting (and actionable) than the woo-woo version.
What the Subconscious Mind Actually Is
Your subconscious mind isn't some mystical entity separate from your brain. It's a functional aspect of how your brain processes and stores information.
Think of it this way: your brain is constantly processing millions of pieces of information. Most of that processing happens without your conscious awareness. Your heart beats, your lungs breathe, you recognize your friend's face—all without you consciously thinking about it.
This is your subconscious at work.
Research in neuroscience suggests that up to 95% of human behavior is driven by subconscious processes. That's not magic. That's just how your nervous system is designed to work efficiently. Your conscious mind can only handle a limited amount of information at a time, so your brain automates the rest.
Your self-concept—who you believe you are—runs almost entirely on this automatic system. It's programmed through years of experiences, messages from authority figures, trauma, success, repetition, and emotional significance. Once it's in there, it operates like an app running in the background, filtering what you notice, how you interpret situations, and what actions feel natural to you.
How Your Brain Actually Learns
Neuroscientist Eric Kandel made an important distinction between two types of memory that help explain how your self-concept operates:
Implicit Memory (bottom-up learning): This is acquired involuntarily, through exposure and repetition. It creates automatic responses. You don't consciously decide to ride a bike—your body just does it. You don't consciously decide to think "I'm not good enough"—you just automatically think it because you've heard it so many times.
Explicit Memory (top-down learning): This requires conscious attention and intention. It's registered in your hippocampus through deliberate focus. This is where willpower comes in—when you consciously choose to learn something new.
Here's the problem: Most people try to change their self-concept using only explicit (conscious) methods—willpower, positive thinking, affirmations. But your self-concept was built through implicit (unconscious) learning. You can't override years of unconscious programming with conscious willpower alone. You need to rewire at the same level it was programmed.
This is why mirror work works. You're speaking directly to the implicit system, not trying to argue with it consciously.
Your Self-Concept as a Neural Network
Recent neuroscience research has revealed something fascinating about how your brain organizes your self-concept: it's structured as an interconnected network.
A 2023 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience by Elder, Davis, and Hughes looked at how people update their self-beliefs based on feedback. What they found is that the brain doesn't update individual beliefs in isolation. Instead, it treats your self-concept as a network where beliefs are connected to each other.
When you receive feedback about one trait (say, someone tells you you're not capable), your brain processes how that feeds into your entire self-network. If "not capable" connects to "not worthy," which connects to "don't deserve success," then one piece of negative feedback can ripple through your whole system.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—the region central to self-referential thinking—is what orchestrates this. And importantly, the brain resists changing deeply connected beliefs more than surface-level ones. Why? Because changing one belief in a tightly connected network threatens the whole system.
What this means for identity shift: You can't just change one belief and expect it to stick. You need to rewire the entire network. You need to shift how all your beliefs connect and relate to each other. This is why The Identity Shift Method teaches you to reverse-engineer the entire identity system (how they think, speak, move, decide)—not just to change one affirmation.
Neuroplasticity: The Brain's Ability to Rewire
Here's the good news: your brain isn't fixed. This is called neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections in response to learning, experience, or even injury.
When you practice something repeatedly, you literally create new neural pathways. The more you practice, the stronger those pathways become. Eventually, what required conscious effort becomes automatic.
Research on neuroplasticity shows that this happens through:
Synaptic Plasticity: When you repeat an action or thought, the connections between neurons (synapses) strengthen. This is the physical basis of learning. Repeated activation of neural pathways makes them "stick."
Structural Changes: With sustained practice, your brain actually undergoes structural changes. The regions involved in that practice can expand. London taxi drivers, for example, who spend years memorizing complex city routes, show measurable enlargement in the hippocampus—the region responsible for spatial memory.
The famous saying "neurons that fire together, wire together" (Hebbian learning) captures this perfectly. Your repeated thoughts, behaviors, and emotional states are literally wiring your brain.
The 66-Day Rule: Research has shown it takes an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. Some people take 18 days, some take 254 days—it depends on complexity and individual variation. But the point is: consistency over time creates permanent change at the neural level.
This is why The Identity Shift Method is 21 days of daily practice. You're not expecting to be "done" in 21 days. You're establishing the neural pathways. The real embodiment happens in months 2-3 when those pathways have strengthened enough to become truly automatic.
How Subliminals and Mirror Work Access the Subconscious
Now that you understand how your brain works, here's why certain tools are so effective:
Mirror Work: Direct eye contact with yourself activates the neural pathways associated with self-referential processing. You're not imagining or hoping—you're literally seeing yourself. Your nervous system registers this as real. When you speak to yourself in the mirror, you're sending new information directly to the implicit system that programmed your current self-concept.
The two-part approach (relational foundation + identity directives) works because:
Part 1 creates nervous system safety (so your subconscious feels secure enough to change)
Part 2 plants new neural seeds (the new identity beliefs)
Subliminals: These work by delivering information below the threshold of conscious awareness. Your conscious mind—which might argue with "I trust myself"—isn't in the way. The message goes directly to the implicit system. Paired with repetition (listening daily), this creates new neural pathways through the same mechanism as any repeated thought or behavior.
EFT Tapping: This combines somatic (body-based) stimulation with new cognitive information. The tapping engages the nervous system in a way that can help reset threat responses and create openness to new beliefs. Combined with spoken affirmations, it's encoding new information at both the nervous system level and the cognitive level.
None of this is magic. It's applied neuroscience.
The Bottom Line: Your Self-Concept Is Programmable
Your self-concept isn't some fixed truth about who you are. It's a neural program that was installed through repetition, emotion, and experience. And like any program, it can be updated.
But you can't update it using the same method you used to install the old one. If your limiting self-concept was built through implicit learning (unconscious repetition and emotional experiences), you need to reprogram it at that same level.
This is why simple willpower and positive thinking often fail. You're trying to use conscious methods to override unconscious programming.
Mirror work, subliminals, EFT tapping, and deliberate behavioral practice? These are tools that actually reach the implicit system. They speak the language your subconscious understands.
You don't need to understand all of this neuroscience to make changes. But understanding it? It gives you permission to stop fighting yourself and start working with how your brain actually works.
Your subconscious isn't your enemy. It's just running an old program. And now you know exactly how to rewrite it.
References
Elder, J. J., Davis, T., & Hughes, B. L. (2023). A Fluid Self-Concept: How the Brain Maintains Coherence and Positivity across an Interconnected Self-Concept While Incorporating Social Feedback. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(22), 4110-4128. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1951-22.2023
Kandel, E. R. (1998). A new intellectual framework for psychiatry. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 155(4), 457-469.
Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.
Pascual-Leone, A., Amedi, A., Fregni, F., & Merabet, L. B. (2005). The Plastic Human Brain Cortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 28, 377-401.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
Walsh, M. (2020). Embodied Cognition and the Teaching-Learning Process. Lecture presented at the Embodiment Conference.