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

by Joe Dispenza

your habitat becomes your habit.

The more you fire the same circuits by reacting to your external life, the more you’ll wire your brain to be equal to your personal world.

For instance, if you can never stop thinking about your problems, then your mind and your life will merge together as one. The objective world is now colored by the perceptions of your subjective mind, and thus reality continuously conforms. You become lost in the illusion of the dream.

You have formed the habit of being yourself by becoming, in a sense, enslaved to your environment.

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.

To change, then, is to think and act greater than our present circumstances, greater than our environment.

Not only can we change our brains just by thinking differently, but when we are truly focused and single-minded, the brain does not know the difference between the internal world of the mind and what we experience in the external environment. Our thoughts can become our experience.

Whether we physically or mentally acquire a skill, 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. That is mental rehearsal, an important tool in breaking the habit of being ourselves. If we repeatedly think about something to the exclusion of everything else, we encounter a moment when the thought becomes the experience.

When you change your mind, your brain changes; and when you change your brain, your mind changes.

So can you believe in a future you cannot yet see or experience with your senses but have thought about enough times in your mind that your brain is actually changed to look like the experience has already happened ahead of the physical event in your external environment? If so, then your brain is no longer a record of the past, but has become a map to the future.

There is an extensive chemical factory between our ears that orchestrates a myriad of bodily functions.

Neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and hormones are the cause-and-effect chemicals for brain activity and bodily functioning. These three different types of chemicals, called ligands (the word ligare means “to bind” in Latin), connect to, interact with, or influence the cell in a matter of milliseconds.

For our purposes, think of neurotransmitters as chemical messengers primarily from the brain and mind, neuropeptides as chemical signalers that serve as a bridge between the brain and the body to make us feel the way we think, and hormones as the chemicals related to feelings primarily in the body.

Therefore, when you have great thoughts or loving thoughts or joyous thoughts, you produce chemicals that make you feel great or loving or joyful. The same holds true if you have negative, fearful, or impatient thoughts. In a matter of seconds, you begin to feel negative or anxious or impatient.

as we begin to feel the way we are thinking—because the brain is in constant communication with the body—we begin to think the way we are feeling. The brain constantly monitors the way the body is feeling. Based on the chemical feedback it receives, it will generate more thoughts that produce chemicals corresponding to the way the body is feeling, so that we first begin to feel the way we think and then to think the way we feel.

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.

(The moment you begin to feel the way you think, you begin to think the way you feel.) You unconsciously reinforce the same feeling by continuing to think angry and frustrated thoughts, which then make you feel more angry and frustrated. In effect, your feelings are now controlling your thinking. Your body is now driving your mind.

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.

What most people don’t know is that when they think about a highly charged emotional experience, they make the brain fire in the exact sequences and patterns as before; they are firing and wiring their brains to the past by reinforcing those circuits into ever more hardwired networks. They also duplicate the same chemicals in the brain and body (in varying degrees) as if they were experiencing the event again in that moment.

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.

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.

We live by habit when we’re no longer aware of what we’re thinking, doing, or feeling; we become unconscious. The greatest habit we must break is the habit of being ourselves.

In effect, you have to unlearn, or unwire, your old thinking and feeling patterns and then relearn, or rewire, your brain with new patterns of thinking and feeling, based on who you want to be instead.

Every time you think a guilty thought, you’ve signaled your body to produce the specific chemicals that make up the feeling of guilt. You’ve done this so often that your cells are swimming in a sea of guilt chemicals.

The thoughts we embrace are intimately identified with the feelings of what it would be like to experience the indulgence. When we give in to the cravings, we will keep producing the same outcomes in our lives, because the mind and body are in opposition. Our thoughts and feelings are working against each other, and if the body has become the mind, we will always fall prey to how we feel.

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.

Some maintain that “positive thinking” is the answer. I want to be clear that by itself, positive thinking never works. Many so-called positive thinkers have felt negative most of their lives, and now they’re trying to think positively. They are in a polarized state in which they are trying to think one way in order to override how they feel inside of them. They consciously think one way, but they are being the opposite. When the mind and body are in opposition, change will never happen.

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

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.

You know that when you repeatedly re-create the same emotions until you cannot think any greater than how you feel, your feelings are now the means of your thinking. And since your feelings are a record of previous experiences, you’re thinking in the past. And by quantum law, you create more of the past.

Most of us live in the past and resist living in a new future. Why? The body is so habituated to memorizing the chemical records of our past experiences that it grows attached to these emotions. In a very real sense, we become addicted to those familiar feelings. So when we want to look to the future and dream of new vistas and bold landscapes in our not-too-distant reality, the body, whose currency is feelings, resists the sudden change in direction.

We now know that less than 5 percent of all diseases today stem from single-gene disorders (such as Tay-Sachs and Huntington’s chorea), whereas around 95 percent of all illnesses are related to lifestyle choices, chronic stress, and toxic factors in the environment.4

Just by changing our thoughts, feelings, emotional reactions, and behaviors (for example, making healthier lifestyle choices with regard to nutrition and stress level), we send our cells new signals, and they express new proteins without changing the genetic blueprint. So while the DNA code stays the same, once a cell is activated in a new way by new information, the cell can create thousands of variations of the same gene. We can signal our genes to rewrite our future.

So if the experiences in your life aren’t changing, the chemical signals going to your genes aren’t changing. No new information from the outer world is reaching your cells.

When we stay present, when we are “in the moment,” we can move beyond space and time, and we can make any one of those potentials a reality. When we are mired in the past, however, none of those new potentials exist.

Here is how it works: You have an experience, which has an emotional charge. Then you have a thought about that particular past event. The thought becomes a memory, which then reflexively reproduces the emotion of the experience. If you keep thinking about that memory repeatedly, the thought, the memory, and the emotion merge as one, and you “memorize” the emotion. Now living in the past becomes less of a conscious process and more of a subconscious one.

A mood is a chemical state of being, generally short-term, that is an expression of a prolonged emotional reaction.

Our personality traits, then, are frequently based in our past emotions. Most of the time, personality (how we think, act, and feel) is anchored in the past. So to change our personalities, we have to change the emotions that we memorize. We have to move out of the past.

Live Your Desired New Future in the Precious Present

Instead of obsessing about some traumatic or stressful event that you fear is in your future, based on your experience of the past, obsess about a new, desired experience that you haven’t yet embraced emotionally. Allow yourself to live in that potential new future now, to the extent that your body begins to accept or believe that you’re experiencing the elevated emotions of that new future outcome in the present moment. (You’re going to learn how to do this.)

the main obstacle to breaking the habit of being yourself is thinking and feeling equal to your environment, your body, and time.

This kind of repetitive stress is harmful to us, because no organism was designed with a mechanism to deal with negative effects on the body when the stress response is turned on with great frequency and for long duration. In other words, no creature can avoid the consequences of living in long-term emergency situations. When we turn on the stress response and can’t turn it off, we’re headed for some type of breakdown in the body.

Negativity runs so high because we are either living in anticipation of stress or re-experiencing it through a memory, so most of our thoughts and feelings are driven by those strong hormones of stress and survival.

As a result, we begin to define our “self” within the confines of the physical realm; we become less spiritual, less conscious, less aware, and less mindful.

Put another way, we grow to be “materialists”—that is, habitually consumed by thoughts of things in the external environment. Our identity becomes wrapped up in our bodies. We are absorbed by the outer world because that is what those chemicals force us to pay attention to—things we own, people we know, places we have to go, problems we face, hairstyles we dislike, our body parts, our weight, our looks in comparison to others, how much time we have or don’t have … you get the picture. And we remember who we are based primarily on what we know and the things we do.

Living in survival causes us to focus on the .00001 percent instead of the 99.9...

Who we are is a consciousness connected to a quantum field of intelligence.

In time, we unconsciously become addicted to our problems, our unfavorable circumstances, or our unhealthy relationships. We keep these situations in our lives to feed our addiction to survival-oriented emotions, so that we can remember who we think we are as a somebody.

We just love the rush of energy we get from our troubles!