Can subconscious mind change physical appearance?

Can the subconscious mind change your physical appearance?

Yes and no.

Your subconscious mind cannot change your appearance overnight like magic, but it does play a huge part in determining how you look.

In this article we will explore the ways in which your subconscious mind can change your appearance.

Wrinkles explain if physical appearance can be changed by the subconscious mind

As you age you will start getting wrinkles on your face.

The types of wrinkles you get are largely dependent on how you have used your facial muscles. The more you frown, the more likely you are to get forehead and frown lines. The more you smile, the more likely you are to get crow’s feet and smile lines.

It takes millions of expressions over the course of dozens of years for these lines to appear. The lines on your face can tell a story of the dominant emotions you experienced throughout your life.

Look at the Dalai Lama’s face and you will see mostly smile lines which have come from many years of peaceful meditation and living in bliss. He does have a few forehead lines too. As you get older the appearance of all the lines is inevitable (the man is 86, give him a break).

So, what determines if you are sad, happy, excited or depressed? Often, it’s your subconscious not your conscious mind. The subconscious mind dictates our base emotional state and how we respond to events in our lives. The person who suffers from anxiety has subconscious programs which put them in fight-or-flight at the slightest provocation. The optimist has a subconscious program which allows them to automatically see the glass being half-full instead of half-empty.

Our subconscious minds form the beliefs that dictate our emotional response to events. These emotional responses change our appearance through our facial expressions.

Being angry once won’t give you forehead wrinkles. You need to experience the emotion regularly before the wear and tear shows on your face.

This means you have time to undo the damage by learning to change your base emotional state.

This can be done through reprogramming your subconscious mind and practicing Stoicism.

Weight loss explains if physical appearance can be changed by the subconscious mind

Losing weight is one of the easiest ways to change your appearance.

Losing the fat on your face can accentuate your features. Losing fat on your body can make both men and women more attractive.

Did you know that the subconscious mind plays a big role in weight loss?

Hotel Maid Study

Hotel maids are some of the busiest people you will ever meet. Their job involves cleaning after guests, changing sheets and carrying heavy luggage. It’s a physically demanding job indeed.

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer was curious as to why maids did not lose weight despite all the activity. She did a survey on maids and found that 67% of them didn’t consider what they were doing a form of exercise – they thought their workload was normal. It turns out a maid’s work on average surpassed the general recommendation for daily exercise more than that of a U.S. surgeon.

Yet, these women were not losing weight!

Langer decided to do a study on 84 maids. She split them into 2 groups (a control group and an informed group). Both groups had their measurements taken before the experiment: blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio and body weight. The control group carried on as normal with no changes in their routines. The informed group were given information by experts about the number of calories they were burning during different tasks throughout the day.

One month later, measurements were taken from both groups. It was found that the informed group had a decrease in their weight and waist-to-hip ratio, and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.

The study suggests some sort of placebo effect helped with the weight loss. The subconscious minds of the maids in the informed group were likely primed for weight loss. They were expecting to lose weight and behaved in a way which would facilitate weight loss – eating healthier at home, moving purposefully whilst working, etc.

This shows how your subconscious mind through mental processes plays a big role in your weight loss.

It’s now widely accepted that stress hormones can affect your body weight. It can go either way; you could lose a lot of weight when feeling depressed or gain weight. Some people are comfort eaters and eat food to deal with emotional issues while others don’t have the ‘stomach for it’ and lose weight.

Bad Habits and Facial Changes

Smoking, drinking, drugs and consuming toxic foods are all bad habits which can change your facial appearance. It takes just googling a before-and-after picture of a heroin addict to see how drastic these changes can be.

There have been twin studies done which follow the lives of twins. Twins have the same DNA, so this allows for a unique study to be conducted which outlines how outside factors can affect their appearance.

A simple study was done on 79 pairs of twins to see how smoking changed their appearance. The pairs consisted of a smoker and non-smoker, or if both twins smoked, one had to have smoked for 5 years longer than the other.

The results showed that smoking on average made the twins look older. Even in the smoking pairs, the twin who smoked for a longer period showed greater signs of ageing.

What does this have to do with the subconscious mind?

Smoking is a habit and habits are governed by the subconscious mind.

To stop a smoking habit, you need to reprogram your subconscious to stop seeing yourself as a ‘smoker’.

The twin on the left has smoked 17 years longer than the twin on the right. Note the differences in lower lid bags and upper and lower lip wrinkles. Credit: Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

Conclusion

The subconscious mind can indirectly change your facial experience because it is what controls your default habits and emotions. Most of us live on auto-pilot allowing our subconscious minds to dictate the direction of our lives. If we have bad subconscious habits, we can unintentionally speed up the ageing process and gain weight.

If you want to reverse the damage, you must get serious about mastering your subconscious mind.

Do this and I promise you will be one step closer to living and dying well.