Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Powerful Daily Habit to Break Unconscious Patterns & Create Lasting Change | Dr Joe Dispenza #599

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Today’s guest 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 changes in our lives, for both our health and our happiness. 86% of people in the Western world reach for their phone first thing in the morning. But what if that simple habit is programming you to think, feel and behave in the same way… every single day?⁠ Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 549 of the podcast with Dr. Joe Dispenza, a New York Times best-selling author, speaker, and researcher. Dr. Joe has spent decades studying neuroscience, meditation, and the effect our thoughts have on our health and well-being.  In this clip, he shares how we can begin breaking free from the unconscious patterns that can keep us feeling stuck, and why your morning routine could be the most important place to start.⁠ Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes and the full podcast are available at https://drchatterjee.com/549 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. 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 other qualified health care provider with any questions you may 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.

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Today's clip is from episode 549 of the podcast with best-selling author, speaker and researcher, Dr. Joe Dispenter. Dr. Joe has spent decades studying neuroscience, meditation, and a powerful impact our thoughts have on our health. and well-being. And in this clip, he shares how we can begin breaking free from the unconscious patterns that can keep us feeling stuck and why your morning routine could be the most important place to start. You mentioned earlier on what we practice we get good at. So for many people, the first thing they do in the morning is they practice stress. They get up, whether it's the news or emails or social media. They, in what I consider to be a very important time of the day,

they allow the environment to start conditioning their mind and that conditions their body. So that's the way I see it. So how important to you is the first part of the day when someone has woken up, is that a critical part of the day where people have to be very intentional or can they do some of the work

that you promote later on? Or do you think first thing in the morning is a very important part of the day? I want to be really careful about this. I think there's two times the door to the subconscious mind opens up. Okay. When we wake up in the morning

and we go to bed at night and it's simple brain chemistry and simple physiology. We have a circadian rhythm As soon as there's light, our body has been pretty much programmed that we begin to release serotonin, different chemicals that kind of wake us up. So our brain waves go from delta to theta to alpha to beta.

And you kind of slide up this way and then you're back to conscious awareness, local and space and time. When you go to bed at night, you go from beta to alpha to theta and you slide down. Now, if you're stressed, you can't stop thinking, you stay in beta and you're thinking actually is arousing the body because you're thinking about your problems, you can't slide down, right? So when we're in alpha, our analytical

facilities are suppressed, we're in theta, we're in a hypnotic state. And the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is wide open. What separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind is the analytical mind. So as you suppress analytical facilities, you can program anybody to do anything. So then what really happens for most people before they even reach for their cell phone, and by the way, the statistics are 86% of the people in the Western world. First thing they do is they reach for the cell phone

and they connect to everything that's known. And why is that a problem? Well, I would never tell people how to think, but I would give them information to cause them to think. So the device is reminding them of things that are known. And every person, every object, everything, every place is mapped neurologically in our brain because we've experienced it. And then we have an emotion associated with our coworker, with our boss, with our ex,

with our whoever. And so the moment we start responding, now we start feeling the same way. So now the environment is actually controlling, the person's feelings and thoughts. And anything that controls the way we feel and the way we think, we're victims to. So something's programming us to think and feel a certain way. There's nothing wrong with that. You should check your text and do whatever you need to do.

But the first thing in the morning, if the door between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind is open, why don't we program a new behavior? Why don't we rehearse a different way of being with our children, with our spouse, in our Zoom meetings, when we're alone, when we're in traffic, is there a better way to evolve our experience? So if you're truly in the game of evolution, you're truly in the game, like one lifetime one day, what am I working on today? Can I respond a different way to this person? Can I think this way instead of that way? Let me be conscious of my unconscious thoughts. Let me not be in a habit. Let me stay away from certain emotions. Let me practice feeling these

emotions and see if I can maintain it. Now you're in the game. You're out of the bleachers. you're on the playing field. So it actually happens even before the cell phone. Because what most people do is they wake up and the first thing they do is the brain is a record of the past. They think of their problems. And those problems are just memories

that are etched in the brain that are connected to certain people and objects at certain times and places. The moment they think of their problems are thinking in the past. Then when they think about their problems and they feel unhappy, now their body's in the past. And if you believe that your thoughts

have something to do with your destiny, wow. And then the emotion that's associated to it is now the body's in the past because thoughts of the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body and how we think and how we feel creates our state of being.

Now here's the problem. If you can't think greater than how you feel and you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny and you understand that feelings and emotions are a wrecker of the past then you're thinking in the past

and your life will stay the same. Yeah. So I've always been a fan of morning routines personally. For me, I've discovered when I have some intentional time to myself in the morning and when I don't, I'm a different person. I show up differently. My productivity, the way I am with my wife or my kids is completely different. So I know mornings are very important for me.

And I feel first in the morning I'm priming myself to be a certain way for that day. It's this idea that you spoke about last time, mental rehearsal. You know, we have no problem. thinking about athletes rehearsing how they're going to perform. We have no problem thinking that, of course, an actor, if they want to play a part a certain way, they're going to rehearse. They're going to keep rehearsing until they're able to do it.

Yet, most of us don't really apply that on our own life. We don't think, yeah, I need to be rehearsing for the person I want to be in my own life. The game of life. The game of life, the most important game. Yeah, the most important game. Well, 95% of who we are, as a set of memorized behaviors, automatic, emotional,

responses, unconscious, have as hardwired attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions that are running pretty much like a computer program. They're automatic, right? So you can think positively all you want. You can say, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm free, I'm free, I'm worthy and worthy. And your body's saying, no, you're not, you're miserable, right? So it makes sense that there's got to be an unlearning process. And we've got to stay conscious of our unconscious thoughts that slip by our awareness unnoticed. We've got to watch how we speak. We've got to observe how we act.

We got to pay attention to the way we're feeling and we have to become so conscious of those unconscious states of mind and body that we don't go unconscious in our waking day because how you think, how you act and how you feel is your personality and your personality creates your personal reality. So if you're thinking the same way,

you're acting the same way and you're feeling the same way, nothing's going to change in your life. Right. So then the unlearning process is, as valuable as the re-learning process. The breaking the habit of the old self has to happen before you reinvent a new self. You got to prune synaptic connections

before you sprout new connections. You got to unfire and unwire before you refire and re-wire. You got to deprogram and then reprogram. So how do you unlearn? I get you can meditate. You can feel that elevated emotion with a very, very high degree of emotional intensity.

but how do you go about becoming conscious and unlearning those previous patterns? It's trial and error. You've got to go out into life and try it out, okay? I've changed my internal state. You could have a great meditation. You can connect, your heart could open. This happened to me.

You could open your heart. You'd be amazing. You feel like the day is invincible. And you get up, and then the rest of your day, you're unconscious, the 15 hours of your day. So you're going to weigh one hour of being in a different state of being against 15 hours of you being unhappy and rushing it in a program.

So then how many times do we have to forget until we stop forgetting and start remembering? That's called change. How many times do we have to go unconscious to the point where we no longer go unconscious and we stay conscious? That's the moment of change. Now, if you're truly out of the bleachers

and you're on the playing field, and this happens to a lot of people in our work, They say, I had to start really watching myself in my life, how I was emotionally responding to my ex, how I was emotionally responding to my financial problems. I had to really, really pay attention that, and that takes an enormous amount of energy and an enormous amount of awareness

to stop the program, right? So you forget and you go, damn, I went unconscious to that. Now, you didn't lose, you didn't fail, you just became conscious. Now, if you keep becoming so conscious of your unconscious states, you're outside the program. You're only in the program when you're unconscious. The moment you're conscious, you can objectify your subjective self. So you can see yourself through the eyes of someone else. So, okay, how am I in my waking day?

The moment you begin to ask that question, you turn on the frontal lobe, and the frontal lobe is the seat of your conscience. Now, the moment you start looking at at the end of your day, how did I do? this is such an important question. How did I do today? Did I fall from grace? When did I lose it? And who did I lose it with? If I had another opportunity, how would I do it differently?

The learning process comes from the mistake. The brain learns by mistakes and surprises. I've made enough of them in my life. It's just whether you're going to do it again. You want to do it again, you're back in the habit, back in the routine. Now, if you're just doing your meditation, just because you want to please God or do the right thing or feel good about yourself, that's going to get stale after. after a while because it's just gonna become

another routine between your coffee and your shower and your emails and your drive to work and people aren't present, right? So the familiar past, conditioning is based on the past, that thought and the feeling, but habituation is the programming to predictable future, that's the known. So if you teach a person how to find the present moment, that's where the unknown exists.

And that takes a lot of energy and a lot of awareness and yet if you practice it, the body literally will begin to respond to the mind. It's like training an animal. It finally relaxes. And when that occurs, your response to people and circumstances in your life will be different because you overcame yourself at the beginning of the day. So I'm an early morning guy just like you. I get up really early. Why? Because nobody bothers me. What time? 4.30-ish somewhere around there. And then what do you do?

I get in my think box. What's a think box? Okay, what am I doing today? But I'm not going to sit down and just jump into a meditation. And what thoughts before I go into this meditation, am I going to stay away from? Well, what circumstances, what things I can think about later that aren't that important? I mean, what emotions, what memories, am I going to stay away from? If I go there, I know what that's going to do. Why am I doing this meditation? What am I going to be doing?

What am I going to be doing? Just like anybody who does anything really well, you get in your think box and you organize what you're going to do. You're doing this in bed or you're having coffee first? I just get up, move around a little bit, you know, do a few things, maybe write some notes down. Because then I can assign meaning to the act. I can stay conscious when I'm in it. So you do all this before your meditation.

Always. But then when I get in my play box, there's no thinking. I did all my thinking in my think box. You did all your thinking in your think box. Is that also when sometimes we wake up and there's these kind of thoughts that are just popping up, is you writing down a few things? As you processing them, a way of sort of quietening down the noise

so that you can drop into meditation? So let's say I have 10 Zoom meetings in one day. I look at my calendar and I go, So, okay, none of that, I'm going to get to all of that. This is not my time to think about the known. I know all this stuff is going to work out. I know how the Zoom meetings are going to go. Okay, but let me just make sure when I'm in these certain Zoom meetings that I'm leading

with my heart and I'm being the person that I want to be as an example for my team. I want to make sure I'm communicating really clearly. I'll make time for this. Okay, I get all that out of the way. That's all the known stuff. But when I come to execute now, what am I going to do to open my heart today? Like, what am I really going to do? When I do the breath to bring energy to my brain, what am I bringing?

Like, where am I going to go to that? What do I want to experience? How do I do that? Let me just review that. Okay, then I'm going to open my focus. I'm going to go deep into nothing. I'm going to go as far as I can. And then when I get to that point, then I'm going to create.

And when I create, this is what I'm going to create. So I'm not thinking when I'm there, what should I create. I've already got that all worked out. I'm rehearsing, I'm getting clear on what I'm going to do. I'm getting clear on what I'm not going to do. I'm going to clear on how my last meditation was. and how I want to evolve my next meditation. So then when I get to my playbox,

I'm not analyzing and thinking because I'm analyzing and thinking. I can't do it, right? So I get that worked out. If it takes me half an hour, I allow for two hours for myself. If it takes me half an hour to get very clear. And sometimes there's disturbing things that I have to get through because there's meetings and stuff like that. But I just go, that is all always going to work out.

This is you, this is your time. It's interesting, Dr. Joe, that for many of us, for many people, meditation is almost like your pre-day ritual, right? So you meditate to prime yourself for your day, how you're going to be. But when you talk about your morning routine, you have a pre-meditation ritual, which I find really, really interesting. Because I want to get into it. I want to assign meaning to what I'm doing. When you assign meaning to the act, you turn on your prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex says, quiet, everybody that's not involved in this intention, settle down. So the frontal lobe will actually lower the volumes of the circuits in the brain that are disturbance.

So when you assign meaning to something, you get more value from it. So I just learn that if I just get in and just do my meditation, sometimes they're wonderful because I've done it enough times. But if I just drop in, it just doesn't have any meaning. If it doesn't have any meaning, then it just becomes another routine. You're doing your meditation, but you're thinking about your coffee. You're drinking your coffee. You're already thinking about your emails.

Your brain's an anticipation machine, and we lose our free will to that kind of programming. So after I, when I get my think box really clear, it's just like when I used to golf. I would just kind of look at where I was going to hit the ball. I was thinking about the club I was going to use, how I was going to swing, and how it was going to feel. I work it all out in my think box. When I get my play box, I've done all my thinking. Now I'm just going to execute, right? So we've found that when people do that,

we do this in our week-long events. I'll always say to the audience, all right, after we come back from the break. So turn to someone now, and I want you to have a conversation about what you love about yourself, that you did really well in that last meditation. What did you stick?

What felt right for you? What did you execute really well? I want you to articulate that and remind yourself, reproduce that same level of mind, install the neurological hardware by firing and wiring so you can step into that footprint and do that again in the next meditation.

Then I say to them, now let's light a match in the dark place. If you had another opportunity to do another meditation, what would you bring? What would you work on improving? What would you become aware of that you don't want to do that you did in that last meditation? Let's get really clear about what you're not going to do.

And if you had another opportunity, what you would do. and somehow that kind of shapes the brain for the next experience for them to evolve their experience because they're in the experience now they're like oh yeah I'm not going down the I'm not getting off the exit of my job

I'm not getting off the exit of my ex I'm going to go straight I'm going to just keep so you can make those turns in the beginning it's normal but you start making those turns and then all of a sudden you're realizing I'm not going to make those turns and you drive right past the exit

I drive right past them too old I drive right past them too out of shape I drive right past, I'm the night's season going to go away. There's something wrong with me. You just keep driving past those. The next thing, you know, you run into something big. So it's trial and error, you know? I mean, this is like, if I rehearse how I'm going to be mentally,

I'm going to install the hardware in my brain. If I keep doing it, it's going to become a software program. I'm going to start acting that way. Okay, if I say I can't, it's too hard, I'm too tired, I don't feel good. Those are the things that stop me. Okay. But what if I just start saying anything is possible? I believe in synchronicities.

What if I, with my intention and attention, just really get clear on that. Would that be the new voice in my head? So now, if you're truly in the game of change, then you would be rehearsing how you were going to be in the next Zoom meeting if you were really off in the last one. The next time I have that opportunity, if I'm truly in the game of evolution, let's see if I can stay in my heart and the whole time I'm not going to react. That would be a victory for me. That would be a victory.

So at the end of your day, you go, I can actually kind of love myself. I actually got my behaviors to match my intentions. I got my actions equal to my thoughts. I had a new experience in it. It actually felt good. Hey, I'm going to do that again. And you start doing it with your children. You start doing it, opening the door for the person who's walking out of the office building.

You start letting people go ahead of you in traffic. You're just cool. You're no longer in that vigilant state. Now, get enough people doing that. All of a sudden, you start noticing your wife a little bit differently. or Rangan's all of a sudden starting to smile a little bit more. He seems way more relaxed and chilled. People are going to start getting relaxed and chilled around you because mirror neurons in the

tribes say, hey, there's somebody doing something that I'd like to do. I just need evidence to be able to do it. And all of a sudden, you start developing a community of people that start behaving differently. What's the significance of that? That's called emergence. An emergent consciousness is that everybody's behaving differently. And that is what's going to change the world, you know?

You know, one of the core ideas I get from your work is that we all have a choice. We can practice the way that we want to feel so that we actually start feeling it every day. For someone who is watching this or listening and is intrigued, and they go, okay, I understand, I've got a choice. I can practice feeling an elevated emotion. They also hear you saying that this can take time if you spent 10 years in stress, it ain't going to happen overnight. And sometimes it does. But sometimes it can do.

For that person who's watching now and listening and says, hey, hey, Doc, I understand what you're saying. I get it. But I don't have time. My life is busy. I don't have time to meditate. What would you say to them?

I would say you can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering or you can learn and change in a state of joy and inspiration. I mean, if you don't have time now, make time when you can. But for the most part, I mean, I want to inspire people to not wait for that crisis or that trauma or that disease or that loss to really change. I want them to be inspired to try it out. It's an experiment. The hardest part about all of this, Ronkin,

is actually making the time to do. That's the hardest part about all of this. When we make time for our precious selves, when we invest in ourselves, we invest in our future. And, and, order for us to believe in ourselves, we have to believe in possibility. And when we believe in possibility, we believe in ourselves. So it doesn't even have to be a long amount of time. Do a little experiment and say, I'm not going to think these thoughts. I'll write them down. I'm not going to act this way or speak this way. And today I'm going to work on just staying conscious of these feelings. That's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to close my eyes for a few moments and remember that I'm not going to do these things. If that's the start,

you just demystified meditation because meditation means to become familiar with. To become familiar with, that symbol is familiarization, to become so familiar with yourself that you can become familiar with a new self and not default back to the old person. We all default. We all react. That's not the question. The question is, how long are you going to react?

How long are you going to do that for? And so we have a choice. Try it out as an experiment. little time, just a little time. If you don't have the time, how people say, well, I don't know the time. You know, and I say, well, we'll get up earlier. And they say, well, I'm tired.

I say, well, go to bed earlier. What am I going to say? You know, when do you want to do it? If you don't want to do it and you don't have the time, don't do it. If it inspires you to do it, I want you to do it. Only do it if you're inspired. Don't do it because you have to. And so the act of making time, you show up to do the work

because you want to believe in your future more than you believe in your and there's some people that do this work that get up and believe less in their past because they didn't overcome themselves. And then there's people who do it every day and they get up and they believe more in their future every day. And the side effect of that are all these wonderful changes

that begin to happen in a person's life. And they say what everybody says, I knew it was the truth. I just had to prove it to myself. Hope you enjoyed that bite-side. clip, do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email. It's called

a Friday 5 and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at doctorchatsy.com forward slash Friday 5. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of bite science next Friday. Thank you.