391. The unconscious vs. conscious mind
The Psychology of your 20s
iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
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Summary
We like to think we’re making conscious choices all day long - but a lot of what drives our reactions, habits, and gut feelings happens outside of awareness. The conscious vs. unconscious mind is a useful way to understand why you can know what you want, and still do the opposite. In this episode, we break down what the conscious and unconscious mind actually mean in psychology, where the idea came from, why it can feel unsettling to face, and how to build more influence over your impulses and automatic patterns.
We explore:
• The difference between deliberate thinking and automatic processing
• Freud’s topographical model
• The importance of the unconscious mind
• The responsibilities of the conscious and unconscious
• How to spot unhealthy unconscious patterns
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Our favourite sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/bookseries/abs/pii/S0065260106380021?via%3Dihub
https://acmelab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/1999_the_unbearable_automaticity_of_being.pdf
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:08.5 | Hello everybody. |
| 0:10.0 | I'm Jemma Spike and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk |
| 0:15.4 | through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. |
| 0:28.0 | Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to |
| 0:33.4 | have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s today |
| 0:40.1 | I have something really fun and scientific for you guys so if your favorite episodes of the |
| 0:48.8 | podcast and when we kind of go deep into concepts and deep into research you you are going to love today's topic. |
| 0:58.1 | And even if you don't, I still think this is one of those ones you should definitely |
| 1:02.0 | listen to because it will tell you so much about how you operate, your behaviors, your |
| 1:08.5 | decision making, while you make decisions that you don't always actually |
| 1:12.2 | want to make rationally, because today we are talking about the conscious versus unconscious |
| 1:18.6 | mind and the role each of them plays in our lives and why we kind of, again, yeah, make |
| 1:25.3 | decisions that feel bizarre and hard to justify, while we have |
| 1:30.1 | these reactions that come out of nowhere and yet we still keep doing them. And we can't quite |
| 1:38.5 | figure out how to change. This is the unconscious mind. This is the part of our existence and how we interpret the world we're going to really drill into today. |
| 1:50.1 | The idea that there are parts of us operating outside of our deliberate rational control is not a new idea. |
| 1:57.1 | What's just changed over time and over the years is how we explain it. |
| 2:02.3 | And we cannot talk about the unconscious versus conscious mind without doing a little bit of a history lesson first. So |
| 2:07.9 | long before we had these words that I think we use so often these days, unconscious, conscious, |
| 2:15.7 | subconscious, a lot of brilliant ancient thinkers were |
... |
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