The Subconscious Mind

This page explains how the subconscious mind works and how this process relates to OCD — in a clear and reassuring way.

The subconscious mind is the part of your mind that works automatically in the background.

We cannot control the thoughts the subconscious generates — they arise automatically.

This is where unwanted thoughts come from, and therefore where OCD thoughts come from.

The subconscious can be compared to an airplane’s autopilot: intelligent enough to react to patterns and predict danger. But there is no little pilot inside it. There is no one to persuade or reason with. It follows its own automatic rules.

The same is true for the subconscious. It cannot respond to commands. If you tell it “stop thinking this,” it isn’t ignoring you — there is no one in there to hear it. It’s a machine doing what it has learned to do.

To explain the subconscious further, it helps to contrast it with the conscious mind. The conscious mind has a slow and narrow connection to the brain. The subconscious is the opposite; it is able to send thoughts to the brain in a super quick time; typically, in a fraction of a second. It is also able to send a high number of thoughts to the brain at any one time – you could say the cable from the subconscious to the brain is wide.

Subconscious has two main jobs

The reason the subconscious mind has a fast and wide connection to the brain is that is what it needs to perform its two main jobs which are:

(a) short‑term safety of the body
(b) long‑term safety of the body

For the short term safety of the body, the subconscious acts like an emergency response system. For example, if a vicious dog is running towards you, it triggers rapid changes in the body — faster heartbeat, heightened senses, and muscle readiness — so you can escape or defend yourself.

For the long term safety of the body, the subconscious works like a maintenance system, making sure everything runs as efficiently as possible. It constantly monitors what is happening inside the body, and if it detects a simple issue — for example, a minor cut on your skin — it directs the brain to trigger healing processes such as clotting and tissue repair. These are straightforward problems the subconscious can handle automatically. However, if the issue is too complex, such as trauma, the subconscious cannot resolve it alone. In those cases, it asks for the help of the conscious mind.

However, the subconscious cannot speak directly to the conscious mind, as they are on two different systems. You could say they speak different languages.

If the subconscious could talk directly to the conscious mind, it would say something like, ‘there is too much trauma in the body, please can you figure out how to fix that?’

But it cannot talk directly.

So how does the subconscious mind get the attention of the conscious mind?

Getting the Conscious Mind’s Attention

It does this indirectly by getting the brain to generate anxiety. The subconscious knows that only the conscious mind can feel emotions, so it needs to create an emotional signal. It does this through a three step process:

Types of Thoughts

So, what kind of thoughts can the subconscious generate to scare the brain?

Well, I classify the thoughts into two broad categories.

Category 1: Producing a thought that is totally made up. For example, it can generate thoughts like ‘What if I pick up a kitchen knife and stab someone’.

This category contains the following sub‑categories:

Harm OCD (e.g. fear of picking up knife and stabbing someone)

Symmetry and Ordering OCD (e.g. arrange books according to height)

Relationship OCD (e.g. you fear your partner is cheating)

Numbers OCD (e.g. some numbers are considered unsafe)

Category 2: Exaggeration of real thoughts. The subconscious can exaggerate a real thought to such an extent that it becomes irrational. For example, a real thought is that we should wash our hands once after going to the toilet. But the subconscious will take that thought and exaggerate it by saying we need to wash our hands ten times, to make sure we don’t get an illness.

This category contains the following sub‑categories:

Contamination OCD (e.g. the need to wash hands many times)

Uncertainty OCD (e.g. checking that the door is locked many times)

Getting It Right OCD (e.g. repositioning items so that they are facing the “right” way)

Religious OCD (e.g. if you get an immoral thought are you committing a sin?)

While above I have mentioned eight subcategories, there are actually many more subcategories. In fact, the list of subcategories is infinite, because the subconscious can use the person’s imagination to create any kind of thought, hence why OCD thoughts can be so irrational.

Speaking of irrational thoughts, there is a young lady in a two‑part BBC documentary (called ‘Extreme OCD Camp’) whose OCD thought is that if she eats an M&M chocolate, her family is going to die! You can find the documentary on YouTube; I recommend you watch both parts, to see the different varieties of OCD thoughts.

Why Irrational Thoughts Still Feel Real

You may be wondering why the young lady (who is scared to eat M&Ms) gets anxious even though she knows the thought is irrational? I raised this same question in the homepage of this website, and I will now provide the answer.

While the young lady's conscious mind knows the thought is irrational, that is almost irrelevant, because her brain, which is the part that generates the anxiety, does not, and assumes it is rational, and so it generates anxiety. This is an important point about OCD; really ponder this.

Right, back to categories and subcategories of OCD thoughts. It may be helpful if you write down which of the broad categories and sub‑categories your OCD thoughts fall under.

Every OCD sufferer gets an anxious thought from at least one of the two broad categories.

When One Thought Isn’t Enough

If one thought is not enough, then the subconscious could generate additional thoughts, so that the person ends up having multiple thoughts. That is, it could start off with a thought about contamination, and when that is not enough, it can also add thoughts about harm and symmetry, so that the person ends up having three OCD thoughts to deal with rather than the original one thought.

When Beliefs Get Involved

If multiple thoughts are not enough for the person to start fixing the root cause of OCD, then the subconscious can also impact our beliefs (about ourselves) in two ways to generate even more anxiety.

The first way is to get the person to question their beliefs about themselves. For example, if they get an OCD thought of ‘What if I pick up a kitchen knife and stab someone’, the subconscious can also generate the thought ‘You must be a bad person if you get that thought’. This makes the person question whether they are actually a bad person, which creates even more anxiety

The second way is to exaggerate our beliefs so that the OCD thought becomes even more effective at generating anxiety.

Let me give an example. Before developing OCD, a religious individual might not get anxious when hearing a song on the radio that contains immoral lyrics. Their belief is that if they are not deliberately listening to the song (it just came on the radio), then it cannot be sinful.

But once that individual gets OCD, the subconscious can change this belief to something like: ‘It doesn’t matter if I am listening deliberately or not — I will still be committing a sin.’ As a result, they will now rush to turn off the radio, otherwise they will feel anxiety about committing a sin.

So how does the subconscious exaggerate the individual’s belief? Well, all beliefs sit in the subconscious mind. So one part of the subconscious can generate a new thought and send it repeatedly to the part of the subconscious that contains the beliefs. This could happen quickly, perhaps in a matter of hours. The person will not even be aware that their belief has changed.

But even if they realised that their belief has changed (by remembering how they used to think before they had OCD), it won’t help them, because the brain — which generates the anxiety — doesn’t care what the old belief was. It only reacts to the current belief.

Have any of your beliefs been changed by OCD?

When Anxiety Shifts in the Body

The ability to change or exaggerate our beliefs is a very sneaky tactic from the subconscious mind.

Another sneaky thing the subconscious can do is shift where the anxiety shows up in the body. At first, an OCD thought might cause anxiety in the chest, and if that doesn’t have the desired effect, the subconscious can then move it to the arms instead. This becomes a problem if the person’s job involves lifting heavy things, as their arms will now feel unstable because of the anxiety.

When the Subconscious Uses Other Tactics

There are two more things the subconscious can do which, strictly speaking, are not OCD, but have the same objective: to stop you living your normal life so you can fix things like trauma and stress.

The first is generating psychosomatic symptoms in the body.

Psychosomatic means that mental factors can create physical symptoms even when there is no physical illness.

For example, a person might feel completely fine for most of the day. But later, when they need to go out, the subconscious can suddenly generate a tense feeling in the stomach, making it harder for them to leave the house. Nothing is physically wrong — it’s simply a psychosomatic symptom designed to keep them indoors.

The second thing the subconscious can do is to make you associate an OCD thought with an object or area. For example, if you happen to be eating a particular chocolate bar when you get the intrusive thought ‘what if I pick up a kitchen knife and stab someone’, you may start avoiding that chocolate in the future because it reminds you of the moment the thought appeared. Over time, more objects and areas can become associated in this way, until it feels as though many parts of your home carry something you ‘need’ to avoid. This can make everyday life feel increasingly restricted.

Taking a moment to reflect

I appreciate this is a lot to take in, and you may find it helpful to read through it more than once. It can also help to note down which parts you recognise in yourself, as this often makes everything feel clearer and more manageable.

Although OCD is often described as a mental illness, the subconscious isn’t malfunctioning. The subconscious is acting logically based on the situation it finds itself in. It cannot speak directly to the conscious mind, so it uses the only tools it has — intrusive thoughts, anxiety, belief shifts, and other tactics — to get your attention. The content of the thoughts are irrational, but that is precisely how the subconscious signals that something deeper needs attention.

You now know what OCD is. This explanation should help all OCD sufferers, because it provides the reason as to why you are getting these thoughts and why they are so irrational/scary. The explanation is particularly helpful to people with harm OCD, as they now know that the thought isn’t an instruction to harm someone, it’s just a made‑up thought.

In fact, it is quite common for OCD thoughts to be ego‑dystonic i.e. against one’s nature. For example, a teacher that teaches young kids may have OCD thoughts about punching a child in the face. The teacher will never do that, their moral code will always override the nonsense thoughts that OCD produces.

As a side note, some therapists/psychologists say uncertainty is a part of OCD, and that we can’t say for sure the teacher won’t punch the child. In my opinion this is a cruel way to administer the therapy, as there has never been a documented case of an OCD person causing harm to someone else because of an OCD thought.

In fact, OCD people typically go to extreme lengths to avoid the fictitious chance of harm.

If you have read the pages on the brain, the conscious mind and now this chapter, you should have a good understanding of how OCD works.

So, at this point, the OCD sufferer will think ‘I know it’s my subconscious mind that is generating these OCD thoughts, so how do I stop it generating those thoughts’.

Moving toward recovery

In the short run, stopping the thoughts is not possible. They’re a symptom of an underlying issue, and resolving that issue takes time.

But in the short run (within six to twelve months), you can stop the anxiety those thoughts generate. This is one of the aims of CBT — a therapy that reduces or eliminates the anxiety response.

More about recovery on the next page.

Summary

The root cause of OCD is having too much stress or trauma in the body. Resolving this can take a long time, but there is an extra delay because you cannot fix a problem until you know it is there. Because the subconscious (which monitors the stress/trauma) cannot talk directly to the conscious mind (the part responsible for fixing it), the conscious mind doesn't even know what the root cause is. Later on this website, I will explain in detail how to use CBT to handle the immediate anxiety, and how EFT can help you identify and resolve the root cause.

The next page is an overview of the recovery process – please click the button below.