Let’s talk about the mind

The mind is generally defined as the set of non-physical, cognitive, and emotional faculties that enable an individual to think, feel, perceive, and experience consciousness. While the brain is the physical organ (hardware), the mind is often described as the subjective "software" or the manifestation of the brain's activity. You can use this link to learn and read more about the mind.

The mind has three categories:

1. Conscious: This is the part that we have greater control over. The conscious mind is used in active thinking, rationalising, and decision-making.

2. Subconscious: This is the part that we have very minimal control over. It is the part that controls habits, retrieves memories and triggers automatic reactions.

3. Unconscious: This part of the mind is where we have no control. This is where our deep-seated traumas are stored. It is also where our “instincts” are stored.

I am not an expert in psychology or neurology, so please, do your own research and let me know if some of the things here are untrue or incorrect.

What is the subconscious?

I like to think of the subconscious as doing most of the work behind the scenes, constantly learning from what we consume, even when we are not trying to teach it anything.

The subconscious mind refers to the part of your mental processing that occurs just below the threshold of conscious awareness. While you are not actively focusing on these thoughts or processes, they remain accessible and continue to influence your behaviour, habits, and emotional responses.

Sources of data for the subconscious

Some of the sources of data that are being fed to the mind include:

• Sensory Input: Our five sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin) are a major source for data being fed into the subconscious. Everything you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste gets logged somewhere, even when you’re not paying attention. Your brain is always taking notes of all the background music, street noise, lighting, and body language.

• Language and repetition: They say whatever you do repeatedly over time becomes a habit. The words you hear too often register in your mind, even if you do not understand what is being said. Funny thing is, you might find yourself saying these words without even knowing the true meaning of what is being said. Repetition is basically the subconscious’s favourite learning method. It’s why slogans work and why habits stick.

• Emotional experiences: Your first heartbreak usually shapes your mindset towards relationships. The first man or woman who hurt you builds some crazy mindset about other men and women within you, and this makes you form untrue opinions about people because your mind has subconsciously registered that emotion. Moments with strong emotions (joy, fear, embarrassment, pride) leave deep impressions. The subconscious is less interested in facts and more interested in how something made you feel.

• Social and cultural norms: There was a question I asked myself some years back, “If I weren’t born into the Yoruba culture, would I ever want to be Yoruba?” and you can take it to different aspects of your life. If your religion did not say that something is a sin, would you enjoy doing such things? People say that “the RCCG church in Abule-egba practices a different religion from the one in Houston”. Have you ever wondered why that is? Family behaviour, peer interactions, cultural expectations, online communities, all these shape beliefs about what’s “normal,” “acceptable,” or “possible,” usually without explicit instruction.

• Media and environment: This, for me, was my biggest concern when I decided to have some control over my subconscious. I realised that I was forming ideologies based on my environment and the things I read somewhere or even watched somewhere. I’ll give a scenario: If you see a post on Twitter, you would read it without bias and even laugh, but when you come back to the tweet (after it has garnered enough interactions), you realise that you would see that tweet in a different light, and slowly, you start to read every other tweet from that lens. We are in a generation where access to information is so easy, and while that could be an advantage for us, it is a big disadvantage to our subconscious because it now makes decision-making difficult. Movies, music, social media feeds, news, games, and even the physical spaces you spend time in all provide patterns and narratives the subconscious absorbs and uses to make sense of the world.

Training the subconscious

As already established, we have limited control over our subconscious. So, if we cannot control the subconscious, then there must be something that we could do to make sure we have a healthy subconscious mind. The sources of data that feed the subconscious are one place to start from.

1. Leverage “Theta” States: The subconscious is most receptive when the brain is in a theta wave state. This state naturally occurs just as you are falling asleep or immediately after you wake up. Understanding this, you can employ methods like mental visualisation of desired outcomes, listening to positive affirmations, and visualising a specific goal, engaging your five senses. Your subconscious cannot easily differentiate between a real event and a vividly imagined event.

2. High-Frequency Repetition and Affirmations: As I said earlier, the subconscious learns through consistent repetition over time. Now, we need to learn how to make positive affirmations. I am sure, if you can view my WhatsApp status, that you noticed I had my daily affirmations for 2025 posted every morning. It is usually the first thing that goes to my status whenever I wake up. Practising positive affirmations involves:

   1. Present-Tense Affirmations: Use statements like “I am…” rather than “I will be…”. This is a trick I learnt sometime in 2020/2021, and it has worked (like magic)

   2. Emotional Weight: Logic alone rarely moves the subconscious; thoughts must be backed by genuine emotions such as gratitude and desire (not regrets, please) to be effectively registered in the mind.

   3. Mirror Work: This, for me, is like magic. You know, when you watch those Nollywood movies that have wickedness involved, and then they call the spirit of the person from a mirror? We often think these things are just tales by moonlight, but the truth of the matter is that, if these things can be used for evil, then they can be used for good, too. Speak three empowering statements while looking yourself in the eyes (you also have to mean it). This combines verbal, visual and emotional elements for deeper impact.

3. Cognitive Reframing: Training your subconscious often requires uprooting existing negative programs. When you notice a negative thought spiral, use a physical reset cue like snapping your fingers to break the automatic loop and consciously choose a new thought. It is not going to be easy, but you have to give it a try. Challenge your automatic negative thoughts by looking for objective evidence that contradicts those thoughts. Finally, whenever a harmful thought arises, mentally visualise pressing a “delete” button or smashing the thought to reinforce its removal from your mind.

4. Environmental and Lifestyle Prime: This is one technique that works 100% of the time but is underestimated. Take advantage of what I call “Visual Anchors”. We often think we can keep data in our heads and not forget, but we are only weakening the subconscious mind by doing that. Place reminders (post-it notes, vision boards, desktop or phone wallpapers) in your environment. They provide constant passive data for your subconscious to process throughout the day. My current phone wallpaper is my beautiful wife because I want to remind my subconscious that she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. Take part in aerobic exercises and sleep well. Allow your brain some rest.

5. Active Persistence: Ever heard of the 90-day rule? Most researchers suggest that significant rewiring of the subconscious requires consistent daily practice for 90 days to turn a new path into a habit. When people talk about consistency, the 90-day rule is usually one of the most talked about approaches. Also, you need to celebrate small wins. Celebrate minor achievements daily. This trains your subconscious to scan for and recognise success patterns rather than failure patterns. The small positive thinking in the face of a negative situation is a win worth celebrating.

If there is one quiet truth worth sitting with, it is this: your subconscious is always listening, even when you are not speaking on purpose. It listens when you scroll without thinking. It listens when you repeat the same thought again and again. It listens when you laugh something off that actually stayed with you. It is always there in the background, paying attention, learning from whatever you consistently expose it to. This does not need to feel scary. If anything, it should feel grounding.

We often believe change begins with big moments and dramatic decisions. But the subconscious does not respond to big speeches or sudden promises. It responds to patterns. It learns from what shows up regularly, not from what shows up once with good intentions. Over time, it builds beliefs from small, repeated signals: the tone of conversations around you, the media you consume, the environments you spend time in, and the way you talk to yourself when no one else is listening.

Because this process is quiet, it is easy to miss. We assume we are fully in charge of our thoughts, while overlooking the influences shaping them long before they become conscious. By the time a belief feels obvious or fixed, it has usually been practised many times beneath the surface.

Awareness changes that. When you realise your subconscious is listening, you start to move with a little more care. You become more selective about what you consume repeatedly. You notice the stories you tell yourself on autopilot. You pay attention to habits and environments you once treated as harmless, even though they were shaping you all along. This is not about controlling every thought or living perfectly. It is about choosing direction instead of drifting.

You do not need to police your mind. That is exhausting and unrealistic. What matters more are small, steady choices. What do you watch most days? What do you listen to often? What do you allow to repeat without question? Over time, these things add up. The subconscious learns slowly, but it learns deeply. It also does not understand jokes, sarcasm, or disclaimers. It does not filter information based on your intentions. It absorbs what is repeated and emotionally charged. That means what you tolerate, what you normalise, and what you revisit again and again all matter more than you might expect.

So if your subconscious is listening, what kind of conversation is it overhearing? What patterns are quietly being reinforced? What beliefs are being formed through repetition rather than choice? You do not need all the answers. You just need to remember that learning is always happening. Because long before change shows up in your life, it shows up in what feels familiar. And familiarity is the language your subconscious understands best.

For many websites, plain HTML, CSS, and a sprinkle of JavaScript already do the job. They load faster, break less, and come with accessibility baked in by default. This isn’t a call to abandon frameworks altogether. It’s a reminder to choose simplicity when it’s enough, and complexity only when it earns its keep, and I think that starts with being able to tell the difference between a website and a web app.

Many of us are fond of frameworks, so we forget to keep things simple. A simple landing page doesn’t need the overhead of React and its node_modules. I’m not going to lie, it’s fun having a simple page application (SPA) for your apps, but fundamentally, we do not overdo simple things like building a website.

Starting as a developer, one of the key principles I learnt was K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid), but I mostly applied it to the code I wrote. As a software engineer, I have begun to take that beyond just written code into architectural design (though I still struggle a bit because I want to create “scalable” systems).

Building my portfolio website is something I put off for way too long. I always knew I wanted one, but I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted it to be. I looked at countless designs, case studies, and ideas from others, but none of them really clicked with me.

I even had a version designed by my friend, Ibukun. It’s still sitting rent-free in my Figma account 😂. It’s genuinely beautiful, but for some reason, it still wasn’t enough to push me into writing code or even paying for a domain name.

On Thursday, I came across a simple personal website and found the motivation I needed. I spun up a new React project with Vite, and to my greatest surprise, a whole lot had changed in the frontend world. I mean, I was updated to the point of knowing that create-react-app was obsolete, but why didn't anyone tell me that Vite now uses a different command? I wasn’t even informed that React Router was a bit different, either, and that installing Tailwind and running npx tailwind init were no longer necessary with Vite.

This just showed me that frameworks will always change, even when trying to achieve the simple task of rendering a website. Anyways, I was able to build my “simple” website, and I absolutely love it 🥰, but I still felt it was an overkill.

Then Friday came, and I came across a talk by my friend (Jemima Abu) titled I Can't Believe It's Not JavaScript!, which she delivered in Japan, where she talked about doing some fantastic stuff with just HTML and CSS. It was amazing because many of the things we needed JavaScript for could now be done with just HTML and CSS. You should check it out, plus Jemima is a really fantastic frontend developer.

You know that moment when you watch a motivational video on YouTube and suddenly start questioning all your life choices? That was me after watching Jemima’s talk.

I found myself asking: How much have I missed since I went knee-deep in servers and quietly neglected accessible HTML? What’s changed since I stopped being a full-time frontend engineer? Can I still build things without leaning on frameworks?

Those questions stuck with me, and the answer felt obvious… it was time to go back to basics. Back to learning (and relearning) HTML and CSS.

These days, we focus more on a website's functionality than on its accessibility. And, to be fair, I was guilty of this, too. I had forgotten about all that and got stuck in my head with over-engineering and “building scalable web applications”.

I decided to return to building websites without frameworks — really leaning into the basics again and reminding myself what the web can do on its own. Over the past weekend, I put that into practice by helping a friend (Joshua Chinaecherem Nnamani) build a simple website, without reaching for a framework once. You can check out the website here. The goal was to keep things relatively simple, yet do them well.

That somehow turned into over 10 hours split across a Google Meet, a WhatsApp call, and a “code with me” session in JetBrains WebStorm. Honestly, it was a lot of fun. Everything we did was refreshingly traditional, right down to deploying the site on cPanel 😂.

This was as simple as we wanted it to be, and we were delighted with it. Of course, there were a few bugs which are yet to be fixed (at the time of writing this post), but at least it was a fun one.

Now, don’t get me wrong, frameworks are lovely and amazing. They have made building complex web applications much easier with less code (even though there’s so much code to write) compared to having to create the same web applications with vanilla JS. Still, we must keep things really simple for the sake of the web.

Accessibility is another essential part of the web that we often overlook. It’s easy to focus on features and functionality, and that’s not a bad thing, but we sometimes forget that we don’t actually know who’s on the other side of the screen.

Using the correct HTML elements and attributes, loading fewer JavaScript files, respecting reduced-motion preferences, and offering colour themes that match user settings all go a long way toward making the web usable for more people. At the end of the day, no matter what framework we reach for, whether React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, or whatever comes next, we are still building with the same fundamentals: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

It is also essential to understand the basics and avoid becoming overly reliant on frameworks and libraries, because at its core, the web is still just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When we depend too heavily on frameworks, we risk tying our skills to a specific tool, and before long, picking up a new one can feel harder than it needs to be.

In a bid to relearn basic web development, I may be learning in public, or might just tutor some people over a few weekends, so two birds (or more) can be killed with one stone. Feel free to let me know if you're interested, and I may consider it (no promises 😜).

Remember, keep the web simple. Make it accessible. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are already a framework. They’ve just been around long enough that we forgot. Only reach for other frameworks when they solve real problems. Otherwise, let the platform do the work

The secret to getting ahead is getting started! - Mark Twain

There’s usually a lot of stuff going on in my head, and I feel really bad that I keep them to myself every time just because I don’t know how to put the pen down (or press the key down). You know, when someone drops a “hot take” on X (I succumbed to calling it that rather than Twitter 🫠), there are a million and one things you want to say, but you cannot because you are scared of being dragged? Or when you watch a movie and a punchline jumps at you, and you’re like “word! word!!” and then you start to self-reflect because the sank deep? Yeah, those moments should be shared. You just might be helping someone out there.

If everyone waited to become an expert before starting, no one would become an expert. To become an EXPERT, you must have EXPERIENCE. To get EXPERIENCE, you must EXPERIMENT! Stop waiting. Start stuff. - Richie Norton

So I am making this commitment to talk about my thoughts (those I can share, of course) with everyone, not caring (but caring lowkey) about who gets to read them and can find them helpful. I am not going to wait till it is perfect. I am going to start doing.

Some of the things I would be talking about would include:

• Tech: As you know (or maybe you don’t), I love tech, so I would be talking about technology. It would be about stuff I learned somewhere, or something that jumped out at me while I was working, AI, tech events, or even hot takes on social media. I should also talk about gadgets. I may have slacked, but I sure still do love gadgets.

• The Gospel: I am not ashamed of the gospel because it saved me, and I want others to be saved. So, most of my WhatsApp status rants about the gospel would be living here now. The word of God is sweet, and I can’t be stingy with it.

• Family: The basic unit of society is family, and while I am not a professional to talk about family, I can at least talk about myself and how I see family. There are so many opinions about what a family should be, and I feel choked up sometimes when I read some opinions, so here’s my free space to share my thoughts.

• Books: I found reading fun back in 2020/2021, and I have been inconsistent with it, but I am beginning to find my spark again. So join me to talk about books, make recommendations, and this includes the bible! I am currently reading The Rules of Thinking by Richard Templar, and I’ve got 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson for my next read. I am also currently on a streak of reading the bible every day, and today is Day 859 🥳

• Life generally: I might be coming up with newsletters (still thinking whether to make it monthly or weekly) to talk about my life and the things that I have been up to. You can let me know if you think newsletters are a good idea or not.

The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing. - Walt Disney

While I might struggle to be consistent from the start, I would need your “ginger”. So think of yourself as my accountability partner.

I am also looking to learn from you, so your engagements are super important to me. Help me out here, would you? 😉