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

by Joe Dispenza

As a consequence, we become addicted to our very thoughts; they begin to give us an unconscious adrenaline high, and we find it very hard to think differently. To think greater than how we feel or to think outside of the proverbial box becomes just too uncomfortable. The moment we begin to deny ourselves the substance we are addicted to—in this case, the familiar thoughts and feelings associated with our emotional addiction—there are cravings, withdrawal pains, and a host of inner subvocalizations urging us not to change. And so we remain chained to our familiar reality.

Thus, our thoughts and feelings, which are predominantly self-limiting, hook us back to all the problems, conditions, stressors, and bad choices that produced the fight-or-flight effect in the first place. We keep all these negative stimuli around us so that we can produce the stress response, because that addiction reinforces the idea of who we are, only serving to reaffirm our own personal identity.

Simply put, most of us are addicted to the problems and conditions of our lives that produce stress. No matter whether we’re in a bad job or a bad relationship, we hold our troubles close to us because they help reinforce who we are as ...

Most harmful of all, we live in fear that if those problems were taken away, we wouldn’t know what to think and how to feel, and we wouldn’t get to experience the rush of energy that causes us to remember who we are. For most of us, God forbid we not be a someb...

But when chronic, long-term stress chemicals push the body and brain out of balance, the ego becomes overfocused on survival and puts the self first, to the exclusion of anything else—we’re selfish all the time.

Thus, here is the grand hint: to change any aspect of your life (body, environment, or time), you must transcend it. You must leave behind the Big Three in order to control the Big Three.

By beginning to mentally rehearse new ways of being, you start rewiring yourself neurologically to a new mind—and the more you can “re-mind” yourself, the more you’ll change your brain and your life.

If knowledge is for the mind, and experience is for the body, then when you apply knowledge and create a new experience, you teach the body what the mind has intellectually learned.

Knowledge without experience is merely philosophy; experience without knowledge is ignorance. There’s a progression that has to take place. You have to take knowledge and live it—embrace it emotionally.

As a reminder, when you are in a new state of being—a new personality—you also create a new personal reality. Let me repeat that. A new state of being creates a new personality … a new personality produces a new personal reality.

You can’t think one way and feel another and expect anything in your life to change. The combination of your thoughts and feelings is your state of being. Change your state of being … and change your reality.

The elevated emotions of gratitude, love, and so forth all have a higher frequency that will help you move into a state of being where you can feel as though the desired events have actually occurred.

In fact, I saw that all of my perceived happiness was really just a reaction to stimuli in the external world that made me feel certain ways. I then understood that I was totally addicted to my environment, and I was dependent on external cues to reinforce my emotional addiction.

When we memorize addictive emotional states such as guilt, shame, anger, fear, anxiety, judgment, depression, self-importance, or hatred, we develop a gap between the way we appear and the way we really are. The former is how we want other people to see us. The latter is our state of being when we are not interacting with all of the different experiences, diverse things, and assorted people at various times and places in our lives. If we sit long enough without doing anything, we begin to feel something. That something is who we really are.

The world is complex and scary, but make it less frightening and much simpler by lumping everyone into groups. Pick your group. Pick your poison.

when we never overcome our limitations and continue carrying the baggage from our past, it will always catch up with us. And this usually happens starting around our mid-30s (this can vary greatly from one person to another).

In a matter of moments we can alter our emotions so many times … we can view a sitcom or a YouTube video and laugh hysterically, then watch a football game and feel competitive, then watch the news and be angered or fearful. All of these outer stimuli can easily distract us from those unwanted feelings inside.

Technology is a great distraction and a powerful addiction. Think about it: You can immediately change your internal chemistry and make a feeling go away by changing something outside of you. And whatever it was outside of you that made you feel better inside of you, you will rely on that thing in order to sidetrack yourself over and over again. But this strategy doesn’t have to involve technology; anything momentarily thrilling will do the trick.

Some people unconsciously delve deeper and deeper into this bottomless pit, using different aspects of their world to keep themselves preoccupied—in an effort to re-create the original feeling from the very first experience that helped them escape. They become overstimulated so that they can feel different from how they really are. But sooner or later, everyone realizes that they need more and more of the same to make them feel better. This becomes an all-consuming search for pleasure and ways to avoid pain at all costs—a hedonistic life unconsciously driven by some feeling that won’t seem to go away.

Some of us ultimately realize that nothing in our environment is going to “fix” the way we feel. We also recognize the enormous amount of energy it takes to keep up this projection of self as an image to the world, and how exhausting it is to keep the mind and body constantly preoccupied.

Instead of buying a bigger TV or the latest smart phone, these people stop running from the feeling that they’ve been trying to make go away for so long, face it head-on, and intently look at it. When this happens, the individual begins to wake up. After some self-reflection, she discovers who she really is, what she has been hiding, and what no longer is working for her. So she lets go of the façade, the games, and the illusions. She is honest about who she really is, at all costs, and she is not afraid to lose it all. This person stops expending the energy she had been putting into keeping an illusory image intact.

When it comes to change, our energy is connected to everything that we’ve had an experience with in our outer world. When we break the addiction of emotion we’ve memorized, or when we tell the truth about who we really are, doing that takes some real energy. Just as it takes energy to separate two atoms of oxygen that are bonded together, it takes energy to break the bonds with the people in our lives.

For instance, if you had certain experiences 50 years prior that marked you as insecure or weak and you felt that way about yourself ever since, then you stopped growing emotionally 50 years ago. If the soul’s purpose is to learn from experience and gain wisdom, but you stayed stuck in that particular emotion, you never turned your experience into a lesson; you didn’t transcend that emotion and exchange it for any understanding. While that feeling still anchors your mind and body to those past events, you are never free to move into the future. And if a similar experience shows up in your present life, that event will trigger the same emotion and you will act as that person you were 50 years ago.

The reason why people need more drugs or more shopping or more affairs is that the chemical rush that’s created from those activities activates the receptor sites on the outside of their cells, which “turns on” the cells. But if receptor sites are continually stimulated, they get desensitized and shut off. So they need a stronger signal, a bit more stimulation, to turn them on the next time—it takes a bigger chemical high to produce the same effects.

using the outer world to change the inner world makes things worse … it only widens the gap.

I call this being possessed by our possessions. We become possessed by material objects, and those things reinforce the ego, which needs the environment to remind itself of who it is.