Emotions

The subconscious controls emotions in at least two ways. The first is a rapid, fight or flight reaction -- generation of instant anger or fear. When such situations arise, you must react faster than you can think, so that the conscious brain must be bypassed by something that is hardwired and preprogrammed for immediate reaction. The second is a very slow, gradual realization of a deep or fundamental situation. Whether the first and second type of subconscious brain are parts of the same subconscious is an academic question, since we almost certainly have many types of subconscious behaviors. Feelings of depression during a midlife crisis might be a result of the workings of the second type of subconscious: the subconscious brain has had time to figure out all the negative situations that develop as you age and the future begins to look less hopeful. Such a process requires the evaluation of myriads of good and bad possibilities of what the future might bring. When trying to evaluate such a future situation, the conscious brain would have to list all the possibilities, evaluate each, and try to remember them. The subconscious functions differently. It evaluates various situations in a non-systematic way; how it picks a particular situation for evaluation is not under your control; that is controlled more by every day events. The subconscious also stores its conclusions in what might be called "emotion buckets". For each emotion, there is a bucket, and every time the subconscious comes to a conclusion, say a happy one, it deposits the conclusion in a "happy bucket". The fullness of each bucket determines your emotional state. This explains why people often can sense what is right or wrong or whether a situation is good or bad without knowing exactly what the reasons are. Thus the subconscious affects our lives much more than most of us realize.