Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

by Joe Dispenza

If she was still “being” the young woman in the dorm room with a dream of going to Italy, then she was still the same person living the same reality. So while it was still March, she had to begin “being” that young woman who’d been in Italy for half the summer.

Keep Revisiting Familiar Thoughts and Feelings and You Keep Creating the Same Reality

Perhaps your troubles feel so real because you constantly revisit those familiar feelings that initially created the problem. If you insist on thinking and feeling equal to the circumstances in your life, you will reaffirm that particular reality. So in the next few chapters, I want to focus on what you need to understand in order to change.

If you want to change, you must have in your thoughts an idealized self—a model that you can emulate, which is different from, and better than, the “you” that exists today in your particular environment, body, and time. Every great person in history knew how to do this, and you can attain greatness in your own life once you master the concepts and techniques to come.

Your identity becomes defined by everything outside of you, because you identify with all of the elements that make up your external world. Thus, you’re observing your reality with a mind that is equal to it, so you collapse the infinite waves of probabilities of the quantum field into events that reflect the mind you use to experience your life. You create more of the same.

When you think from your past memories, you can only create past experiences. As all of the “knowns” in your life cause your brain to think and feel in familiar ways, thus creating knowable outcomes, you continually reaffirm your life as you know it. And since your brain is equal to your environment, then each morning, your senses plug you into the same reality and initiate the same stream of consciousness.

Well, we remain plugged into this past self by following a highly routine, unconscious set of automatic behaviors.

Why are you secretly expecting something different to show up in your life, when you think the same thoughts, perform the same actions, and experience the same emotions every single day? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

Think of it this way: the input remains the same, so the output has to remain the same. How, then, can you ever create anything new?

There is a principle in neuroscience called Hebb’s law. It basically states that “nerve cells that fire together, wire together.” Hebb’s credo demonstrates that if you repeatedly activate the same nerve cells, then each time they turn on, it will be easier for them to fire in unison again. Eventually those neurons will develop a long-term relationship.1 So when I use the word hardwired, it means that clusters of neurons have fired so many times in the same ways that they have organized themselves into specific patterns with long-lasting connections. The more these networks of neurons fire, the more they wire into static routes of activity. In time, whatever the oft-repeated thought, behavior, or feeling is, it will become an automatic, unconscious habit. When your environment is influencing your mind to that extent, your habitat becomes your habit. So if you keep thinking the same thoughts, doing the same things, and feeling the same emotions, you will begin to hardwire your brain into a finite pattern that is the direct reflection of your finite reality. Consequently, it will become easier and more natural for you to reproduce the same mind on a moment-to-moment basis.

You could call this a rut, and we all fall into them, but it goes much deeper than that: not just your actions, but also your attitudes and your feelings become repetitive. You have formed the habit of being yourself by becoming, in a sense, enslaved to your environment. Your thinking has become equal to the conditions in your life, and thus you, as the quantum observer, are creating a mind that only reaffirms those circumstances into your specific reality. All you are doing is reacting to your external, known, unchanging world. In a very real way, you have become an effect of circumstances outside of yourself. You have allowed yourself to give up control of your destiny. Unlike Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day, you’re not even fighting against the ceaseless monotony of what you are like and what your life has become. Worse, you aren’t the victim of some mysterious and unseen force that has placed you in this repetitive loop—you are the creator of the loop.

Because how we think, feel, and behave is, in essence, our personality, it is our personality that creates our personal reality.

They couldn’t see, hear, taste, smell, or feel it, but they were so possessed by their dream that they acted in a way that corresponded to this potential reality ahead of time. In other words, they behaved as if what they envisioned was already a reality.

When our behaviors match our intentions, when our actions are equal to our thoughts, when our minds and our bodies are working together, when our words and our deeds are aligned … there is an immense power behind any individual.

It didn’t matter to them if they hadn’t yet received any sensory indication or physical evidence of the change they wanted; they must have reminded themselves daily of the reality they were focused upon. Their minds were ahead of their present environment, because their environment no longer controlled their thinking. Truly, they were ahead of their time.

he was not swayed by what was happening in his outer world (environment), he didn’t worry about how he felt and what would happen to him (body), and he didn’t care how long it would take to realize the dream of freedom (time). He simply knew that all of these elements would sooner or later bend to his intentions.

We can make our thoughts so real that the brain changes to look like the event has already become a physical reality. We can change it to be ahead of any actual experience in our external world.

In Evolve Your Brain, I discussed how research subjects who mentally rehearsed one-handed piano exercises for two hours a day for five days (never actually touching any piano keys) demonstrated almost the same brain changes as people who physically performed the identical finger movements on a piano keyboard for the same length of time.2 Functional brain scans showed that all the participants activated and expanded clusters of neurons in the same specific area of the brain. In essence, the group who mentally rehearsed practicing scales and chords grew nearly the same number of brain circuits as the group who physically engaged in the activity.

there are four elements that we all use to change our brains: learning knowledge, receiving hands-on instruction, paying attention, and repetition.

When we can change our minds independent of the environment and then steadfastly embrace an ideal with sustained concentration, the brain will be ahead of the environment.

In fact, you’ll do more than that. The brain’s hardware, as I use the analogy in this book, refers to its physical structures, its anatomy, right down to its neurons. If you keep installing, reinforcing, and refining your neurological hardware, the end result of that repetition is a neural network—in effect, a new software program. Just like computer software, this program (for example, a behavior, an attitude, or an emotional state) now runs automatically. Now you’ve cultivated the brain to be ready for your new experience, and frankly, you have the mind in place so that you can handle the challenge. When you change your mind, your brain changes; and when you change your brain, your mind changes.

but consider that thoughts are primarily related to the mind (and the brain), and feelings are connected to the body. Therefore, as the feelings of the body align to thoughts from a particular state of mind, mind and body are now working together as one. And as you’ll recall, when the mind and body are in unison, the end product is called a “state of being.” We could also say that the process of continuously thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking creates a state of being, which produces effects on our reality.

Warning: when feelings become the means of thinking, or if we cannot think greater than how we feel, we can never change. To change is to think greater than how we feel. To change is to act greater than the familiar feelings of the memorized self.

You’ve memorized suffering by your recurrent thoughts and feelings—those related to that incident, as well as other events in your life. Your thoughts about yourself and your life tend to be colored by feelings of victimization and self-pity. Repeating the same thoughts and feelings you’ve courted for more than 20 years has conditioned your body to remember the feeling of suffering without much conscious thought. This seems so natural and normal now. It’s who you are. And anytime you try to change anything about yourself, it’s like the road turns back on you. You’re right back to your old self.

We are capable of reliving a past event over and over, perhaps thousands of times in one lifetime. It is this unconscious repetition that trains the body to remember that emotional state, equal to or better than the conscious mind does. When the body remembers better than the conscious mind—that is, when the body is the mind—that’s called a habit. Psychologists tell us that by the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity or personality will be completely formed. This means that for those of us over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within us. Those programs are running us, because the body has become the mind.

About 95 percent of who we are by midlife1 is a series of subconscious programs that have become automatic—driving a car, brushing our teeth, overeating when we’re stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few.

Think about that: 5 percent of the mind is conscious, struggling against the 95 percent that is running subconscious automatic programs. We’ve memorized a set of behaviors so well that we have become an automatic, habitual body-mind. In fact, when the body has memorized a thought, action, or feeling to the extent that the body is the mind—when mind and body are one—we are (in a state of) being the memory of ourselves. And if 95 percent of who we are by age 35 is a set of involuntary programs, memorized behaviors, and habitual emotional reactions, it follows that 95 percent of our day, we are unconscious.

Now the body demands a stronger emotional rush of feeling bad in order to feel alive. You become addicted to guilt by your own doing.

When anything goes wrong or is awry in your life, you automatically assume that you’re the guilty party. But that seems normal to you now. You don’t even have to think about feeling guilty—you just are that way. Not only is your mind not conscious of how you express your guilty state by way of the things you say and do, but your body wants to feel its accustomed level of guilt, because that’s what you have trained it to do. You have become unconsciously guilty most of the time—your body has become the mind of guilt.

As you continue this “awfulizing,” the body is tempting the mind to return to the state it has unconsciously memorized. On a rational level, that is absurd. But obviously, on some level it feels good to feel bad.

As long as we use familiar feelings as a barometer, as feedback on our efforts to change, we’ll always talk ourselves out of greatness. We will never be able to think greater than our internal environment. We will never be able to see a world of possible outcomes other than the negative ones from our past. Our thoughts and feelings have that much power over us.

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You will learn in the following pages that for true change to occur, it is essential to “unmemorize” an emotion that has become part of your personality, and then to recondition the body to a new mind.

You don’t even have to think about how to be negative. You just know that it’s how you are. How can your conscious mind control this attitude in the subconscious body-mind?

When the mind and body are in opposition, change will never happen.

By definition, emotions are the end products of past experiences in life.

As that cumulative sensory data reaches the brain and is processed, networks of neurons arrange themselves into specific patterns reflecting the external event. The moment those nerve cells string into place, the brain releases chemicals. Those chemicals are called an “emotion” or a “feeling.” (In this book, I use the words feelings and emotions interchangeably because they are close enough for our understanding.)

All of the cumulative sensory information—everything you’re smelling, seeing, feeling, and hearing—is changing your internal state. You associate that external experience with a change in how you’re feeling internally, and it brands you emotionally.

You go home and repeatedly review this experience in your mind. Every time you do, you remind yourself of the accusing, intimidating look on your employer’s face, how he yelled at you, what he said, and even how he smelled. Then you once again feel fearful and angry; you produce the same chemistry in your brain and body as if the performance review is still happening. Because your body believes it is experiencing the same event again and again, you are conditioning it to live in the past.

RELIVING NEGATIVE EXPERIENCES

Think of your body as the unconscious mind, or as an objective servant that takes orders from your consciousness. It is so objective that it doesn’t know the difference between the emotions that are created from experiences in your external world and those you fabricate in your internal world by thought alone. To the body, they are the same.

The body is thr unconcious mind

When your memorized thoughts and feelings consistently force your body to “be in” the past, we could say that the body becomes the memory of the past.

If we believe that our thoughts have something to do with our destiny, then as creators, most of us are only going in circles.

We may not be able to control all the conditions in our external environment, but we certainly have a choice in controlling our inner environment.