Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Unlock the Power of Your Mind | Dr Joe Dispenza #384

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 266 of the podcast with Dr. Joe Dispenza, a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and researcher. Dr. Joe has spent decades studying neuroscience, meditation, and the effect our thoughts can have on our health and well-being. And in this clip, he explains why it's so easy for us to get trapped in negative thought

Starting point is 00:01:44 patterns and shares how we can learn to break free. 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, if you believe at all that 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

Starting point is 00:02:31 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 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

Starting point is 00:03:22 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.

Starting point is 00:04:11 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.

Starting point is 00:04:43 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:05:13 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 do that over and over and over again. 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,

Starting point is 00:05:41 is it possible then our thoughts can make us well? 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

Starting point is 00:06:32 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 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 choices 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.

Starting point is 00:07:10 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 suffering, it loves the same pain, it loves the same unworthiness.

Starting point is 00:07:27 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

Starting point is 00:08:00 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. 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. 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

Starting point is 00:08:49 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 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.

Starting point is 00:09:33 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. One of the deep realizations in my own life over the past few years has been that 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 do what I need to do to win at all costs.

Starting point is 00:10:19 But I know full well that 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? Being competitive absolutely serves that purpose because if you're competitive, 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 competitive in a different way. It's not because I need to succeed because that says who I am and that's a reflection of who I am, it's because 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

Starting point is 00:11:10 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's 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:11:54 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 going to be in my life when I open my eyes? How am I going to 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 rehearsed mentally, how are you going to be on a Zoom call, how you're going to be with your colleagues,

Starting point is 00:12:26 how you're 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

Starting point is 00:12:49 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 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

Starting point is 00:13:31 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:14:16 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? 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?

Starting point is 00:15:01 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 remind myself who I do want to be, how I do want to think, how I do want to act,

Starting point is 00:15:31 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:15:51 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. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | How to Unlock the Power of Your Mind | Dr Joe Dispenza #384

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