This imagination exercise can help you become healthier, more creative and less depressed

t is necessary to know that two distinct selves exist within us: the active conscious and the remembering unconscious. The conscious self possesses a very unreliable memory, while the unconscious registers everything, without our knowledge, even the tiniest of events; it accepts everything it is told with unreasoning docility.

The Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior published a study that showed subjects are more likely to rate as true, the statements that they have already heard, regardless of their validity.

So when a child is told he is untalented, he will unconsciously remember this fact for the rest of his life and will likely never do that activity again. If a doctor tells his patient that he has only one year to live, the patient will most likely succumb to this fate. According to Psychologist Emile Coué, this happens due to the process of Autosuggestion: when someone makes a suggestion to you, for you to accept it as fact, unconsciously you must suggest it to yourself as so.This experience creates an implicit memory, an illusion-of-truth effect. In everyday life, people rely on implicit memory. This is the kind of memory that allows you to remember how to tie your shoes or ride a bike without having to consciously think about these actions.

In a recent study published in Science Transitional medicine, Harvard researcher Dr. Ted Kaptchuk found that by using a placebo to affect his patients’ unconscious minds, it significantly reduced their tendency for Migraine headaches. They felt significant relief even though they swallowed nothing more than a sugar pill. Kaptchuk attributed this to the fact that he would praise the medication, and provide the patient with support telling them how much better they will feel. Believing a medicine will work has a strong effect on its actual result. This proves the importance of positive person-to-person transactions for stimulating mental and physical healing.

Our unconscious presides over all of our bodily functions including pain reception, but according to Emile Coué, it also presides “over all of our actions whatever they are.” It causes us bias in decision-making and the way we view the world. Our unconscious “always forces us to act, even, and above all, against our will.”

Peel open a dictionary and look up the word “will”. It will be defined as: “The mental faculty by which one deliberately chooses or decides upon a course of action.”

Nothing could be more false.

Imagine I placed a metal beam across the ground that was 20 feet long and a half-foot wide then asked you to walk across it. Without hesitation every single one of you would be able to walk across it flawlessly.