Your conscious mind is your active thinking, for example, when we make decisions such as what we will have for dinner or what clothes to wear. The conscious mind is the part of your mental processing that you are aware of at any given moment, which can include your thoughts and decision making. The conscious mind can be described as your short-term memory with your immediate thinking, powering critical thinking and planning. The unconscious is therefore what is happening in the background of the mind helping us navigate the world at pace, our motor skills are busy working away for our conscious mind to process a hundred different things. The purpose of our unconscious mind is to process automatically what our sensors are picking up to create a match – for example, when you are on autopilot driving to work and not having to think about the directions or tying your shoelaces. It is believed our unconscious is responsible for 90% of our behaviour. According to Freud, the unconscious stores all repressed thoughts and feelings. In day-to-day life our unconscious can be triggered by everyday occurrences, for example an invitation to a party might stir up feelings of social anxiety linked to a previous event in our childhood that we may not even be aware of on a conscious level. It can also lead to patterns of behaviour that are impulsive, one example being the potential to be overly sensitive to criticism, which could lead to outbursts such as snapping at someone whose intention may have been to help you. In such an event, the person may look back on the event and be left wondering why they behaved in such a way. Within cognitive hypnotherapy, I seek to understand the unconscious mind, so that we start to understand what unhelpful behaviours are stored and what we can work on to reframe the early memory that began this behaviour cycle.