Trust your subconscious - it will give you a solution for your problem

We all know situations where we are faced with a problem whose solution is not immediately apparent. Sometimes it even seems as if it is impossible to reach a goal because we do not have the necessary resources.

We then try as hard as we can and brood over the problem for hours. At some point, our head hurts and frustration increases. We don't seem to have come any closer to solving the problem.

When we complain about our suffering to other people, we often get the advice just to do something completely different for a while.

This advice seems naive and unhelpful at first. Don't people understand that we need to find a solution? How can we afford not to work on it for even one hour?

When we ask ourselves questions like that, we do not understand what is evident to an external observer. The other person sees how much we have become obsessed with our problem and how we are getting more and more stressed. For everyone but ourselves, it is clear that in this state, we cannot access our minds fully.

When we think consciously, we eventually reach a point where our thoughts only go round and round. We are no longer able to take new perspectives or recognize aspects of the problem that we have not considered.

It is as if we were standing one meter in front of a wall covered with complicated formulas and long texts. From where we are, we cannot see the whole picture.

If this wall is a problem that we look at in our mind, we usually make the mistake of going closer rather than going back one step to see more details at once.

Everyone would intuitively move further away from the wall in real life to see the big picture. But in processes that take place in our minds, we often lack this intuition. When we think we tend to focus more and more on small sections of the problem.

When we recognize this mistake, we can suddenly understand the viewpoint of those who are watching us. They see us standing in front of the inscribed wall from a distance and realize at first glance that we only need to go back a few steps to see the whole picture. That's why friends advise us in such a situation to clear our heads and think about something completely different. And they are right.

Have you ever woken up in the morning and suddenly had insights into your current problem that you did not have yesterday?

Have you ever been in the shower when you suddenly had a brilliant idea that you had been chasing desperately for days?

I'm sure you've experienced something like this before. Maybe you thought that you were fortunate, or that a miracle had happened. None of that is true. This luck was the result of a simple and very useful principle.

Our subconscious does not stop to deal with something just because we do not actively think about it anymore. It continues to work while we sleep, eat, play, shop, or do sports. Our subconscious is like a worker we send to the warehouse to look for a particular object. He will search for that object until he finds it, regardless of what we do in the meantime.

At that point, he will either come back with the item or at least with a clue as to where the item might be, other than in the warehouse.

In terms of our subconscious mind, to which we give a request for a solution, this means that we either get the answer directly or a hint on how we can further encircle the solution.

This is not an article about neuroscience or clinical psychology. I am not a psychologist or a brain researcher. But whenever I allow my subconscious to play with what I have been thinking about intensively, I have been rewarded so far. And everyone I've talked to about it so far has been able to report similar successes.

It is no secret that distance to the problem and letting go of the thoughts often leads to unexpected insights. But we forget this simple truth far too often in everyday life.

This is a reminder to all those who sometimes do not trust their creative potential enough. When you have done everything to solve a problem and are stuck, get up, forget the problem and turn to something completely different. This can be the decisive step towards a breakthrough.