How to Program Your Subconscious to Solve Problems

You can program your subconscious to solve problems with a handwritten question and a long walk. Steven Kotler’s method is to handwrite the question at the end of a work session, go do something low-grade and physical, skip the TV, then come back and write “The answer to my question is…” and keep the pen moving.

Steven is a multiple New York Times bestselling author. He wrote Abundance and Bold with Peter Diamandis, The Rise of Superman, and Stealing Fire with Jamie Wheal. He came back on the Addicted2Success podcast after our first conversation about flow, and this time I wanted to go deeper into brain chemistry and all sorts of crazy stuff.

To be honest, I’d only skimmed Stealing Fire before we sat down. What grabbed me was the practical side. Steven works with Navy SEALs and extreme athletes who get results the rest of us call luck, and I wanted to know what the entrepreneurs listening could actually start implementing.

The method above is the part I’ve thought about most since. It makes more sense once you see what he thinks is going wrong first.

Why you’re training skills when you should be training states

Steven calls our default setting “21st century normal”: tired, wired and chronically stressed. He says it has a biological signature. The prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead, is hyperactive, brain waves sit in the fast beta range, and there’s a steady drip of stress hormones like cortisol.

Then he said the line I’d underline:

“A lot of the critical skills we need, we’re lousy at because we’re trying to train up skills, and what we need to be doing is training up states of mind.”

That hit me. Most of us respond to a hard problem by grinding harder at the same skill. More hours, more coffee. Steven’s point is that the state you’re in decides how much of your brain you even get to use.

What changes in your brain when you get out of your own way

Stealing Fire looks at what Steven calls non-ordinary states, like flow, meditation and awe. His research claim is that they share roughly the same pattern. The prefrontal cortex quiets down, brain waves drop into slower alpha and theta, and the stress chemistry gets replaced by feel-good chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins.

He says you feel four things when that happens:

• Selflessness. Your sense of self goes quiet, and the inner critic shuts up with it.
• Timelessness. You drop into what researchers call “the deep now.” He pointed out that most of our fears aren’t present tense. They’re about the future or the past.
• Effortlessness. Motivation goes through the roof.
• Richness. Short for information richness. You trade conscious processing for what he calls the adaptive unconscious.

That last one is why the method works. He put the conscious mind at roughly 120 bits of information at once, “depending on whose calculation you like,” and the subconscious at around 400 billion bits a second. Treat those as his figures, not lab measurements. The point is that the part of you that isn’t “trying” has far more horsepower.

The 200 pages Kotler still can’t explain

Steven told me his favorite “what the hell happened” story. His third book, A Small Furry Prayer, came back from his editors with a note: they liked the first 100 pages and he needed to rewrite everything after that.

He’d never had writer’s block in his life. He reached about page 110 and stopped dead. By July he was in a panic. At the end of August he still hadn’t written a word past page 110, and the book was due in October.

Then a friend invited him downhill mountain biking. He bought used hockey pads at a thrift store, and by the third run he was so deep in flow he was ready to drop $10,000 he didn’t have on new gear.

He went home and thought, maybe I’ll try writing. He wrote 200 pages in two weeks with no time to edit. When the editor’s notes came back, the first 110 pages, the part he’d worked over again and again, were full of corrections. From page 110 to the end there wasn’t a single note.

“I don’t know who wrote it. I don’t have a clue. Couldn’t do it again.”

I know a small version of that feeling. The first speech I ever gave was in front of about 360 people and I hated every second of it. I’d practiced it probably 80 times word for word and listened to a recording of it at the gym for weeks. Then I got up and used my slides as a crutch. I walked off thinking I didn’t know if I’d ever do that again.

Now I speak 10, 12, 15 times a year and I love it. I hate prep structure. I hate slides. I get up with nothing memorized, and some nights I’m thinking, where the hell did you get that from? I want more of that. Steven’s method is the closest thing I’ve heard to a way of asking for it on purpose.

How to program your subconscious to solve problems

Steven called the subconscious “a giant pattern recognition system” and said you can absolutely program it. He does this at the end of every morning writing session. Here’s the method the way he laid it out.

1. Write the question by hand. Don’t type it. He believes there’s a link between writing longhand and the brain, and there’s some research pointing the same way. A 2024 EEG study in Frontiers in Psychology of 36 university students found handwriting produced far more widespread brain connectivity than typing on a keyboard.
2. Make it as vague as it needs to be and as specific as possible. His example: “I want to start chapter two, I want it to be exciting and sexy, and maybe it involves elephants and jugglers and mathematicians.” You’re not writing the answer. You’re giving the problem a shape.
3. Go do something low-grade and physical. A long walk works, longer than 20 or 25 minutes, so the voice in your head goes quiet. He mentioned gardening and building models. Working out works too, as long as you don’t exhaust yourself.
4. Stay away from the TV. He was clear that television is the one thing that wrecks this break.
5. Sleep on it while you’re learning. In the beginning, give it a nap or a full night. As you get better, you can shrink the gap.
6. Come back and write “The answer to my question is…” Then keep writing no matter what. He says more often than not, the answers start showing up.

What an amazing exercise. Steven said most people don’t believe it until they try it. Knowing it is worth nothing. You have to run the experiment.

He also pointed to Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning. Steven said Josh has high-end Wall Street finance clients do a version of this at every break: write a question, go to the gym, come back and answer. As you get better, the cycles get shorter and it becomes a rhythm for the whole day.

Is the subconscious always right?

I asked him straight: there’s more power in the unconscious mind, so practicing habits that tap into it is better for entrepreneurs, am I correct in saying that? His answer was “yes and no.”

He sent me to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. The fast system is powerful, but it also houses your danger detector and loves shortcuts that don’t always work. What I like about the handwritten question is that it uses both. You think hard first, then you hand the problem off.

Take state breaks instead of going hard the whole time

When I was writing my own book, I noticed I had to get up and take breaks. The flow slows down, you get up, and you let it oscillate like that. Instead of just trying to go hard the whole time.

Steven takes that further. He writes from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. on his small farm, then walks across his fields to the house, where his wife runs their animal sanctuary. If he’s totally burnt out when he walks in, he says he’s awful.

So now, before he goes up to the house, he finishes the session, writes his question, and does something state-changing. A 15-minute meditation. Five minutes of box breathing. Breath of fire. Yoga if he can’t get there any other way.

“I no longer try to inflict myself on the world really at any level if I don’t have my states of consciousness managed properly.”

Box breathing is his quickest tool: a 5-second inhale, hold, exhale and hold. He said that as you stretch the hold after the exhale, around 7 seconds is where most people start to panic. By focusing through it, he says, you’re turning down the fight-or-flight response and making yourself less reactive over time. That’s his claim, not medical advice, so if you have a heart or breathing condition, check with your doctor before you play with breath holds.

I’ve seen this up close. We were filming for a movie in Denver, and before Tony Robbins went out to speak at an event, he was in the bathroom doing breath of fire. If he still manages his state before he walks out, the rest of us don’t get to skip it.

If sitting still for 15 minutes sounds impossible, this guide to meditation for beginners is a decent place to start.

Every peak sends you a bill

I once watched Rajon Rondo highlight clips before I went and played basketball. I scored something like 36 points. I was shooting from behind the three-point line and it was still going in. The ring looked massive. Boom, boom, boom, the whole game.

That night I had the biggest crash. My body had been pushed so far that I woke up the next day feeling like I had a hangover.

Steven said that’s what the science predicts. The neurochemicals behind these states are expensive for the brain to produce, and big peaks drain the supply. His line was simple: you can have these big states, but they’re expensive and they need to be followed by a recovery period.

At the Flow Genome Project, he said, one of the first things they do with organizations is put people on sleep monitors to make sure they get eight hours a night. Most founders do the opposite. We have one great day and try to repeat it the next morning on four hours of sleep.

Why I’m not chasing the shortcut

Stealing Fire describes what Steven calls a $4 trillion underground revolution of people trying to change their state of consciousness, from Navy SEALs and Wall Street traders to biohackers and Burning Man. Some of those people use psychedelics.

That side of the book gets the headlines. It’s not something I’m interested in taking myself. I don’t want to judge anything I haven’t tried, but everything comes at a cost. You’ve got to weigh it up and go, is it worth it or not? Steven’s own point was that different doors into these states differ mostly in time and risk. Nothing here is a recommendation to try any substance.

What I found more useful was his own path. He’s tried just about every door. The ones that work for him are action sports and writing. He’s done yoga for 25 years and meditated for 15. It calms him down and makes him happier. It just doesn’t make him talk to Norse gods. I love that honesty. Find your door. It doesn’t have to be dramatic.

The daily reset: exercise, breathing and gratitude

For every day, Steven named a combination he says the positive psychology data backs: robust exercise, a daily mindfulness practice, a breathing practice and gratitude lists. Positive psychologists usually say three things you’re grateful for. He likes to do 10.

His reasoning: information hits the amygdala, your danger detector, first. He said we pick up about nine negative things for every positive one, and it takes around six positives to offset one negative. Those are his numbers. A gratitude list tips the balance by training you to notice what’s already there.

I practice gratitude every day. People hear it and roll their eyes because it seems so overplayed. There’s a reason it’s overplayed. It actually works. Instead of your brain going to the default, the negative, you’re training it to go to the positive.

Don’t die wondering

I asked Steven for his last 30-second speech to the world. He said it’s a bit of a Flow Genome cliche because they say it a lot, but he meant it: “Don’t die wondering.” You get one shot at this life, you spend a third of it asleep, so the only question that matters is what you’re going to do with the rest of it.

So here’s what I’d do tonight. Pick the problem you’ve been stuck on. Write the question by hand before you finish work. Go for a walk. Don’t turn on the TV. Tomorrow morning, before email, write “The answer to my question is…” and don’t stop. Then tell me it didn’t give you something.

FAQ

Can you really program your subconscious to solve problems?

Steven Kotler says yes. Handwrite a specific question, step away for something low-grade and physical, then write “The answer to my question is…” He calls the subconscious a giant pattern recognition system that keeps working while you rest.

Why write the question by hand instead of typing it?

Kotler believes there’s a link between handwriting and the brain. A 2024 EEG study in Frontiers in Psychology found writing by hand produced far more widespread brain connectivity than typing, which supports doing this step with a pen.

What should you do while your subconscious works on a problem?

Something low-grade and physical. Kotler suggests a walk longer than 20 to 25 minutes, gardening, building models or a workout that doesn’t exhaust you. The one thing he says ruins the process is television.

What is box breathing?

Box breathing is a 5-second inhale, 5-second hold, 5-second exhale and 5-second hold, repeated. Kotler says focusing through the hold helps turn down your fight-or-flight response over time. Check with a doctor if you have a heart or breathing condition.

Why do you crash after a flow state?

Kotler says the feel-good chemicals behind flow are expensive for the brain to produce, so big peaks drain your supply. He says these states need a recovery period afterward, including proper sleep, or you pay for it the next day.