GUEST SERIES | Dr. Paul Conti: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health

This unconscious mind, this supercomputer, is doing all of these things ... And then what comes up from all of that is the conscious mind. So, imagine an iceberg ... And we see the part above the surface. That's the conscious mind. But there's a huge part of this iceberg, maybe 95% of it, that's underneath the water ... That's the unconscious mind.

If you want to take the best care of yourself that you can, you want to understand yourself... Let's say the answers are in 5 or 10 different cupboards, look in all of them ... If we want to know something, look everywhere for it ... What we are creating may be a recipe; there may be things from different cupboards that overlap.

The factors that tell us is this person enjoying life, do they take care of themselves, are they happy, they're here, are they engaged productively in the world is agency and gratitude. And if we have those two things... you almost never see someone go wrong.

If you look at even traditions of understanding, how are people happy? ... It is always people who approach like through the lens of agency and gratitude.

That vulnerable part of us, the part of the iceberg sticking out above the water, needs a defensive structure around it to protect it against the vulnerability of fear, confusion, despair. And because the conscious mind is sticking out of the water with a defensive structure around it, it is the raw material from which we create our character structure.

The good news is you can get to whatever change you want ... The same thing is true with our mental health goals—but not at the snap of a finger, not by magic. It's through applying the same science and common sense combination of science and common sense that we apply to other things.

So, structure of self—we all have an unconscious mind, right? And we pay so little attention to this part of us that really is the biological supercomputer.

Then imagine that the conscious self is girded by a set of long tendrils that come out from under the water. There are defense mechanisms that are unconscious to us that sort of gird the conscious mind ... That are there to try and protect the conscious mind from the slings and arrows of the world around us.

No matter what is behind what's going on in that person's mind, it's addressable but you don't know what it is and how to address it until we ask the question of what's going on inside.