Moment 144: How To ACTUALLY Break Bad Habits: Joe Dispenza
Guests: Joe Dispenza
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The hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, you're going to feel uncomfortable. Probably for most of my listeners who've heard great advice on this podcast, and they think, yes, that's who I want to be. I have an intention to stop eating sugar at 1am at night, or I have intention to become organized or to be this kind of friend or partner they have the information right what there's something stood in the way of me doing something about that information on a regular basis yeah the habit is when you've done something so many times that your body now knows how to do it better than your conscious mind then it's programmed subconsciously so then when the body knows how to do it better than the conscious mind then for the most part the greatest habit we have to break is the habit of being ourselves, right? So there's a principle in neuroscience that says that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you keep thinking the same way, if you keep making the same choices, if you keep doing the same things, if you keep reproducing the same experiences and feeling the same emotions, your biology begins to become hardwired
in a sense. It becomes programmed. So in order to change something to arrive at a new vision of your future, if you wanted to arrive at a new goal or a new vision of your future, you'd have to change something about yourself in order to get there. And you'd have to change the way you think, the way you act, and the way you feel. So to change then is to become so conscious that you don't go unconscious again. People hear that, they go, Joe, how long? How much practice?
You know, are you talking about, I've got to do this for three, four, five years or, you know, and that practice, what does that look like practically for someone like me who hears everything you've just said and wants to make changes and cares of my life? Okay, so there's two times when the door to the subconscious mind opens up. When you wake up in the morning, because your brainwaves are going from delta to theta to alpha to beta. And when you go to bed at night, you go from beta to alpha to theta to delta, and you slip through that scale pretty quickly in the morning and the evening.
But your brainwaves start to change during those times, and one of the features, one of the important elements of meditation is to get beyond the analytical mind. And what separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind. So 5%, as we said, is our conscious mind. 95% is programmed subconsciously. And if you're going to try to change yourself with your conscious mind, you're outside the operating system. So then you got to learn how to change your brainwaves, slow them down, get beyond the analytical mind, and enter the operating system where you can rewrite a program, where you can make those changes.
And so learn how to do that. Practice. Learn how to do that. And again, it's not a big deal. It's easy to learn. and then once you can slow your brain waves down and you're more suggestible to what you're thinking now you can reprogram you can't do with your conscious mind you can say i'm healthy i'm healthy i'm wealthy i'm wealthy i'm unlimited i'm unlimited i'm happy i'm happy i'm whole and whole and your body's saying no you're not dude you're miserable you're unhappy that thought never makes it past the brain stem to reach the body right so it's important for us to in the morning or the evening, instead of reaching for our cell phone as the first thing, as a habit that we do, and checking our texts and our WhatsApp and our Telegram and our social media and our Instagram and our Twitter and Facebook, whatever else people do their emails, they get connected to everything known in their life. Before you start that, try this out as an experiment. Before you start your day, instead of falling into that redundant habit, you know, go on autopilot, just say, okay, if the change is to be greater than my body, to be greater than my environment, be greater than time, and the environment's so seductive, and my body's craving certain
emotions and it's programmed to get up and do things, I'm going to sit my body down. I'm going to tame the animal here. And when I'm ready to get up, we're going to get up, not when it's tired or when it wants to go. And if you were sitting there in silence, aware of nothing but you, and you said, okay, what is the greatest expression of myself I can be today? And do that exact process. Let me write down two thoughts that are not going to slip by my awareness unnoticed by me today.
Two memories, whatever it is. What are two emotions that I live by every day that I can literally change? I want to become conscious of what they feel like in my body. I want to catch them the moment I start feeling them. Let me review them over and over again enough times so I don't go unconscious. Okay, now I'm conscious of my unconscious. just that 95%. How do I want to think? How would greatness think today? Let me review it. Let me repeat it. Let me remember how I am going to think. Let me remember how I am going to think.
Let me remember how I'm going to behave here. How am I going to act here? Let me rehearse a change I want to make in a certain circumstance. Let me think about how I do want to feel today. Let me open my heart to life again. Let me feel kindness and care and love and gratitude and appreciation. Let me just bring up that feeling. Let me feel it with my heart. Let me keep bringing it up so I can bring it up enough times. I want to get so good at bringing up this feeling with my eyes closed, I can do it with my eyes open. We discovered that if you keep doing that every day, somehow you'll arrive at that destiny, and your biology will literally begin to change to look like you're living in a different life. You practice that, and you make a decision to not get up until you feel that emotion. And ask yourself, can I stay in the state my entire day?
And if you can't, you go unconscious, ask yourself at the end of the day, how'd I do? Where'd I go unconscious? Okay, tomorrow morning, new day, new lifetime. Let me go again. Most people then, they have that vision of the future, but they give up on that vision because in order for them to arrive at that vision, they have to do something. They have to think differently. They They have to act differently. They have to feel differently. And it's so much easier to make the same choice every single day.
And the hardest part about change is not making the same choice as you did the day before. And the moment you decide to make a different choice, you're going to feel uncomfortable because you're stepping from the known into the unknown. So some people would rather cling to their self-pity than take a chance and possibility. They'd rather tell the story of their past instead of telling the story of their future. They'd rather believe in their past instead of believe in their future.
What are some of the biggest myths relating to behavior change and I guess character and personality change that hold people back? unconsciously we're always waiting for something out there in our life to change so that we can change or feel the relief of the lack of what we don't have. And I do think that's kind of a limited model of reality. I think when you start changing inside of you and you start seeing the changes happening outside of you, you go from being a victim in your life to being a creator of your life. And I think that when that occurs, then all of a sudden it's no longer a have to.
It's something that you want to do. You actually don't want the magic to end in your life. So now you become a work in progress by investing in yourself. And when you invest in yourself, you invest in your future. So there is probably a chronic disbelief that many of us have that we're not creators of our life. And only when we get the parking space or something good happens to us do we believe that we're the creator of our life. But imagine a world where everybody actually took responsibility in being the creator of their life and no longer the victim of their life.
I think we would see a dramatic shift in consciousness. That makes people feel uncomfortable, this idea of personal responsibility. It's almost become quite a controversial idea, the idea that we are the creator of our lives. Because then I have to accept responsibility for all the bad things that happened. Dave dumped me. I got fired from work. Someone bumped into my car and it hurt my neck. maybe you're not creating. And the fact that you're not creating, you're left to the effects of your environment actually controlling you, controlling your feelings and thoughts.
By creating, what do you mean by creating? Isn't being intentional? Well, if you woke up every morning and you truly made time to think like this, okay, if my personality creates my personal reality, and my personality is made of how I think, how I act and how I feel. If I want to create a new personal reality, a new life, I'm going to have to change my personality. And most people try to create a new reality, a new personal reality, as the same personality, and it doesn't work. We literally have to become someone else.
So if you said, okay, let me not default and go unconscious to that 95% of who I am that's programmed. Let me become so conscious of the way I think. Let me become so aware of how I'm going to act today. And then if you said, okay, if a belief is just a thought I keep thinking over and over again, what thoughts do I want to fire and wire in my brain? And with attention and with intention, to begin to familiarize yourself with a new way of thinking. Meditation means to become familiar with. If you keep firing and wiring those circuits, you're going to begin to install the hardware repeated enough times and it becomes a software program, that could be the new voice in your head that says, I can, it is possible. If you said, okay, when did I fall from grace yesterday?
When did I lose it? Oh my gosh, it was with, at work, with my co-workers, with my ex, with my enemy, with the news, with traffic. Acting this way is not going to make me happy. If I had another opportunity, another opportunity, how would I do it? If you could close your eyes and rehearse in your mind mentally how you're going to behave in certain situations. Rehearsing it how? Well, mentally rehearsing, mental rehearsal is one of these great ideas in neuroscience where you can actually install circuits in your brain, right? So everybody has done this. Musicians do it.
They're playing a song in their mind all the time. Athletes do it. They're always going over their moves. Dancers do it. Actors do it. So many people rehearse mentally what they're about to do. And when they do that, they actually prime their brain. They actually can change their brain and change their body just by thought alone. Physiologically change it. Physiologically change. You can take a group of people that never played the piano before and divide them into two different groups and do functional brain scans on both groups.
One group, they'll come for two hours a day for five days, and they'll practice these one-handed scales and cords. Now, you learn something new. You make new connections in your brain. You get some instruction. You get your body involved. When you get your body involved, you're going to have an experience. You pay attention to what you're doing, and you repeat it over and over again. Nerve cells that fire together wire together. You're going to begin to install new circuits in the opposite side of your brain.
That's common. You do the scan at the end, you see those actual physical changes. You take those people, the other group, and you ask them to close their eyes without lifting a finger. Have them mentally rehearse those scales and cores, and at the end of five days, they grow the same amount of circuits in their brain as the people who actually physically demonstrated the act. In other words, they were so present with what they were doing, the brain did not know the difference between the real-life experience and what they were imagining.
The brain was physically changing to look like they already experienced it. They already did it. So now you take those people, never played the piano before. They've just been mentally rehearsing for two hours a day for five days. You set them in front of a piano. And they could actually play those scales and chords. Why? Because they prime their brain for that behavior. So then if you're going to prime your brain for a new behavior, whether you're the CEO of a company, whether you're a parent whether you're learning something the more you rehearse it mentally the more you prime your brain and body for the act so you could actually practice rehearsing how you're going to change in your life and if you keep doing it enough times your behaviors will match your intentions automatically because you have the mind installed to do it if you don't have the mind installed to do it you'll go back to the same past behavior so i play through that scenario of making the decision differently.
Exactly. And rehearse it in your mind until it feels right. So you feel like I could actually do that and go from start to finish without losing your attention. And so that it gets easier each time you do it. It makes sense, then you'll actually do it. And then if you said, okay, enough of this guilt. I've felt enough of it. I don't like feeling that way. I could actually break the conditioning of that emotion in my body? Can I condition my body? Can I teach my body to feel something differently? What would be the feeling that I want to feel if I was able to do it? Would it be worth? Would it be self-love? Would it be freedom? Would it be joy? Let me teach my body emotionally what a future could actually feel like before it happens.
If you keep doing it over and over again, you're going to start making more of those chemicals, and it's going to become easier for you to do it. It's going to become familiar to you. And that's exactly what meditation is, to become familiar with an old self, to know thyself. Become so conscious of that unconscious self that you don't go unconscious to that self. And how many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start remembering?
That's the moment of change.