Your day is partly run in automatic mode – you do things each day without thinking. For example, you reach for the light switch as you walk into a room. You brush your teeth the same way. You’re on autopilot driving the same route each day to work . You may even react the same way to stress – such as look for a snack or tightening your fists – even without thinking about it. These are subconscious habits that run in the background of your mind, helping you get through the day with as little effort as possible.
While these habits are intended to make your life easier, some of them impact you negatively. Many of which are those that impact your health, sleep, breathing, focus and ability to recover. They are automatic but ingrained deeply into your physical and emotional life.
Let’s take a look at how these habits are created, how the body stores them and why they are so stubbornly persistent. Most importantly you’ll find out why they stick and what you can do to get rid of those that aren’t helpful.
What Are Subconscious Habits?
Subconscious habits are actions that happen without conscious thought. You don’t plan them and they take over often when you don’t want them to. They operate in the background and impact your health.
These habits form when you repeat an action enough times that your brain decides to take over. The brain’s motive is to ease pressure on the conscious mind, giving it a shortcut that lives in a part of your brain.
Some examples of habits include:
- Reaching for your phone when you’re bored
- Tensing your shoulders when you’re stressed
- Clenching your jaw without noticing
- Breathing through your mouth while walking
- Slouching at your desk despite good intentions
These aren’t signs of laziness. They’re signs your brain is trying to save mental energy. These subconscious habits are what makes the brain so efficient. The problem is, they aren’t always beneficial to us and can also run counter to goals or change we want to adopt. The secret is to understand these habit patterns and how to override them or replace them over time.
Question: Aren’t All Habits Subconscious?Not exactly. Most habits start consciously—you decide to go for a walk after lunch or to stretch before bed. But with consistency and repetition, the brain recognizes them as needed and moves them into the subconscious for efficiency. This only happen after a few dozen to a couple hundred times of repeating them. |
Habits as Energy-Saving Systems
Your brain is always looking for ways to conserve energy. In fact, it uses up about 20% of your daily energy just running normal operations [1]. This is the reason it loves habits because when a behavior becomes a habit, the brain uses less fuel to repeat it.
It’s like driving a familiar route in your car: your brain switches to automatic “cruise control” because there is no need to think or decide where to go – you just go..
Your subconscious takes control of behaviors that it has become familiar with. They form a network of shortcuts, allowing you to function with fewer decisions, less effort, and more consistency.
Why does this matter?:
- Your brain will always favor the path of least resistance
- Even a low-quality habit feels “easier” because it’s familiar
- That’s why breaking habits isn’t about having discipline—it’s about rewiring these shortcuts
This process works fine for helpful habits but works against you when the shortcut is linked to poor posture, stress breathing, or bedtime scrolling. Knowing how the system works allows you to replace outdated or harmful shortcuts with better ones.
How Emotions Drive Subconscious Habits
While the secret to building habits is repetitions, it’s emotion that locks them in [2]. The brain assigns emotional experiences—especially those that feel intense, positive, or stressful—as being more important. This is why moments of relief, comfort, or panic tend to form lasting habit loops.
How does this work?:
- When you feel emotional relief after a behavior (like sighing after a stressful moment), your brain tells you to, “Do that again.”
- When you feel content after scrolling, snacking, or zoning out, those actions get stored as go-to responses because of the emotion assigned to them.
- Even negative emotions, like guilt or fear, can reinforce a habit if it eases discomfort—even briefly.
This emotional assignment happens within the subconscious. You probably wouldn’t think that your late-night screen time or midday slump is related to an emotion. But your brain and body remember what helped in the past—even if it wasn’t ideal..
As time passes, emotion reinforced behavior loops become deeply ingrained. To change them, you don’t just need new routines. You need to create new emotional anchors—linking positive emotion to new behaviors, like calm breathing, posture resets, or healthier evening habits.
How to Change Subconscious Habits—Starting Today
The secret to change subconscious habits is through brute force but through consistency, awareness and repetition in the direction of your goals.
Here’s how you can begin to retrain your brain and body for change:
1. Catch the Pattern
Begin by noticing when the habit occurs:
- Are you clenching your jaw when thinking or when upset?
- Breathing through your mouth while scrolling or stressed?
- Slouching after lunch when frustrated?
Being simply aware of the habit and trigger won’t change anything you need to change the behavior.
2. Override with a Better Alternative
Instead of trying to “stop” the habit, switch it for something better:
- Relax your jaw and exhale through your nose
- Sit upright and take a deep, slow breath
- Stretch your shoulders when you begin to slouch
Over time, this becomes the new behavior.
3. Anchor the New Habit Using Emotion as a Reward
Link the new behavior to something positive or calming. This helps move the habit more deeply into the subconscious:
- Do deep breathing while visualizing calmness
- Reinforce the shift with words like “reset” or “do it”
- Smile and pause for a couple of seconds when you get it right
4. Use Your Body to Disrupt Old Subconscious Habits
Because subconscious habits exist in your body (muscle memory and nervous system pathways), changing how you move, breathe, and respond physically is the fastest way to rewire unhealthy habits.
Start small. Practice a lot. And remember: you’re not “breaking” a habit—you’re switching it out within an established path to better behavior.
Conclusion
Subconscious habits are crazy strong. They determine how you move, breathe, react, and feel – usually without even knowing it. These habits aren’t mistakes or flaws, they are patterns you created to make life easier.
There is good news. You can change these habits if they don’t serve you or work against your goals. By knowing how habits are created and how you keep them in place you gain awareness and can make small consistent changes to have them work for you.
You need to identify what you do and what you want to change and not expect sudden improvements. Identifying a pattern, whether it is with how you breathe, your posture, or even eating habits allows you to better understand how to anchor change to something that serves you better. This is how you change your life. This is how you regain your edge.
Check out 8 Ways to Sharpen Your Focus Without the Noise.
