Making Something Conscious

Exercise 1

Take a fairly simple unconscious action, like walking. Force yourself to perform it consciously. Life up one foot, balance, move the other foot, balance, put it down, balance, and shift your weight.

Repeat a few times. While you're doing this, notice how much attention you do or don't have to think about other things, like what you're going to have for breakfast tomorrow morning and where you went for your most recent vacation.

Exercise 2

Pick a situation you don't like your response to. It should be a situation you can reproduce at will, so situations involving another person are not ideal here; you can do those after you've practiced some more. Something like automatically eating when sitting in front of a candy jar would be well suited to this exercise. Note, however, that real addictions, such as smoking or drinking, are probably beyond handling in this way.

In order to stop your unconscious from handling the situation, you need to stop taking the same action every time the situation occurs. If you take one action sometimes, and another action other times, there will not be an automatic response for your unconscious to learn, and you will have the opportunity to make a conscious decision instead.

Thus, initiate the situation which produces the automatic response, but instead of taking the automatic response, do something completely different instead. It's better to do something different as opposed to merely not doing the usual thing. So perhaps in the candy bowl situation, you could respond by picking up the candy bowl and putting it away somewhere else. Do this several times, stopping to do other activities in between. You should find that when you're presented with the situation, your unconscious no longer acts automatically, because it is not sure which of the actions you sometimes take is the desired one.

Note that you should not, while practicing, think to yourself "Well, I'm going to do something different this time because I'm doing this exercise, but normally I'd just do the normal thing." This will teach your unconscious to do a new thing while you're thinking about doing the exercise, and to do the usual thing whenever you're not thinking about doing the exercise, and this is not the desired result.

Exercise 3

In this exercise, we're going to separate an unconscious activity which you might not even have realized could be separated. I'd like to use taste as an example. When you taste something, you probably like or dislike that taste. You may even have thought that the like or dislike is an inherent part of the taste, but this is not the case. You can learn to separate the actual taste from the liking or disliking, and consciously choose which reaction you will have.

This exercise is straightforward, but it is not easy. Expect it to take somewhere between one and two hours.

First, select a healthy food that you don't like the taste of, but wish you did. Now, you'll need to imagine the taste of that food without also imagining the dislike. This will be difficult at first. You may want to take deliberate advantage of the limitation on the number of things your conscious mind can hold. Imagine the taste of the food, and simultaneously imagine as many other unrelated things as will fit in your mind, ensuring that there isn't "room" for the dislike to enter.

Once you're comfortable imagining the taste of the food without any like or dislike, you'll need to learn how to imagine the liking without any specific food. Start by imagining one or a few foods that you like, and get a good idea of what the liking itself feels like. Then, concentrate on the feeling of liking and the feeling of "good" taste. If any specific tastes come to mind, don't try to force them out; just ignore them and go back to thinking of the "good" taste. Alternatively, you may wish to try to consider so many different specific tastes at once that none of them have much effect.

For the final step, you'll want to combine the previous two steps. Imagine the new food, and simultaneously imagine what it feels like to enjoy a food. Concentrate on that for a little while... then go eat some, and notice how you enjoy it.