Why does one memory feel vivid and emotionally charged while another feels distant and neutral? The content might be equally significant, but the way your brain encodes the experience is different. In NLP, these encoding differences are called submodalities — and understanding them gives you remarkable control over your emotional responses.
What Are Submodalities?
Modalities are the sensory channels through which we represent experience internally: visual (images), auditory (sounds), and kinaesthetic (feelings). Submodalities are the finer distinctions within each channel:
Visual Submodalities
- Brightness / dimness
- Colour / black-and-white
- Size (large / small)
- Distance (close / far)
- Location (left, right, centre)
- Moving / still
- Focused / blurry
- Framed / panoramic
Auditory Submodalities
- Volume (loud / quiet)
- Pitch (high / low)
- Tempo (fast / slow)
- Location (where the sound comes from)
- Internal voice / external sound
- Tone (warm, harsh, monotone)
Kinaesthetic Submodalities
- Intensity (strong / mild)
- Temperature (warm / cool)
- Location in the body
- Movement / stillness
- Pressure (heavy / light)
- Texture (smooth / rough)
Why This Matters
Here’s the key insight: the emotional intensity of an experience is determined more by its submodalities than by its content. A memory encoded as a large, bright, close-up movie will feel more intense than the same memory encoded as a small, dim, distant still image.
This means you can change how you feel about something without changing what happened — simply by adjusting the submodalities.
Why does one memory feel vivid and emotionally charged while another feels distant and neutral? The content might be equally significant, but the way your brain encodes the experience is different. In NLP, these encoding differences are called submodalities — and understanding them gives you remarkable control over your emotional responses.
What Are Submodalities?
Modalities are the sensory channels through which we represent experience internally: visual (images), auditory (sounds), and kinaesthetic (feelings). Submodalities are the finer distinctions within each channel:
Visual Submodalities
- Brightness / dimness
- Colour / black-and-white
- Size (large / small)
- Distance (close / far)
- Location (left, right, centre)
- Moving / still
- Focused / blurry
- Framed / panoramic
Auditory Submodalities
- Volume (loud / quiet)
- Pitch (high / low)
- Tempo (fast / slow)
- Location (where the sound comes from)
- Internal voice / external sound
- Tone (warm, harsh, monotone)
Kinaesthetic Submodalities
- Intensity (strong / mild)
- Temperature (warm / cool)
- Location in the body
- Movement / stillness
- Pressure (heavy / light)
- Texture (smooth / rough)
Why This Matters
Here’s the key insight: the emotional intensity of an experience is determined more by its submodalities than by its content. A memory encoded as a large, bright, close-up movie will feel more intense than the same memory encoded as a small, dim, distant still image.
This means you can change how you feel about something without changing what happened — simply by adjusting the submodalities.
Practical Exercise: Diminishing a Negative Memory
- Think of a mildly unpleasant memory (start small — not trauma)
- Notice the internal image: How big is it? How close? How bright? Colour or black and white?
- Now gradually push it further away. Make it smaller. Dim the brightness. Drain the colour.
- Notice how the feeling changes as you adjust each submodality
- Find the combination that neutralises the emotional charge
Practical Exercise: Amplifying a Positive State
- Think of a wonderful memory
- Notice the submodalities: size, brightness, colour, distance
- Make it bigger, brighter, more vivid, closer
- Turn up any sounds. Intensify the feelings.
- Notice the emotional state increasing in intensity
Advanced Applications
Submodality work underpins several advanced NLP techniques:
- Swish Pattern — replacing an unwanted response with a desired one using rapid submodality shifts
- Belief Change — moving a limiting belief from the “certain” submodality coding to “doubtful” coding
- Mapping Across — transferring the submodality structure of motivation to a task you’ve been avoiding
Our audiobook Submodalities as Code explores these applications in detail with guided exercises.