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

by Joe Dispenza

I then reminded my daughter, “You can’t get up from your mental creation of this experience as the same person you were when you sat down. You have to get up from your seat as if you just had the most amazing summer of your life.” “I got it,” she said. She understood my reminder that each day, she had to change to a new state of being. And after every mental creation, she was to go about her day living in the elevated mood of gratitude generated by having had that experience.

A few weeks later when she called again, her excitement was palpable. She had been in the library, chatting with her art history teacher, and they eventually slipped into speaking Italian; both spoke the language fluently. At that point her teacher said, “I just remembered. One of my colleagues needs someone to teach Level I Italian to some American students who will be studying in Italy this summer.” Of course, my daughter was hired. Get this: not only would she be paid to teach (all expenses covered), but she would be in six different cities in Italy for six weeks, spend the last week in Florence, and be able to be home for the second half of the summer. She manifested her dream job and every aspect of her original vision.

Instead of following cause and effect, my daughter changed her state of being to the extent that she was causing an effect. She was living by the quantum law. As she electromagnetically connected to an intended destiny that existed in the quantum, her body was then drawn to the future event. The experience found her. The outcome was unpredictable, it came in a way that she in no way expected, it was synchronistic, and there was no doubt that it was the result of her internal efforts.

Think about that for a moment. What opportunities are out there waiting to find you? Who are you being in this moment … and every other moment? Is your being that way going to attract to you all that you desire? Can you change your state of being? And once you inhabit a new mind, can you observe a new destiny?

As you continually think about your problems (consciously or unconsciously), you will only create more of the same type of difficulties for yourself. And maybe you think about your problems so much because it was your thinking that created them in the first place. 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.

To Change, Be Greater Than Your Environment, Your Body, and Time Most people focus on three things in life: their environment, their bodies, and time. They don’t just focus on those three elements, they think equal to them. But to break the habit of being yourself, you have to think greater than the circumstances of your life, be greater than the feelings that you have memorized in your body, and live in a new line of time.

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.

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? All of us have fallen prey to this type of limited life, one time or another. By now, you understand the reason why. In the preceding example, it is safe to say that you’re reproducing the same level of mind, every day. And if the quantum world shows that the environment is an extension of your mind (and that mind and matter are one), then as long as your mind remains the same, your life will stay “status quo.”

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

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.

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. The good news is that since you created this loop, you can choose to end it. The quantum model of reality tells us that to change our lives, we must fundamentally change the ways we think, act, and feel. We must change our state of being. Because how we think, feel, and behave is, in essence, our personality, it is our personality that creates our personal reality. So to create a new personal reality, a new life, we must create a new personality; we must become someone else.

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

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.

The greatest individuals in history were unwaveringly committed to a future destiny without any need for immediate feedback from the environment. 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. Another fundamental element shared by each of these celebrated beings was that they were clear in their minds about exactly what they wanted to happen. (Remember, we leave the how to a greater mind, and they must have known this.)

Now, some in their day might have called them unrealistic. In fact, they were completely unrealistic, and so were their dreams. The event they were embracing in thought, action, and emotion was not realistic, because the reality had not yet occurred.

When one holds a dream independent of the environment, that’s greatness. Coming up, we’ll see that overcoming the environment is inextricably linked with overcoming the body and time.

Neuroscience has proven that we can change our brains—and therefore our behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs—just by thinking differently (in other words, without changing anything in our environment). Through mental rehearsal (repeatedly imagining performing an action), the circuits in the brain can reorganize themselves to reflect our objectives. 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.

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.

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 this occurs, the neural hardware is rewired to reflect the thought as the experience. This is the moment that our thinking changes our brains and thus, our minds.

If you can influence your brain to change before you experience a desired future event, you will create the appropriate neural circuits that will enable you to behave in alignment with your intention before it becomes a reality in your life. Through your own repeated mental rehearsal of a better way to think, act, or be, you will “install” the neural hardware needed to physiologically prepare you for the new event.

So when the time comes to demonstrate a vision contrary to the environmental conditions at hand, it is quite possible for you to be already prepared to think and act, with a conviction that is steadfast and unwavering. In fact, the more you formulate an image of your behavior in a future event, the easier it will be for you to execute a new way of being. 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.

You do not think in a vacuum. Every time you have a thought, there is a biochemical reaction in the brain—you make a chemical. And as you’ll learn, the brain then releases specific chemical signals to the body, where they act as messengers of the thought. When the body gets these chemical messages from the brain, it complies instantly by initiating a matching set of reactions directly in alignment with what the brain is thinking. Then the body immediately sends a confirming message back up to the brain that it’s now feeling exactly the way the brain is thinking.

The Thinking and Feeling Loop

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. There’s a certain synchronicity that takes place moment by moment between the brain and the body. In fact, 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.

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.

Does Your Mind Control Your Body? Or Does Your Body Control Your Mind?

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. This means that we will think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, react in identical ways, behave in the same manner, believe the same dogmas, and perceive reality the same ways.

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. We only appear to be awake. Yikes!

when the 5 percent that is conscious is going against 95 percent that is running subconscious automatic programs, the 95 percent is so reflexive that it only takes one stray thought or a single stimulus from the environment to turn on the automatic program again. Then we’re back to same old, same old—thinking the same thoughts, performing the same actions, but expecting something different to happen in our lives.

In this book, you will learn how to get into the subconscious, and reprogram it with a new set of strategies. 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. When you condition the body with a new mind, the two can no longer work in opposition, but must be in harmony. This is the point of change … of self-creation.

The next step in breaking the habit of being ourselves is understanding how important it is to get the mind and body working together and to break the chemical continuity of our guilty, ashamed, angry, depressed state of being. Resisting the body’s demand to restore that old unhealthy order isn’t easy, but help is only a thought away. 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.

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.

Feelings and emotions are not bad. They are the end products of experience. But if we always relive the same ones, we can’t embrace any new experiences. Have you known people who always seem to talk about “the good old days”? What they’re really saying is: Nothing new is happening in my life to stimulate my feelings; therefore I’ll have to reaffirm myself from some glorious moments in 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 will also look at a scientific understanding that may be new to you, called epigenetics: the control of genes from outside the cell, or more precisely, the study of changes in gene function that occur without a change in DNA sequence.3 Just as we can create new experiences for ourselves, like my daughter did, we can also gain control of a very important part of our lives—what we commonly think of as our genetic destiny. As we go along, you will see that knowing something about your genes and what signals them to be expressed or not is crucial to understanding why you have to change from the inside out.

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

In all these cases, could the person who remains healthy have such a coherent, balanced, vital internal order that even when his or her body is exposed to the same hazardous environmental conditions, the external world does nothing to his or her gene expression, and so doesn’t signal the genes to create disease?

It’s true that the external environment influences our internal environment. However, by changing our internal state of being, can we overcome the effects of a stressful or toxic environment so that certain genes do not become activated? 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.

The way most organisms adapt to conditions in their environment is through gradual genetic modifications. For example, when an organism is faced with tough environmental conditions such as temperature extremes, dangerous predators, fast prey, destructive winds, strong currents, and so on, it is forced to overcome the adverse aspects of its world in order to survive. As organisms record those experiences, in the wiring in their brains and the emotions in their bodies, they will change over time. If lions are chasing prey that can outrun them, then by actively engaging the same experiences for generations, they will develop longer legs, sharper teeth, or bigger hearts. All of these changes are the result of genes making proteins that modify the body to adapt to its environment.

One of the most active areas of research today is epigenetics (literally, “above genetics”), the study of how the environment controls gene activity. Epigenetics flies in the face of the conventional genetic model, which stated that DNA controls all of life and that all gene expression takes place inside the cell. This old understanding doomed us to a predictable future in which our destiny fell prey to our genetic inheritance, and all cellular life was predetermined, like an automatic “ghost in the machine.”

How do we keep certain genes turned on and others turned off? If we stay in the same toxic state of anger, the same melancholy state of depression, the same vigilant state of anxiety, or the same low state of unworthiness, those redundant chemical signals we have talked about keep pushing the same genetic buttons, which ultimately cause the activation of certain diseases. Stressful emotions, as you will learn, actually pull the genetic trigger, dysregulating the cells (dysregulation refers to impairment of a physiological regulatory mechanism) and creating disease.

As a result of stress or a habit of being repeatedly and consistently angry, fearful, sad, and so on, the DNA that the peptides use to produce proteins will start to malfunction.

The first group was asked to exercise by contracting and relaxing one finger on their left hand, for five one-hour training sessions per week for four weeks. A second group mentally rehearsed the same exercises, on the same timetable, without physically activating any muscles in the finger. People in a control group exercised neither their fingers nor their minds.

We all know that if we repeatedly put a load on a muscle, we will increase the strength of that muscle. What we probably wouldn’t anticipate is that the group who mentally rehearsed the exercises demonstrated a 22 percent increase in muscle strength! The mind, then, produced a quantifiable physical effect on the body. In other words, the body changed without having an actual physical experience. Just as researchers have worked with test subjects who mentally rehearsed finger exercises and others who imagined playing piano scales, experiments have compared practical experience versus mental rehearsal for individuals doing bicep curls. The results were the same. Whether the participants physically performed bicep curls or mentally rehearsed those activities, they all increased their bicep strength. The mental exercisers, though, demonstrated physiological changes without ever having the physical experience.9

begins to make sense that although we “think” or “believe” we are living in the present, there is a good possibility that our bodies are in the past.

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.

Overcoming your nearly automatic habits, and no longer anticipating the future, requires the ability to live greater than time. (More on that to come.)

Remember when I said that my daughter needed to live her present life like she’d already had the experiences of the great summer in Italy? By doing that, she was broadcasting into the quantum field that the event had already physically occurred.

At this point, you understand that the main obstacle to breaking the habit of being yourself is thinking and feeling equal to your environment, your body, and time. Obviously, then, learning to think and feel (be) greater than the “Big Three” is your first goal as you prepare for the meditation process you will learn in this book.

In speaking to groups across the globe, I’ve asked audience members to describe creative moments when they were so consumed by what they were doing, or were so relaxed and at ease, that they seemed to enter an altered state of consciousness. These experiences generally fall into two categories. The first of these are the so-called peak experiences, what we think of as transcendent moments, when we attain a state of being that we associate with monks and mystics.