Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #266 Dr Joe Dispenza on How To Unlock The Power of Your Mind

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Dr Joe Dispenza is a New York Times best-selling author, speaker and researcher who has spent decades studying neuroscience, meditation and the effect our thoughts have on our health and wellbeing. He believes that all of us are sitting on a huge amount of untapped potential and once we start to tap into it, we can create huge change in our lives for both our health and happiness.   In this powerful conversation, we talk about the importance of mental rehearsal: the idea that instead of waiting for something to happen in the future in order to feel a certain way- instead, we can practice feeling that way right now.    We cover a variety of different topics including: the transformative effects of meditation and what happens in the brain when we practice, the 3 different kinds of stress and how chronic emotional stress can drive ill health and disease. Dr Joe explains how 90% of the thoughts we think are the same as the day before and how that keeps many of us trapped in negative thought patterns, until we learn to break free. At its core, this is a conversation about unlocking the power that exists within your own mind.   This really is an inspiring and empowering conversation, and one that I think will challenge you (in a good way!!) to start thinking differently about your life.  I hope you enjoy listening. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore https://www.calm.com/livemore https://www.blublox.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version: https://amzn.to/304opgJ, US & Canada version: https://amzn.to/3DRxjgp Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/266 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified health care provider with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Our thoughts can make us sick. We can think about our problems. We can imagine the worst case scenario in our life. We can capture bitter memories and do that over and over and over again. If we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone, and the science says that stress can push the genetic buttons that create disease, then our thoughts can make us sick. Well, the question is, if our thoughts can make us sick, is it possible that our thoughts can make us sick. Well, the question is, if our thoughts can make us sick, is it possible then our thoughts can make us well? Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Now, one of my big goals with this podcast is to empower you to share with you practical tools and ideas that help you realize that you can be the architect of your own health and happiness. And

for many years on this show, I've covered topics like nutrition, movement, sleep, and how making small changes in these key areas can have a profound impact on your health and well-being. Now, over the past few years, and of course in my new book, Happy Minds, Happy Life, that I know many of you already have, I've been talking about the idea that the way we think, the way we react to the world, the way we approach the world, in many ways might be even more important than our lifestyle because our thoughts, how we feel about our lives, how we deal with conflict and stress massively influences our lifestyle choices. When we think differently, when we take control of our

emotions and feel empowered, we naturally make better lifestyle choices. And I think today's conversation on the podcast is one that really continues this theme and idea. My guest is Dr. Joe Dispenza, someone who many of you have asked me repeatedly to speak to on my podcast. Dr. Joe is a New York Times bestselling author, he's a speaker, a researcher, and someone who is incredibly fascinated by neuroscience, meditation, and the power of our thoughts. He believes that every single one of us has a lot more potential than we think. And once we start to tap into that potential, we can create huge change in our lives for both our health and our happiness. In our conversation, we talk about mental rehearsal. The idea that instead of waiting for something to happen in the future in order to experience a

certain feeling and emotion. Instead, we can practice feeling the emotion and feeling that we want right now. We talk about the transformative effects of meditation and what happens in our brains when we practice, the three different kinds of stress, and how chronic emotional stress can drive ill health and disease. We also talk about the power of our thoughts and Dr. Joe explains how 90% of the thoughts we think are the same as the day before and that's why many of us struggle to break free from our negative thought patterns until of course we learn to take control of them. And ultimately that is what this conversation really is all about. Dr. Joe is passionate that all of us have the ability to take control of our lives. I think

this is an inspiring and empowering conversation and one that I think will challenge you in a good way to start thinking differently about your life. I hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Dr. Joe Dispenza. As I study your work and your research, one of the key messages I get is that our thoughts really, really matter. The way we think has a huge impact on our health and our happiness. And you give a very empowering message to people that if we take control of our internal state, in many ways, we can take control of our wider lives. Yeah, you know, one of the exciting things that's happening right now is

coming to the realization that this is a time in history where it's not enough to know. This is a time in history to know how. And my interest is to take information that's based on science. And I think science is the contemporary language of mysticism. I think it's science that demystifies the mystical. And if you can apply and combine a little quantum physics with a little neuroscience, with a little neuroendocrinology, with a little psychoneuroimmunology, a little epigenetics and electromagnetism, and in a simple way, give people sound scientific information, the more they understand this model and understand what they're doing and why they're doing it,

that how becomes easier. So let's demystify just one simple process. If you believe at all that your thoughts have something to do with your life or something to do with your health, your thoughts have something to do with your life or something to do with your health. And the research points the finger that 90% of the thoughts that you think are the same thoughts as the day before. As long as you're thinking the same, more than likely your life or your health is going to stay the same because the same thoughts lead to the same choices. The same choices lead to the same behaviors. The same behaviors create the same choices. The same choices lead to the same behaviors. The same behaviors create

the same experiences, and the same experiences produce the exact same emotions, and those same emotions influence our very same thoughts, and our biology, our neurocircuitry, our neurochemistry, our hormones, our gene expression stays the same because we're the same. And the principle is nothing changes in our life until we change. So then the principle in neuroscience is that nerve cells that fire together wire together. If you keep thinking the same thoughts, making the same choices, doing the same things, reproducing the same experiences that stamp the same networks of neurons into the same patterns, all for the familiar feeling called you, in time we begin to hardwire our brain

and condition our body emotionally to become more of a subconscious program. So 95% of who we are by the time we're in our mid-30s or middle life is a set of memorized behaviors, unconscious habits, automatic emotional responses, hardwired thoughts, beliefs, perceptions that function automatically. So if you believe in that idea, then if you wake up in the morning and you think about your problems and your brain is the record of the past, those problems are connected to certain people and certain objects and things at certain times and places, the moment you start thinking about your problems, really much you're remembering your past. And every one of those problems has an emotion

associated with it. So the moment we feel unhappy, the moment we feel anxiety, the moment we feel unworthy, now our body's in the past. So thoughts become the language of the brain and feelings become the language of our body and how we think and how we feel is our state of being. But it only takes a thought and a feeling, an image and an emotion, a stimulus and a response, and you're starting the conditioning process and you're conditioning your body emotionally into the known, into the past. You do that enough times, the body's so objective that it doesn't know the difference between the real life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that person's fabricating by thought

alone. The body's believing it's living in the same past experience 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Now, research on epigenetics says that the environment signals the gene. Okay, well, the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion. So then the person is signaling the same genes in the same way because the body's believing it's living in the same environment. So the trauma, the betrayal, the loss, the drama, whatever it is, the diagnosis that causes a person to feel certain emotions, the majority of emotions that we feel, and you know this because you're an expert on it and you write

about it, are derived from the hormones of stress. And stress is when your brain and body are knocked out of homeostasis, right? So it makes sense then that when you perceive a threat or a danger in your life, you turn on that primitive nervous system and you're mobilizing all your body's resources for some threat, real or imagined. No problem if it's short term. But the chronic long-term effects of the hormones of stress downregulate genes and create disease. Now the problem is we can turn on that stress response just by thought alone.

We can think about our problems. We can imagine the worst case scenario in our life, we can capture bitter memories, and do that over and over and over again. And in effect, if we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone, and the science says that stress can push the genetic buttons that create disease, then our thoughts can make us sick. Well, the question is, if our thoughts can make us sick, is it possible then our thoughts can make us well? And that's kind of my interest. So much to unpack there. There's a couple of statistics you mentioned there,

that 90% of the thoughts we think are the same as the day before. I think you also said that 95% of who we are by the age of 35 are a set of memorised behaviours. And those two things really stood out to me because as a medical doctor, a lot of the things that I try and do with my patients is to help them make change in their life, let's say change their lifestyle. And a lot of the time, those behaviors that they engage in are very short-lived. They get super motivated, they do it for a few weeks, but then they often revert back to where they were before. And I'm wondering if those two statistics help me understand why that is, because actually, if we're not changing at source the programming in our brain in terms of how we think and how we approach the world, then it's going to be very hard,

isn't it, to actually change those downstream behaviors in the long term? Absolutely. And listen, you know this as well as anybody. I mean, chronic diseases require a lifestyle change. And change is an interesting concept. So 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, get ready. Because you're going to feel uncomfortable. It's going to feel unfamiliar. There's going to be some uncertainty. You're not going to be in the known. You're stepping out into the unknown. You're doing something differently in the body which has been

conditioned to be the mind. The servant is now the master. So the body loves the familiar known. It loves the same suffering. It loves the same pain. It loves the same unworthiness. It's been conditioned that way for years on end. It really is running the show. So the moment you step out into the unknown, the body goes, wait a second, I'd rather feel guilty than this feeling of the unknown because I can't predict my future. So the body starts influencing the mind. And we start to hear this chatter in our head that says, Rogan, start tomorrow. You know, tomorrow's a better day. You really don't feel like it today. Why don't you just have one piece of cake? You're a loser. It's your parents' fault. It's your ex's fault. It's your culture's fault, whatever it is. And if we

accept, believe, and surrender to that thought as if it's the truth, that's an old circuit in the brain. That thought will lead to the same choice, which will lead to the same behavior, which will create the same experience, which will produce the same feeling or emotion. The person says, well, this feels right to me. No, no, no, no. That feels familiar. Crossing the river of change, going from the old self to the new self, there is a neurological, a biological, a hormonal, a genetic death of the old self.

There's pruning going on. There's inhibuning going on. There's inhibition going on. We're no longer releasing the same stress hormones that give us the arousal. And so if there's three types of stress, physical, chemical, and emotional. Physical stress being trauma, injuries, accidents, falls. Chemical stress, you know, viruses, bacteria, pesticides, pollutants, toxins, hangovers, whatever. Emotional stress, that's the big one. That's family tragedies, second mortgages, single parenting, 401ks, whatever it is.

It tends to be then that the difficult one to manage really is our emotional stress. So if you can help people to get more physically balanced, more chemically balanced, and to become more emotionally balanced, then the effects of their personal change will be expedited. Yeah. And there'll be a longer duration. So the person sees you for six months, they start a great program, they start making the right choices, and they start feeling better. And then once they make the wrong choice, then it's a downward spiral back to the old unconscious habits and emotional condition, they feel unworthy again, and they return back to your clinic, or they return back to your consultation, and they come back with the same exact conditions. And the simple solution is, yeah, because you return back to the same personality,

and you're feeling the same emotions and your body's back to believing it's in the same environmental condition. So if your personality creates your personal reality, and I believe that, and your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel, then the present personality who's listening to this podcast has created the present personal reality called their life. Not your ex, not your parents, not your boss, you create your life. So it makes sense then if you wanted to create a new personal reality, you'd have to change your personality.

In other words, if you want to change your life, you have to change and nothing changes in your life until you change. So then this first step in change then, 95% of who we are is a set of unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Then the first step is to become conscious of your unconscious thoughts. Become so aware of how you behave. Do you complain? Do you blame? Do you make excuses? Do you judge?

Are you aggressive? And then look at the emotions. What is this emotion Do you blame? Do you make excuses? Do you judge? Are you aggressive? And then look at the emotions. What is this emotion I'm feeling? Wow, this is guilt. This is sadness. This is victimization. This is unhappiness. Name it so now you're so conscious of it that you don't go unconscious and return back to the same self. And how many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start remembering? That's the moment of change. Yeah. I mean, it's so powerful.

There's two key elements there that I'd love to dive into a little bit. There's awareness and personality. On personality, one of the deep realizations in my own life over the past few years has been that our personalities, much of our personality at least, is not fixed. Many people think that, oh, the way I am is the way I am. And what I've learned through the research, but also through my own personal experience of life, is that often our personality is not who we are, it's who we had to become. So for example, for most of my life, most of my friends and family would say that I'm intensely competitive. I can't stand to lose. I will win. I will do what I need to do to win at all costs.

But I know, I know full well that that now comes from a feeling of lack. That came from a feeling of lack inside that I developed this idea as a child that actually, I'm only loved, I'm only worthy when I get full marks or when I'm a success, right? So therefore, of course, being competitive absolutely serves that purpose. Because if you're competitive, you're going to keep reinforcing that, yeah, you're going to then succeed and you're going to get that external validation, which you feel you need. But as I've become aware of that, and that's where the awareness piece, I think, comes in, for me, I've become acutely aware that actually, no, I can change that. Actually, that's not fixed for life. And these days, I'm not competitive. I'm competitive in a different way. Like, it's not because I need to succeed in because that says who I am. And that's a reflection of who

I am. It's because, no, I'm no longer coming from a place of lack. I'm coming from a place of love now where, yeah, I still want to do well. But it's not a reflection of my self-worth. So I've really experienced that you can change. Right, right. Well, then the fundamental thing then is to realize then that there is great science to show that we are not hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of our lives. And we're not doomed by our genes that were marvels of adaptability and change. Now, here's the challenge, though.

The challenge is that most people wait for crisis or diagnosis before they make up their mind to change. And my message is why wait? So then if your personality creates your personal reality, and you become conscious that in lack or in separation, the game to play when you're living in three dimensional reality is that you have to do something to get what you want. So then you have the thought of wanting something, right? You want a new career, you want to succeed in something, you want a new relationship, you want to heal. That thought of whatever that experience is, your mind actually predicts it somewhere in the future. And you say, if I work really hard, if I sacrifice a certain number of things, if I save a lot of money, I can go on this vacation or have this experience. And some people wait for the experience to occur. And when the experience occurs, the payoff is the emotion in three-dimensional reality. But the distance between the thought of what you want and the experience of having it, between cause and effect, between one point of consciousness, I'm conscious that I'm

competitive, and another point of consciousness, can I change that, is called time. So everything in three-dimensional reality takes time, and we experience separation until the event happens, and then we feel the emotion. Well, that's great. But the fundamental quality of a person's personality who's competitive, once they have that experience, then they're going to compete for the next thing they want. And there's nothing wrong with that. Because when we're matter trying to change matter, of course, we're going to use the principles, we're going to control, we're going to predict, we're going to compete, we're going to fight for, we're going to work harder, we're going to manipulate, we're going to do anything we can to produce an outcome. And

when we have the experience, the experience then produces the emotion. Well, the question is then, then people become so reliant on the experience to change their emotional state, they need something outside of them to change their internal state. And so if I said to somebody, hey, why are you so unhappy today? They would say, I'm unhappy because of that person or that circumstance. And what that really means is that that person or that circumstance is actually controlling the way you feel and the way you think. And anything that controls the way we feel and the way we think, we're victims to that circumstance. In other words words we're victims to our environment and our response to the environment actually weakens the organism it actually takes the body's vitalized force and turns it into emergency and that's and you tap

those resources okay so then that's cause and effect you're waiting for something you create something and we're in the plane of doing and, and you master some skills, you get educated, you make the right choices, you get the right counseling or the right advice, and you could actually succeed in this world. Well, that's great, but the time between you getting it and the thought of it is a lot of separation, right? And so what if, like you said, you said, okay, what would a new personality who's not competitive live like? How would I have to think? How would a person who's no longer competitive have to think?

And you start thinking about how to think. And the act of actually with intention or attention actually begins to install new circuitry in your brain, new hardware. Keep doing it and it becomes like a software program. That becomes the new voice in your head that says, ease up, there's another way to do it. Then if you said, how am I gonna be in my life when I open my eyes?

How am I gonna live today, one day, one lifetime, as if I wasn't competitive? Okay, well, I may have to read a little bit and learn a little about how to do that, but I can find somebody that did that. Obviously, someone has. If you close your eyes and you rehearse mentally, how are you going to be on a Zoom call? How are you going to be with your colleagues? How are you going to be in your relationships? Mental rehearsal, when you're truly present, the brain does not know the difference between the real life experience and what you're imagining and the research on mental rehearsal says you can install neurological

hardware in your brain to look like you've already done it that's already been experienced now your brain is no longer a record of the past now it's a map to the future keep priming the brain with those instructions and the hardware will become a software program. Now you'll start behaving that way. Now here's the hard part, which you accomplished. Can I teach my body emotionally what it would feel like to no longer be competitive, to be in love with life and know that everything's going to work out or that I'm resourceful or intelligent or whatever it is? Can I bring up the feeling of what the competitive, non-competitive person or a person who's mastered that feels like? If you can teach your body

emotionally what that feels like before the experience, then it would make sense then if you could do that enough times, you can condition your body emotionally to begin to change with that thought and that feeling, with that image and that emotion. And so then the person becomes a new personality and changes from the old personality. And our research shows when you do that, not only do you change your circuitry, the way your brain works, the way your heart works, your gene expression, your immune system, but the side effect of that a lot of times is there's very profound biological changes that take place in the person's health. And you say, how did you do that? And they'll tell you,

that disease exists in the old personality. I'm literally somebody else. So if you have evidence and testimony, which we do have, that it's possible to change, and we have great evidence and scientific research that we're doing, evidence becomes's possible to change. And we have great evidence in scientific research that we're doing. Evidence becomes the loudest voice. And that person who stands on the stage and tells the story of their personal transformation, and they're speaking the truth, they're the four minute mile. And that's a new level of consciousness that says, I don't need anything outside of me to change my internal state. I could actually self-regulate and change my internal state. And the more I understand what I'm doing,

based on the model of science, and why I'm doing it, made simply, then the how gets easier, because you assign meaning to it. And when you assign meaning to it, you switch on that prefrontal cortex, and it will find value in the act. If you don't know what you're doing and why you're doing it, it's left to conjecture, to superstition, to dogma. And so then lighting a match in a dark place and taking a look at what aspect of yourself, if you want to be happy, then the first thing you have to do is stop being unhappy. You've got to become conscious of those thoughts that make you feel bad and the memories that go along with it. And the emotions of that and disentangling from that program takes a lot of energy and a lot of awareness. You mentioned visualization there, really, this theme of creating the emotion and the feeling now. You're not waiting for

something to happen in the future so you can experience that feeling. You're actually taking control of that and creating that feeling immediately, which is very powerful. And what I think of when you say that is I think about sports people. Tiger Woods, for example, the night before playing 18 holes, he'd be in bed and he would literally be playing every single hole, every shot, picturing where it's going to land, walks up, plays that shot. Is it going to be a little draw? It's going to be a little cut. Is it going to be low? Is it going to be high? To the point where he and other golfers will say, when they show up to actually play, they've already played the course. I know a mutual friend of ours, David Hamilton, when I spoke to him on the show

a couple of years ago, David spoke about tennis for him and how never really played before. I think within a few months or within a year, he was actually doing really well in the men's leagues through this kind of process of visualization. So I think when we hear about it from sports folk, we get it. We go, yeah, yeah, it's important for them. But many of us don't think about it with our own health. We think that the way we feel is the way we feel. Oh, I happen to feel low and sad. The other thing that I discovered whilst I was researching for this conversation, Dr. Joe, was there's this wonderful TED Talk by a chap called Anil Seth. He's a global researcher in consciousness at the University of Sussex. And in his TED Talk, he shows this

wonderful image of a human being. Literally, there's a false hand in front of them. And he's looking at that false hand. And then after a few seconds, someone drops a knife in on the false hands and he pulls his real hand away. It's so profound. And this really speaks to what you've just been saying, which is your brain doesn't know the difference. Yeah, we don't see things how they are. We see things how we are. And so I don't like to use the word visualization because I think it's been overused. I like to use the word mental rehearsal.

I don't care if you're a virtuoso musician. I don't care if you are a performer or an actor. I don't care if you are a performer or an actor. I don't care if you're a dancer or an athlete. Everybody does this who's engaged in getting better at whatever they do. They will rehearse the course now, or rehearse the act enough times that once they can concept the whole thing to its completion and they get out of that think box then the think box is so important because we have to review our act we have to repeat it enough times and the act of mental rehearsal really installs the neurological hardware in your brain it primes the brain the brain so you have circuits to use. Now, mental rehearsal also changes the body. You can take a group of men and have them imagine or

rehearse doing bicep curls for an hour a day for two weeks and add an emotional component called stronger, harder, more intense. And for one hour, they practice in their mind doing those curls. At the end of two weeks, there's a 13.5 increase in muscle strength. They never lifted a weight. Their body's changing by thought alone. So the person who's priming their brain and body through rehearsal, when they get in their play box, there's no thinking. There's just doing. There's just doing.

There's just the act. In fact, the thought of what they're doing becomes the experience. They get lost in the act and their analytical facilities, their analytical mind is out of the way and they can sustain a state where nothing in their environment is going to move them from the state. They're in the feeling of what it would feel like to play well, and they hold on to that feeling. And when the conditions get tense, they actually do something different. They self-regulate, and they actually crave this moment of performance to be able to produce an outcome.

And so there's no mysticism to this. It's just what people do when they get really into something is that we rehearse all the time. So people understand if you take a group of people that never played the piano before, and you teach them one handed scales and chords, and they come and practice for two hours a day for five days, at the end of five days, if you do a brain scan before and after, they'll grow circuits on the opposite side of the brain. No magic there. You learn something new.

Learning is making new connections. You get your body involved. You get some instruction. You have an experience. Experience enriches the circuits. Repeat it over and over again. Fire and wire and pay attention and stay present. You'll assemble new neurological circuitry.

Take another group of people, have them close their eyes, and actually have them mentally rehearse playing the scales and chords for two hours a day for five days. Scan their brain before and after and at the end of five days, their brain will look like they've been playing the piano for five days but they never lifted a finger. The brain literally changed through the rehearsal. Okay, so now take the person and put them in front of a piano. They never played the piano before, and they could actually play those scales and chords like the people who are actually physically demonstrating it. So what does that have to do for the single mother of three children? What does that have to do with the person who's trying to heal a health

condition? It's not enough to just have a good meditation and get up and spend the rest of your day reacting and responding to the conditions in your life. That's one hour of living and conditioning your body and brain into the future against 15 hours of you and responding emotionally from your past. So we got to rehearse. Okay, how am I going to be in this situation? How am I going to change? What would love do today? What would greatness look like? It's those frontal lobe

questions that actually begins to install the circuitry. And we all do it naturally. The only time we don't do it is when we're living in stress and we're living in survival. Why? Because it's not a time to create. It's not a time to learn. It's not a time to go inward. It's not a time to dream. It's a time to run, fight, and hide. And if you're spending the majority of your time in the arousal of those stress hormones, then most people then, their senses become heightened, they narrow their focus, and now they're engaged in doing anything they can, relying on something outside of them to take away that feeling. So

if people begin to understand that they actually can change, and they understand a formula to do it, and they practice that formula, and they rehearse it, both by mentally rehearsing it and actually participating in it, the effects should be in the experiment that something should change either in your body or in your life. And that's why we do it. So when you see the changes or the synchronicities or the coincidences or the opportunities starting to show up in your life, you're going to pay attention to what you did and you're going

to do it again. And many people who have chronic health conditions that just get beyond those thoughts and those habits and those emotions that keep them as that same personality and begin to think, act, and feel differently, notice dramatic changes in their health and in their biology. And we have the data to suggest that people who do this for seven days, their body looks like genetically and biologically, they're in a different life. Their body is no longer responding in the same way and they're no longer victims to their environment because they can self-regulate. There tends to be a greater resistance

to anything in their environment, even on a microscopic level. microscopic level. A lot of this is a complete paradigm shift for the current way most of society is and the way modern society is kind of taught, whether it be at school or university. If I talk through the lens of a medical doctor and looking at the health of my patients, for many years, I have said that, listen, we're missing lots of key skills as medical doctors, because what we've learned can be really good for acute problems and emergency situations, but it doesn't tend to work so well for these chronic conditions that didn't happen overnight that they have developed because of our lifestyle. And I've said many times in the media over the last few years that about 80% of what we

see is in some way connected to our collective modern lifestyles. I'm not putting blame on people. I'm just saying it's the way we are living these days is leading to not just things like obesity, type 2 diabetes, but also anxiety, depression, migraines, gut problems, low libido, whatever this barrage of problems we're now seeing as doctors is. But I've got to say, over the last few years, I've been wondering, well, yes, I still maintain that's the case. And I still want to make and help people make those lifestyle changes. want to make and help people make those lifestyle changes. But actually, I've realised it's not the root cause. It's not, I can go further upstream. Yes, lifestyle is important. If I can help people change, yes, it changes their downstream consequences on their health.

But the way we think, our mental wellbeing, our happiness, I have actually come to the conclusion over the last year that that's even more important than lifestyle because if we change the way we think and approach the world and respond to people and external events rather than unconsciously reacting, well, that creates a new environment in our body where we naturally make better lifestyle choices. In fact, those lifestyle choices no longer feel like an effort because a lot of the time, those lifestyle behaviors are simply a way for us to manage the stress in our lives. How would you see that? Do you agree with that? Do you have a different perspective? I'm just very, very interested to hear your thoughts. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show.

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I absolutely agree with it. I absolutely do. And I just think that the one thing, if it took you five years of living in chronic stress and living, and what are the emotions of stress and survival? Aggression, anger, hatred, competition, judgment, insecurity, envy, jealousy, pain, suffering, guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, powerlessness, those are all derived from the hormones of stress and psychology calls the normal human states of consciousness, those are altered states of consciousness. And so then, if you're living in emergency and your response to your coworker, to your boss, to the traffic, to the news, to whatever it is, weakens the organism. And you're switching on that emergency system over time.

No organism can live in emergency mode for an extended period of time. You're drawing from the body's vital resources and you're converting all of its energy into chemistry for some threat real or imagined. Okay, so then if you keep doing that in chronic conditions, there's no energy for growth and repair. There's no energy for long-term building projects. The immune system dials down. The digestive system becomes out of phase, hormones change, our cardiovascular system changes, our respiratory system changes. This is because the body is believing it's living in a dangerous environment, okay? So the problem then becomes that the arousal of these stress hormones that create fear, that create anger, aggression, or create pain, give the body a rush of energy.

Now people become almost like an addict. They need the problems in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that arousal, to that emotion. And now if you can turn that response on by thought alone, number one, you become addicted to your own thoughts. And number two, you become addicted to the very life, the life that you don't even like. So then you ask the person, why are you this way? And they'll say, I am this way because of this event that happened to me five years ago. Well, what that

really means is they had some really profoundly emotional experience. And the stronger the emotion we feel, the more altered we feel inside of us, the more we pay attention to what causes it. And the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot. And that's called the long-term memory. And so then that person then is altered biologically from that trauma, from that event. And what they don't know is every time they remember the event, they're producing the same chemistry in their brain and body as if the event was occurring. Okay. Well, then you tell the person, why are you this way? Well, then they'll tell the story about how it happened and the research on memory says that 50% of that story

the way you recount it is actually not accurate. It's actually not the truth that people don't have the same brain so they embellish the story to excuse themselves from changing and if they make it more difficult or they they add more components to it, then now they'll reaffirm their identity in being a certain way. That story becomes very important to them. And they believe it, they behave it as it, and they ultimately become it. And so then can you use those same principles and begin to start to manage your inner world. And by regulating, taking the time before you start your day and say, okay, before I grab my cell phone, before I get up and run through my routine, you know, my automatic routine where people are on automatic pilot

and a habituation of what they did yesterday, and their body's dragging them into the same predictable future based on what they did in the past and they've lost their free will to choose to become conscious to a set of automatic programs well if the familiar past is the known and the predictable future is the known there's only one place where the unknown exists and that's the sweet spot of the present moment so you said okay let me get present here let me remind myself of those thoughts I don't want to think. Let me remind myself of the behaviors I want to change.

Let me review in my mind the emotions that caused me to move to a lower denominator. Let me become so conscious of that that I won't go unconscious again. Let me remind myself who I do want to be, how I do want to think, how I do want to act, how I do want to feel. And let me see if I can get so good at doing this with my eyes closed when I start my day that I can do it with my eyes open. Now, this river of change, you know, people say I can't predict my future. Well, the best way to predict it is to create it, not in the known, but in the unknown. So our research shows that if you teach a person to go a little further than where they normally stop, you know, when they get uncomfortable,

they quit and reach for their cell phone, or they say, I'm busy, I got too much to do. If you get people present, really, and you teach them how to stretch a little further, and they get beyond that known, and there's no danger, there's no threat, there's no survival, the body actually begins to relax into the present moment. And when that happens, we see this over and over again, energy moves right into the heart. And now the heart all of a sudden, starts to beat with more order, more coherence, the autonomic nervous system is no

longer dysregulated from stress. It's starting to organize and this feeling feels right, right? So then if you can sustain that state independent of the conditions in your environment, then you're mastering your environment. You're mastering your life. The response most of the times, if you don't change your response to the conditions in your life, then nothing most of the times, if you don't change your response to the conditions in your life, then nothing will change, including you. So in chronic stress, then the person who's living in chronic stress, they're mismanaging their attention. Because when you're in stress, stress is created by you can't predict something, you've lost control, or you have the perception that something's getting worse. And so look at the world we live in right now, people Stress is created by you can't predict something, you've lost control, or you have the perception

that something's getting worse. And so look at the world we live in right now. People are in chronic stress. They don't know that, but now they need the arousal to wake them up, and then they need something outside of them, their cell phone, TV, whatever it is, a movie, a drug, or drink, whatever it is to make that feeling go away. And once you notice the change in that internal state, you pay attention to what caused it. And now you're more reliant on the outer environment. So then is it possible then to teach a person then to create

more coherence in their brain and heart? And we have data suggest that you could change your brain in four days and make it work better. You can make your heart, you can trade resentment, impatience, frustration for elevated emotions and train people how to create more coherence in their heart. The side effect of that, doing that every day, we've done the research, will strengthen your immune system up to 50%. Why? Because your response isn't weakening you. You're not victim to your environment. So if you're not victim to your environment, then you're less susceptible to anything in your environment, large or small or tiny or microbes or

whatever. So then when the person understands that, then they say, oh my God, this hatred, that, then they say, oh my God, this hatred, this fear, this anger that I've become so accustomed to, I literally have to change that. And when we do, you have to understand that the body's going to crave the familiar feelings because that's what it's used to. And this is the work. And people come to our work and they say, I think I'm doing my meditation wrong because their body's getting aroused and they're getting frustrated. I say, no, no, no, no, no. You're actually doing it right. So now instead of reaching for your cell phone, we'll give you something to do. Settle your body back down from that emotional state. Tell it it's no longer the mind that you're the mind, and that's a victory. Then the person

goes, I don't like this feeling. I don't know what I'm doing. I want to get up. I want to quit. I want to go eat. I want to, when's this end? And they become conscious. Their body wants to move into the predictable future. And now they're going to execute a will that's greater than the program and return the body back to the present moment. That's a victory also. And if we keep doing this over and over again, and you know, the stronger the emotions moment that's a victory also and we keep doing this over and over again and you know the stronger the emotions we feel the more we pay attention to it so so every problem every person in your life that you have an emotion associated with you give them your attention so as you lower the volume to your emotions you take your attention off your

your personal life and and and the only way you're going to change your personal reality then is to get beyond your personality. And the only way you're going to change your personal reality is to get beyond your memory of all the associations to your personal reality. And if you're going to heal your body, you got to get beyond your body. So you got to get beyond its habituations. You got to get beyond its emotional responses. And you got to tell the body it's no longer the mind that you're the mind.

In the beginning it's tedious, but working with your body like training an animal. We notice that there's a liberation of energy and the person then who goes a little further than they normally go instead of reaching for their cell phone or posting something on social media, they're going to stick with it and be curious. What's on the other side of this limited thought? What's on the other side of this familiar emotion? What's on the other side of this complaining and judging and analyzing? What's on the other side of it? Now, there's not a lot of agreement in society that says, Rangan, you have to sit with yourself and

that says, Rangan, you have to sit with yourself and to know thyself, to become so conscious of those unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that I won't go unconscious again. And we found out that it's the overcoming process that is the becoming process. And people continue to overcome, overcome, overcome, and then they become that other person biologically. overcome overcome and then they become that other person biologically yeah i mean this is so powerful um you mentioned curiosity i think that's such a wonderful emotion thought feeding value for us all to have and approach our life with what might it look like if i didn't wake up and feel like this every day even just to imagine that that's a possibility, be curious about that. I think that's very empowering. You also said that many of us have become addicted to a life that we don't even like. That has stayed with me. That is so powerful. And I think

people really need to sit with that. You mentioned rehearsal, but we're rehearsing, many of us, these negative emotions. We're rehearsing stress. We're getting better at being in stress because we're practicing every day. And you're offering a possibility to say, hey, listen, it may be uncomfortable at first. We know, we talk about comfort zones, right? Go for a longer run than usual. Go out your comfort zone. Have a cold shower, right? Get out of your comfort zone. But what your work, I think, speaks to is that we can get out of our comfort zone in our minds. So not with physical actions, but in our minds. Let's get out of your comfort zone. Think

differently. And I wrote down this comment on YouTube, Dr. Joe, which on one of your many videos that have got millions of views on, there was this comment at the top. I watched this video a year ago. It completely changed my life. I got rid of 15 years of depression. I lost 15 kilos of weight. I got 1,200 meters more to my Cooper test. I turned my company from the gates of bankruptcy into profit and established three more companies. I've not been sick once after this. I basically addicted myself to the positive. And to me, real experiences like that really, I think, speak to the power of your work. There's real empowerment that you're giving people. A lot of people, Dr. Joe, may be struggling and going,

okay, look, I get that. Yes, I don't like the way that I think, but I don't know how to change that. So in terms of moving us into maybe some practical things people can do, change that? Right. So in terms of moving us into maybe some practical things people can do, firstly, you need awareness. Hopefully this conversation is giving people that awareness, but if people are not aware, how can they become aware? And once they become aware, what sort of things should they start to do to start making those changes? Yeah. Thank you for teasing that out. That's such a great question. You know, my interest is to give people the tools so that they have within their reach all the things they need to begin to apply and become scientists in their life. people don't know if you don't know that those stress hormones are addictive then you think they have power over you if you don't think that you can change your thought just because you have a thought it doesn't necessarily mean it's true

and when the moment I realized that I was free right and if you isolate yourself a lot and you don't you're not out in the world because of whatever you'll you'll you'll you'll start to believe every thought that you think is the truth. And so that challenge then of saying, okay, I do truly want to be happy. I do truly want to be healthy. I do truly want to have a life that is really empowering that I feel good about. Okay, well, let's take a look. Like, if no different than, well, you use the example of Tiger Woods, no different than Tiger Woods watching himself swing on a video, observing himself play.

No different than a person who stands in front of an audience and does a lecture and watches them do the lecture. Nobody else will see what they see. They'll see themselves very differently than anybody else. And they'll see themselves do it and they'll want to self-correct. They'll want to evolve their experience. Now, because we got this big frontal lobe, 40% of our entire brain, that's our conscience. That's a seat of our awareness.

That's our entire brain. That's our conscience. That's a seat of our awareness. That's our creative center. When we ask the question, what would it be like to be in a different life or to be happy? If instead of getting on your cell phone or instead of getting on your social media or instead of turning on the TV or instead of calling a friend and instead of doing something to distract you from that possible answer, If you sat with it long enough and that creative center turned on, it would naturally scan the whole entire landscape of the brain because it's the CEO, it's the symphony leader, it has connections to all parts of the brain. And it's going to look out over the landscape of the brain and look at the knowledge you've

learned and the experiences that are stitched in your brain that are associated with what you know to answer that question. And as it calls up these different networks of neurons, once the brain fires in tandem, you get an image or a picture in your mind and that's called intention. You see a new possibility, right? So then this is why I am passionate about what we're doing. I never thought, Rangan, that I would see the kind of changes in people's physical health that I've seen in the last two years. Now, people do the best with what they think is available. If you don't know that this is possible, you are going to make the same choice. And that may be relying on some pharmaceutical, something outside of you, some therapy, whatever. There's nothing wrong with that.

But if your response hasn't changed in your life, the efficacy of whatever you're doing is going to be diminished. Okay, so once I now know that people could heal from different health conditions, and there's evidence in the science, and there's evidence in testimony, like the person that you just recited, that's one of many, many people that have had that experience. When they stand on the stage at our week-long retreats, and we call them up, why do I call them up on the stage? Because they are speaking the truth. They are the example of truth. And I want people to become aware of that possibility.

Why? Because if you're unaware of it, it doesn't exist for you. Consciousness is awareness, right? And so then with consciousness, you can't have consciousness without energy. So that thought of another possibility is a different energy. It's a different possibility. And so now, once you know it's possible then, okay, now let's get down to stepping in the footprints that other people have left behind. Why? If you're telling the story of your past every single day and 50% of that isn't even the truth, then you're reliving a miserable life that you never even had,

all for the reason to excuse yourself from change. Stop telling the story of your past and start telling the story of your future. Stop romancing your past and start romancing your future. Why not fall in love with your future as much as you've fallen in love with your past? Why not fall in love with your future as much as you've fallen in love with your past? If I do this as an experiment, and you're scientifically minded, make your life the experiment. Make your life the experiment. Okay, I'm going to be uncomfortable if I start making different choices. Okay, but I'm not going to white-knuckle it and stay in this unknown. What I'm going to do is I'm going to work on making my brain work better.

Let's work on making my heart work better. Let's put the whole thing together and let's practice. And so then in the beginning, if it doesn't happen in two days, most people quit. Why? Because Amazon Prime can deliver to your door in a day and you're used to that kind of entitlement of convenience, creating really and making change. If it took you five years to develop this health condition, it may take you a little time to uncreate it. But what you're looking for is those small, subtle shifts in your life and in your body. Once you start seeing those changes take place, now you're more invested. And you can't believe in a new future without believing in yourself. And you can't believe in yourself new future without believing in yourself.

And you can't believe in yourself without believing in a new future. You have to choose yourself every single day. So the person who's, when the drugs and everything else wasn't working, they were their own resource. And they understood that this was their medicine. And so every day, every day, they said, how did I do at the end of my day? When did I fall from grace? When did I go unconscious? When did I return back to the old me?

Let me rehearse it. Tomorrow I want to evolve my experience. And it was no longer about healing. It was about changing. And they stand on the stage and they say, oh God, I just realized that I have to work on this more with my eyes open. I have to stay in this emotional state. I have to keep the vision alive in my mind.

And it's so much easier to forget that vision of your future than to remember it. And it takes repetition and practice. And there is a very strong change that goes on when people start making the effort. So simple thing to do, wake up in the morning before you reach for your cell phone, ask yourself, who do I no longer want to be? Let me write down the thoughts today. Let me become so conscious of I can't, this is horrible, I hate my life. Let's just stop that thought because that thought is going to produce a chemical that's

going to signal your body to feel a certain way. Let's become aware of how I behave. Write down two behaviors. Do I complain? Do I blame? Do I rush? Write them down and just commit them. Review them in your mind.

What emotions do I want to no longer feel today or at least stay conscious of? Do I feel sadness? Do I feel suffering? Do I feel fear? Do I feel anxiety? Let me just become conscious of those. And if I start feeling that, I just want to become aware and see if I can change it. Okay, what do I want to change to?

When I feel that, let me think this way. Let me review that. Let me review how I'm going to behave. Let me rehearse it in my mind. Let me teach my body emotionally. I want to be able to feel this feeling over and over again so well. I'll keep practice feeling it till I can feel it on command. Wow. Now that's greatness. You know, that's getting out of the bleachers and getting on the playing field. And it's not going to be a linear process.

But catching yourself and when it matters the most is when it's the hardest. That's when it matters the most. Yeah. I mean, just wonderful right wonderful hearing you speak with such passion i love the idea that we should be our own experiment because what i'm hearing is listen there's no side effects there well there's no negative side effects there try it right try it

there's no downside to trying to change the way that you think and practicing it and developing it like a skill and i think that's the the for me. This is a skill that you can practice, you can get better at. Just as if you practice running, you may get faster and run for further distances. Well, let's also practice thinking in a different way. So I thought that was really important for people to have in the front of their minds. I practice on myself. I am in my early 40s and genuinely have never felt this good, Dr. Joe. Calm, content, happy. I know I'm responsible for my emotions and my thoughts. So I've now trained probably over five or six years to get to the point now where external events just don't, I don't allow them anymore to influence my state. And what you said about it not being linear. Yeah, I have a daily practice, a morning routine, which has a bit of

meditation, a bit of breath work, a bit of positive mindsets. And you just keep showing up, you keep doing it. And then before you know it, you're in some sort of stressful... Well, you're in a situation in life that previously you would have found incredibly stressful and gone on a negative... Just like this negative mindset afterwards, which would have led to all kinds of compensatory behaviors. And you're like, oh, wow. I didn't react to that. I could see that big space between stress and response. And I want to be respectful to your time, but I'd love to just briefly cover meditation and brain waves if you had time, because I think, again, that's really helpful for people to understand that. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can

break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour, and I can't wait to see you there.

This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal. And as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we

can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link

in your podcast app. in your podcast app. Okay, well, let's demystify it. I looked it up. You know, I looked up the symbol. What does that symbol that represents meditation mean? And the actual translation of the word means to become familiar with.

That's what it means. So then when you become conscious of your unconscious thoughts, behaviors, and emotions and become familiar with them, if you can become so conscious that you don't go unconscious and you're facing off with your old self and you have those thoughts,

you're in a meditation, that's a good thing, right? And if you can fire and wire the new thoughts and rehearse the new behaviors and practice trading the chemicals of survival for elevated emotions and you keep practicing those heart-centered emotions, they'll begin to become familiar to you. So breaking the habit of the old self and reinventing the new self, unlearning and relearning is the model of change, okay? But when you're living in stress and you're living in survival and the brain is aroused, what we're doing when we lost control or we can't predict what's going to happen is we try to control

and predict everything in our life. And the arousal of the stress hormones causes our brain to move in these brainwave states called high beta. Now, we're talking right now and we're in low-level beta. We're in beta. And beta is conscious awareness. We're aware that we're local in a body. We're occupying a body in space and time, in an environment and time. And the sensory system is picking up all this vital information through our senses from the environment. And beta brainwaves happen to create coherence between our inner world and our outer world.

No problem there. If I said, oh, there'll be a dinner tonight and I'm going to invite you, there'll be 10 people there and please just remember all their names. Your brain would kind of pick up into like a mid-range beta state. It's not a bad stress. It's just that you got to get a little bit, the light bulb gets a little brighter. You got to get a little bit more aware, a little bit more awake. But when you're frustrated, when you you're angry when you're impatient when you're resentful

when you're fearful you're in these high beta brainwave patterns and then that high beta is the alarm it's the alert it's emergency there's a threat there's a danger so we shift our attention from one person to another person to another problem to another meeting to another thing to another place to the past and every one of those circuits in our brain that are associated with everything we know in our life starts to light up out of order, like a lightning storm in the cloud, because our attention is shifting. Turns out the brain starts firing very incoherently, and we over-focus on things. Why? Because we don't want them to happen again. And so the arousal causes this incoherence in the brain.

And when the brain is incoherent, we're incoherent. And the person in survival, the primitive system is saying, focus on matter, narrow your focus on the danger, focus on something material. And why does that happen? Because the sense is heightened and we become materialist. So you're not going to be thinking about anything else if something's rustling in the bushes and it's dark, you're going to pay attention to that, right? So

this kind of habituation of narrowing our focus or over-focusing becomes the common way people think when they're in survival. They think that's focus. So we said, okay, how are we going to teach people how to change waves? So what if they go from a narrow focus and focusing on objects in the material world to broadening their focus or creating a divergent focus instead of a convergent focus and opening their focus and focusing on nothing but space, nothing known, nothing material. And the act of sensing space tends to slow the brainwaves down and start to suppress the analytical mind. When you're in survival, you're in stress, you're overly analytical.

And our research shows that if you're analyzing yourself, and you're analyzing the problems in your life within that aroused emotional state, 100% of the time, you'll make your brain worse, you'll drive it further into those high beta states. And that's like driving your sports car in first gear on the freeway. It just won't work in time. So as you broaden your focus and you sense nothing, the acts of sensing and feeling cause you to stop analyzing and thinking. And your brainwaves start to go down into a slower brainwave state. And you get past the analytical mind and you move into what's called alpha brainwaves. Now, alpha brainwaves,

in beta, your outer world is more real than your inner world. In alpha, your inner world starts becoming more real than the outer world. And the voice in your head, that default that's talking to you all the time, tends to shut off and the brain starts to imagine. It starts to see in images and pictures. That's alpha. It starts to see in images and pictures. That's alpha. It's an imaginary state. It's a creative state. But when you're sensing space, what happens that's so unique is those different compartments

of the brain that were subdivided when the person is sensing space, not only moves into alpha, the brain starts to synchronize. The different communities of neurons that were firing out of order start to resonate in coherence and order. And the front of the brain is starting to resonate with both sides of the brain. And all of a sudden, you're seeing more community of neurons coming together. And what sinks in the brain links in the brain. Now, when the person has coherent alpha brainwave patterns,

now all of a sudden the brain becomes more integrated and they can start to hold an image and focus or dream or imagine. We all do this when we're driving in the car on the freeway, okay? There's nothing wrong with that. But then if you can get your body to relax even further so that it's in a light sleep, that it feels so safe that it could actually rest in a light sleep while you're conscious and awake, relaxed and awake. Now you're in a brainwave pattern called theta. Now in theta, lights go out in the thinking neocortex.

The memory bank, the autobiographical self is literally shut off. Your connection to the environment, to your body, and to time literally changes. If lights go out on the neocortex, then you get beyond your identity. And we see then, when a person's in theta, the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is wide open to information. And when you get beyond the analytical mind, then you open the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. That's what separates at the analytical mind. Now you're suggestible to the information. You're in a hypnotic state. And you can rewrite a program. You can rewrite a new script. You can change the way you behave. You can change the way you, you can reprogram yourself to do

something differently. And you can't do it in high beta because you're not in the operating system. You got to get beyond the conscious mind into the subconscious mind to rewrite those programs. So teaching people how to regulate and change their brainwaves is an important element. But what about the heart? Because to create a new future, it requires a clear intention and an elevated emotion. It is the fundamental quality of brain and heart coherence. So then can you practice breathing through your heart and practice regulating your heart and practice bringing up these elevated emotions and feel it with your heart? And our data suggests

that if you place your attention on your heart and you just do that for a few minutes, you'll actually give the heart a very low frequency, and that very low frequency is indigenous to the energy of the heart. So the heart starts building a little energetic field. Once that happens, the heart will inform the brain through the afferent fibers. They'll say, it's time to create, or it's safe to create. And when the heart gets coherent coherent it sends a very profound

signal like grabbing a big sheet and giving it a little whip there's a wave of energy that goes to the brain and all of a sudden you see the heart and the brain start synchronizing and now we're in a creative state and the heart produces an external magnetic field that's up to three meters wide and now we start feeling more whole now we feel like our future has already happened, and we're no longer looking for it. Why would we look for if it felt like it already happened? And we're really relaxing into the present moment. So teaching people how to regulate their brain waves and move into these slower frequencies, people get really good at it. And we have the data that suggests you could be 91, you could be seven years old. You could have a disease. You could not have a disease. You could

eat gluten, not eat gluten. You could eat meat. You could drink wine. You could smoke cigarettes. It doesn't matter. It's just people, once they learn the skill on how to change their brainwaves, they can open the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. But intention is not enough. Intention is the directive. It's like the electrical charge in the field. The elevated emotion is the magnetic charge. It's what feels like the future has already happened for us. So brain and heart coherence, when you do that together, in a sense, you have a Wi-Fi signal. The body's emitting information and energy. And so we teach that as a way for people to really practice getting beyond their analytical facilities. And when they're able to do that, as we said over and over in this talk, it just becomes natural meditations at retreats in all kinds of different ways. For someone who feels inspired by what you've said and thinks, you know what, I want to dip my toe in here. You know, meditation is all the rage these days.

Many people from lots of different fields are talking about it. Is what you teach a specific type of meditation? different fields are talking about it. Is what you teach a specific type of meditation? Do you feel that all kinds of meditation have value for people to at least get going on this journey of opening up to space and just stopping the analytical minds? You know, I mean, if the environment is so seductive, you know, and if our body has been conditioned and habituated to be the mind, and we're either living in the predictable future or the familiar past, it makes so much sense to start our day to disconnect from the environment, to settle our body down into the present moment and get beyond its drives, its emotions and habits. act, right? So we teach no specific form of traditional cultural religious meditation. In fact, that usually divides an audience. We look at the data. We look at the data, and we look at what exactly it is that either I say or the combination of everything put together

with the sound and everything that produces these elegant states. Now, there's just not enough time, but I can tell you when a person gets really, really in the zone, they hit a really transcendental moment when they get to that point of theta and they go into an arousal. But the arousal is not fear, the arousal is not pain, the arousal is not aggression, the arousal is ecstasy. They're connecting. And that's the moment where we see an instantaneous biological upgrade that goes on in the person's body. Energy starts to inform matter. And we're lucky enough to be able to catch that on different brain scans. So then it makes sense then that knowledge is the precursor to experience.

So you got to learn. You've got to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. You've got to demystify the process. It's got to make sense to you. That's why we have so many men in our events because the men love the science. They're like, I'm not going to listen to my wife. It doesn't make sense to me. But she's all intuitive and feeling.

But this, I can do this. It makes sense to me. So then when it makes sense to you. So then as an example, we have this little course called the formula. And the formula really is the understanding of brain and heart coherence. It's 30 minute lectures with five meditations.

I think there's 12 or 13 sessions, easy digestible way to understand it. Then once you understand the knowledge, you'll say, okay, let me try working on the present moment. Okay, now that I got that down, let me try this. And so we build, you know, step by step, because I don't, I want to set people up for success. And I want to set it up so that it's within the realm of their acceptance, where they don't go, oh, my God, this guy's killing me. I got I mean, I got a busy day here, and I can't sit here. But if it's, if

it's in increments, and it's digestible, and you can understand sit here. But if it's in increments and it's digestible and you can understand why you're doing it and what you're doing it, then the how gets very easy. And that's what we want people to do, to experiment. Let me try this out for two weeks and let's see if anything changes in my life. If it does, I'm going to keep doing it. So communities of people, we have a huge community around the world. And what I love the most about our community is we're doers. They don't go, oh God, I got to meditate today. No, they meditate because they don't want the magic to end in their lives. They're doing it because events, they're no longer going anywhere to get what they want. Somehow it seems like it's coming to them. They're a magnet. Their

synchronicities, the serendipities, the coincidences, the opportunities are coming to them as a result of doing the work. And now they're believing less that they're the victims of their life. And now every coincidence, every opportunity informs them that they are the creator of their life. And now the game starts to change because now if you truly believe that you are the creator of your life, then you got to make time to create and you got to experiment in the game and the game called life. Yeah. It's so powerful. I think at the very least, I think this conversation would have inspired people to say, I can change the way I think I can maybe start my day by not letting inputs in from the external world,

keep the cell phone off, keep the TV off, keep the news off, spend some time with myself thinking, rehearsing. Even that would be a great start for people just to start changing the pattern, the addiction to the life that they currently have. If we had longer, there's so much more I would have spoken to you about. Maybe we can do a part two at some point in the future but before you leave Dr Joe this podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our life and I think it's very clear from your research and your years of service to people that when we think better when we think differently we're going to get more out of our life. Have you got any final thoughts or words for people who are struggling? They don't know where

to turn. They think the way that they currently feel is the way that they always are going to feel. And they're getting a little bit of inspiration here. Have you got any final words for them to help set them off on that journey? Yeah, it's really simple. You already know how to do this. Everybody on this podcast has done something great in their life. Everybody's done something great. And what happened? You got a crazy idea and that you stuck with that idea long enough for you to begin to feel the emotions of that future before it happened. And no person, no circumstance, no condition in your life would talk you out of that future. And people who truly make the change.

I mean, some people say, well, I believe in this. I just believe it works for everybody else, but it doesn't work for me. Now, this is a defining moment. So you've got to make a decision then. And you got to make a decision with such firm intention that the amplitude of that decision carries a level of energy that causes your body to respond to your mind. That the choice that you make to change your life becomes a moment in time that you never forget. And the stronger the emotion you feel in that choice the more you'll remember that decision and that's a huge explosion in the

quantum field and you're giving your body a taste of the future emotionally and if we did that every day and got up from our meditations or our inward introspection or contemplation differently than when we started and if you can maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day get ready because weird things are going to begin to happen in your life it's the law and they're going to come in ways that you would never predict that you would never predict, that you would never expect, because if you can predict it and expect it, it's the known. It's got to come in a way that surprises us, that leaves no doubt that what we're doing inside of us is producing some effect outside of us. And the moment we correlate the changes we're making inside of us with the effect

we're producing outside of us, we're going to pay attention to what we did and we're going to do it again. And that's when we start to become more of the creator of our lives instead of the victim of our lives. We know how to do this. We already know how to do it. The brain is wired to be creative. It's just that we have to learn how to break the survival state and those automatic thoughts and those habituations of behaviors and the emotions that we live by every single day to a point that when we overcome it, we become somebody else. And who gets to be the beneficiary of that? We do. And then the people in our life that we love, and then our community, and ultimately the world. And we can, you know, people in our work always say this. They walk back into their life and people say hey what's up with

you you're different what is it what did you do did you you you look differently what happened all right no and what's happening is the person is showing up and the person who's viewing them, the memory of them isn't fitting in any longer. The person's at a phase. We see people how we remember them and all of a sudden something's different about that person. Why is that important? Because if you, there's nothing wrong with reacting. We all react. The question is how long you react. There's nothing wrong with reacting. We all react. The question is how long you react.

If your response, like you said earlier, has changed to challenges or conditions in your life, and people notice that, you're giving them permission in their life to do the same. You're not saying, hey, watch me. Hey, this is how you need to change. This is the time in history where you say, let me show you what compassion looks like. Let me demonstrate leadership from my heart. Let me show you what compassion looks like. Let me demonstrate leadership from my heart. Let me show you. I want to give you permission, because of mirror neurons, that this is the way it works. And what happens is an emergent consciousness starts to take place. An emergent consciousness in a week-long retreat with 1600 people

may start in one state of mind and body, but by the end of that week, there's an emergent consciousness and people are completely, the pro-social networks in their brain are activated, they're communing, they're connecting, they're more present, more appreciative of the moment. That's the natural state of being. So is it worth the effort? You ask the person who never missed a day of 18 days, 18 months of doing their meditation to heal their health condition. You ask them if it was worth it. They'll tell you, my disease was my greatest teacher. I'm so blessed that I had it because now I'm a different person. So that's when you're no longer belonging to your past, you're belonging to your future. And there's just enough evidence now to say that it is possible. And people do the best with what's available.

Now that you know that it's available, you may want to make a different choice and try it out. Change your thinking, change your life. Dr. Joe Dispenza, thank you so much for joining me. And I hope at some point in the future, we get to do this again in person and we get to hang out in person. I would really, really like that. I'd love that too. Thank you, Ryan. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do have a think about one thing or one idea from that episode that you think you can start to introduce into your own life.

Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week and always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.