Your Subconscious Is Always Listening

It took me a while to write this. Something about it kept lingering in the background, reminding me it needed to be said. The moment that pushed me came while I was scrolling through Twitter. I saw a post that almost pulled me into a familiar mental loop. Then a quiet thought surfaced: “Stop it. I am listening.” I closed the app immediately. I may not be able to give it up forever, but I can step away when I need to. That moment made me realise how much attention our minds are really paying. Someone once said social media is free, at least before subscriptions became a thing, because we pay with our time. I think we also pay with something quieter and more expensive: our minds.

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.