Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How To Break Unconscious Patterns, The Power of Meditation, The Truth About Dopamine & Creating Lasting Change with Dr Joe Dispenza #549

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Almost everyone today is addicted to something. From phones and social media to alcohol and drugs, our modern life has created an unprecedented epidemic of dependency. But what is actually driving this addiction and how can we actually break free?   This week’s returning guest is Dr Joe Dispenza. Dr Joe is a best-selling author, speaker, researcher and someone who has been studying neuroscience, meditation and stress for decades. He believes that every single one of us has a lot more potential that 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.   In this week’s conversation, we explore: How every addiction is, at its core, an attempt to change how we feel emotionally and why understanding this is the first step to breaking free Why activities like gaming or social media scrolling can make it harder to enjoy the simple pleasures in life How novice meditators in Dr Joe's Week Long Advanced Retreats demonstrate measurable biological changes after just seven days  How to heal and move on from the past by releasing emotional baggage, rather than simply re-living painful memories The critical importance of how you start each day and the precise structure of Dr Joe's own morning routine – including how he prepares his mind before meditation Why even small moments of presence can have a powerful effect on our lives   Throughout this conversation, Dr Joe emphasises that change requires becoming conscious of our unconscious patterns. Breaking free requires noticing these patterns and making different choices, even when those choices are uncomfortable.   So, whether you're struggling with addiction, processing past trauma, or simply want to create a more fulfilling life, this episode is full of profound, thought provoking wisdom that will leave you feeling re-assured, motivated and inspired.   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.   Thanks to our sponsors: https://drinkag1.com/livemore https://vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://thriva.co https://airbnb.co.uk/host   Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/549   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

You could have the most organic, vegan, gluten-free, ketogenic, triple filtered water. Take all your vitamins, take all your nutrients, workout, do Pilates, do yoga, do your breathing. Do all of that. Get your body chemically balanced, get your body physically balanced. But if you're not going to get your body emotionally balanced, forget it. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

Almost everyone today is addicted to something. From phones and social media, to alcohol and drugs. Our modern life has created an unprecedented epidemic of dependency. But what is actually driving this addiction? And how can we actually break free? This week's returning guest is Dr. Joe Dispenza. Dr. Joe is a best-selling author, speaker, researcher, and someone who has for decades been studying neuroscience, meditation, and stress. Dr. Joe 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. In this week's conversation, we explore how every addiction is at its core an attempt to change how we feel emotionally. Why activities like gaming or social media scrolling can make it harder to enjoy the simple pleasures in life. How novice meditators in Dr. Joe's week-long advanced retreats demonstrate measurable biological changes after just seven days. How to heal and move on from the past by releasing emotional baggage rather than simply reliving painful memories. The critical importance of how you start each day and the precise structure of Dr Joe's

own morning routine including how he prepares his mind before meditation and why even small moments of presence can have a powerful effect on our lives. Throughout this conversation, Dr Joe emphasises that change requires becoming conscious of our unconscious patterns. Breaking free requires noticing these patterns and making different choices even when those choices are uncomfortable. So whether you're struggling with addiction, processing past traumas or simply want to create a more fulfilling life, this episode is full of profound thought provoking wisdom that will leave you feeling reassured, motivated and inspired.

I thought today I wanted to talk a little bit about addiction. These days, it's very hard not to draw the conclusion that almost everyone is addicted to something, whether that be their phones, Instagram, alcohol, online pornography, drugs, whatever it might be. So I'm interested, Dr. Joe, what's your view on addiction? What's driving so much addiction and what can people do to try and break free? Sure. I think it's a question worthy of a conversation. I think that we've been programmed and it's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just how we've been programmed. So I think behind every substance addiction or some addiction on some gaming or media or whatever, there's an emotion that the person is doing their best to regulate.

So let's just say a person has been exposed to a trauma, and when we have an event in our life that changes our emotional state, the stronger the emotion we feel from the shock, the betrayal, the trauma, the news, whatever it is, the more altered we are inside of us, the more the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot. And that's called the long-term memory.

And long-term memories, we remember them because we can remember the feeling associated with them. So what most people don't know is that trauma or those series of events alters our internal state. And every time we think about or remember the trauma, we produce the same chemistry in the brain and body as if the event was occurring. Now the body is so objective

that it doesn't know the difference between the real life experience that's creating that emotion or the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone. And it only takes a thought and a feeling and image and emotion and stimulus and response, and you're actually conditioning the body subconsciously into that emotional state. And that sets the baseline

of that person's emotional state. So then the person goes, God, I feel empty, I feel anxious, I feel unworthy, I feel resentment, I feel frustrated, and I don't know how to change it. So then they look for things in their outer world to make that feeling go away. So whether it's a drug, whether it's gaming, whether it's pornography, whether it's complaining,

doesn't matter what it is. But let's just use a pill as an example, or a drug, a recreational drug. The person takes a recreational drug, the moment they take the recreational drug, they notice a change in their emotional state. And the moment they notice that change in their emotional state,

they associate that change with what caused it, and they remember what caused it. So that starts to create a dependency. Now, I think there are degrees of addiction. Some are very physiological, receptors are modified, but when you get right down to it, an addiction is when the body has been conditioned to be the mind.

So then the person, every time they start feeling the emptiness, they feel the unworthiness, they feel the frustration, they feel the anxiety, their brain creates the image of what they need to do to make that feeling go away. And the last time, or the last series of times, it was that exogenous substance, or that activity that made it go away.

Now here's the problem. Let's use gaming as an example, okay? So when you blow someone up or you break through a certain level or you shoot someone or you get points for whatever you're doing in a game, there's a release of dopamine in the brain and dopamine is the reward chemical,

it's the pleasure chemical. The problem is is that the amount of dopamine that's released in a very short interval of time is outside of normal. So now rush dopamine into the brain and the receptor sites on the outside of the cell say, this is way too much dopamine than I'm used to processing. So the receptor sites actually close down, they shut down.

So now in order for the person to get that same feeling, they gotta play more. They gotta do more. The stimulus has gotta be greater. So over time, we start recalibrating those pleasure centers, those receptors to a higher level. Now what's the significance of that? In the absence of that stimulation,

our pleasure centers have been hijacked to such a high level that we can't find pleasure in anything. You can't find pleasure from a sunset, you can't find pleasure from sitting down at the table and having a meal with your family, playing with a dog, going to see your grandparents, especially for a lot of children, you can look at them and you can see

that something happened to them where they're just glazed over. That's because they're kidnapped by the technology. And so in order for them to get that same rush, they have to play more, they have to do more. Now here's really the big problem. Learning should be a reward in and of itself, right? I mean, learning should be a reward.

But now for most people, they need a stimulus. They need something to drive their attention to whatever they're learning. And now attention is dependent on something outside of us. And when you capture people's attention, you capture their energy. So, and you can program them as a result of it. So the solution then is to teach people

how to self-regulate. So we see people that come to our work that have had problems with addictions, all kinds of addictions, but really it's some emotional addiction that really they're trying to change, right? And so they just don't program the thing that it has to happen outside of us.

So what we discovered in our research is that you could actually turn that hypnosis, that conditioning around, and not wait for the experience to produce the emotion, but teach people how to self-regulate their emotional states, and be able to trade resentment, frustration, anxiety, for an elevated emotion.

And if you keep practicing it, you get really good at what you practice. So good at it that you actually become it. So then when people start to self-regulate, we actually measure what happens to their physiology when they do it properly. And it becomes a habit. And so then when the person notices then

that their body's out of balance, they have one of two choices. They can rely on some exogenous substance or something outside of them, or they can take a moment and recalibrate their emotional state. And the only challenge, I think, with addictions is that the moment you say,

I'm not gonna drink coffee, I'm not gonna smoke cigarettes, I'm not gonna drink alcohol, I'm not gonna have sugar, the moment you make that conscious declaration with your conscious mind, the body has been conditioned and dependent on that substance.

So two hours goes by and the body has modified its receptor sites and it starts talking to the brain. It starts saying, Rangan, why don't you start tomorrow? Tomorrow's a better day. Any other day but this day. This is not a good day for you. It's my parents' fault. It's my boss, it's the news.

And that thought is being driven by the body mind. Now, if we act on that thought, we make it the same choice, we do the same thing, we create the same experience, we feel the same emotion. And then all of a sudden that emptiness or that emotional state goes away and the person returns back to the known. So there is a biological, there is a neurological,

there's a chemical, there's a hormonal genetic death of the old self, because you're breaking that stimulus and response that inhibition then causes the body to feel chaos, it's looking for the known, the familiar. So instead of white knuckling it to the other side, we teach people how to regulate an internal emotional states. And over time, you start seeing the moment you're feeling an elevated emotion like gratitude or appreciation or kindness or care and love with life. You don't need anything outside of you to make you feel better. You're actually

doing it by yourself and people can sustain these states like any habit for an extended period of time. Yeah. There's a phrase I've heard you say before Dr. Joe, that people often mistake love for pleasure. And when people start to feel whole again, they have less of a need for pleasure. And I think that really speaks to what you've just said. You know, when you feel these, as you call them, elevated emotions, you have less of a need for these quick dopamine fixes, right? Yes, exactly. I mean, think about it.

I mean, how could you want if you're whole? If you're whole, there's no need to want, there's no lack, there's no separation. What does that mean, whole? Well, we see, here's how we describe it. We do a lot of studies on brain coherence and heart coherence. And let's talk about what it's not, okay? So when there's an emergency or when we're aroused by some threat or some condition in our life or we can't predict an outcome, we can't control an outcome, we have the perception

that something in our world, or we can't predict an outcome, we can't control an outcome, we have the perception that something in our world could possibly get worse. We switch on that primitive nervous system, right? That fight or flight nervous system, and now the game is fight, run or hide. The problem is, is with human beings, when we're at it, we feel like a loss of control, our brain all of a sudden tries to control everything

in our life. So every person, every object, everything, every place, every experience that you've ever had is mapped in your neocortex. So the arousal of the stress hormones drives the brain into a very high brainwave state called high beta. But then as you shift your attention

from one meeting to another meeting, to another text, to another person, to another thing, to another place you have to go, every one of those different elements has a neurological network in the brain. So like a lightning storm in the clouds, the brain starts firing out of order, it starts firing incoherently.

And when the brain is incoherent, we're incoherent. And so think about when you're stressed, the most common thing that people do is they over focus. They narrow their focus on whatever it is that's driving them to pay attention to it. And so then the act of paying attention to the problem is actually driving the brain further out of balance. And we've studied this, when you analyze that problem,

that circumstance, that condition, within the emotion that you are feeling and derived by the hormones of stress, you'll make your brain worse 100% of the time because the analysis, the over analysis is driving it further into a higher thinking, higher beta brainwave state. So this kind of narrow focus is what causes the brain

to be a house divided against itself. So we thought, well, why don't we do the opposite? Why, instead of narrowing our focus on the cause, something physical, something material, because the hormones of stress actually heighten the senses and cause us to become materialist. So matter is the issue when there's survival, it's whatever's around the corner,

it's whatever's going to happen. So we said, okay, let's teach people something else. Let's teach them how to broaden their focus. And as they broaden their focus and take their attention off of everything material and everything known and focus on space, focus on nothing, the act of doing that actually starts slowing down the analytical mind.

You can't analyze when you're sensing. And it starts to change the person's brain waves into a slower brain wave pattern. And so now as you start slowing your brain waves from that high beta, you start slowing down, you're shifting gears, you go into a mid-range beta, then you go into a low-level beta, and then all of a sudden you get into alpha.

Now alpha, when you're in alpha, the voice in your head, the critic in your mind goes away. That voice that's talking to you stops, and the brain tends to see in images, in pictures. That's the imaginary state. That's a creative state. And in alpha, when you're out of survival, you're looking for answers.

You're creative. You're looking for new ways of doing things. So when they broaden their focus, not only do they move into alpha, but all of a sudden we start seeing those different compartments of the brain that were once subdivided. All of a sudden we start seeing those different compartments of the brain that were once subdivided. All of a sudden starting to unify different communities of neurons that were fragmented start to synchronize.

And that's what you call coherence. Right. So what sinks in the brain links in the brain. So when you see the front of the brain talking to the back of the brain, the right side of the brain talking, the left side of brain, you start knowing something good is starting to happen and the person is starting to create more order. So when you see those psychic union of two hemispheres coming together, you know, the polarity, that person starts to feel incredibly whole and coherence when you have waves that are coherent,

when they build or interfere with each other, their waves get bigger. And the higher the amplitude of the wave, the higher the energy in the brain. All of a sudden, the person starts to become very relaxed and no longer stressed in a program and kind of alert and awake. At the same time, when you're resentful or frustrated or impatient and you're sitting in traffic, the same hormones are released

and your heart is actually beating like there's a tiger behind you, but you can't run, you can't fight, you can't hide. And the traffic is frustrating you even more, you're releasing more of those chemicals. So the heart starts beating against the closed system. And when that happens, the heart starts beating out of order. Now the heart's incoherent.

So when incoherent waves interfere with each other, they're out of order, they diminish energy in the brain and energy leaves the heart. And this is when we stop trusting. This is not a time to communicate. This is not a time to learn. This is not a time to be creative and energy leaves the heart.

So we discovered then when a person truly starts practicing those elevated emotions, the heart gets very orderly, very coherent as well. And now when you start feeling the emotions of the things that you want in your life or that you would like to create in your life, ahead of the actual experience, it's impossible for you to want it.

Why could you possibly want it if you feel like it's already happened? Now, here's the cool part. Maintain that modified state of being. Get so good at doing it with your eyes closed. Start practicing with your eyes open. And if you can maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day, coherent heart,

soon as energy reaches the heart, we've done thousands of studies on this, it's going straight to the brain. The heart starts to inform the brain that it's safe to create. At the exact same time, the heart begins to produce an external magnetic field. You've got a wifi signal now.

You start feeling connected, you start feeling more whole. The brain is coherent, it's directing a very clear vision of what it wants. Combine that clear intention with an elevated emotion, you have a different wifi signal, you have a different energy. And now, the cool part about that is, you start to see those synchronicities,

those coincidences, those opportunities start showing up in your life and you're not going anywhere to get them, they're actually coming to you. Now let's just look at the biology of this. Yeah. Epigenetics says that's the environment that signals the gene.

Genes don't create disease, our response to the environment actually creates disease. Well, the end product of an experience in the environment is called an emotion. So the person who lives by the same emotion every single day, the body is so objective it's believing it's living in the same environment, doesn't know the difference, and they keep the same genes signaled in the same way. Genes make proteins, proteins are responsible for the structure and function of your body, the expression of proteins is the expression of life,

and the person now is in the same emotional state, they're expressing the same genes, and nothing changes in our life until we change. Okay, so now the person who trades resentment and frustration and anger and everything else for an elevated emotion and they can sustain that state, the body's so objective that it's believing it's living in a different environment. So they're knocking on the genetic door.

So the elevated emotion, the person memorizes, the body doesn't, is so objective, it doesn't know the difference between the real life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that that person's regulating by thought alone. Keep knocking on the genetic door. You down-regulate the gene for disease and you up-regulate the gene for health because their body's in a different emotional state and the body's believing it's living

in a different environment. And we've done studies with novice meditators and we were curious to see what kind of biological changes would take place in one week if you went all in, like all in, like immersed yourself in the entire week long event. Like people do on their one week retreats. Yeah, so we draw blood and we look at about 2882 metabolites, all exosomes, gene expression. And at the end of seven days, the novice meditators, almost 100% of them show substantial biological changes

in their blood that suggests that they're living in a different environment. Now here's the weird part about it. They're in a ballroom. There's nothing going on in a ballroom. I've been to thousands of ballrooms. There's nothing very exciting going on in a ballroom. There's nothing going on in a ballroom. I've been to thousands of ballrooms. There's nothing very exciting going on in a ballroom. They're actually making those changes inwardly.

And I say to our research team, where are those chemicals coming from? Where are they coming from? The person's not taking any substance. It's coming from within us. And so the nervous system starts manufacturing a whole pharmacy of chemicals equal to the person's intention and emotional state. And it's how we think and how we feel that begins to alter things in our lives.

Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely incredible to hear this. What kind of metabolites or, or I guess chemicals are you measuring? Are they to do with markers of inflammation? Yes. Cytokines, markers of inflammation, markers of the immune system, markers of the immune system, exosomes that have very positive effects that show the cells in the state of growth and repair instead of in the state of tissue breakdown or catabolism. This is profound because a lot of people may not realize that just the way you sleep, if you have a beautiful seven and a half, eight hours of deep sleep compared to, let's say,

five hours of sleep, the next day you can measure maybe 700 genes are expressed differently in the body. You can be more pro-inflammatory the night after poor sleep. And what you're saying, your research is showing that actually when you take novice meditators, people who don't know how to do this, who don't have years of experience, they're not monks, they've not been trained. In fact, not to interrupt you, in fact, if they have no experience, they're going to do really well because they're going to do really well, because they're going to do exactly what you tell them to do, especially guys that come and their wives drag them along, or people come and their partner wants them to do it, and they're like,

I don't know anything about this. And I say, you're the perfect person. Just follow the instructions. Because you have no preconceived notions to undo. They just do exactly what you ask them. There's the guy, his heart's blown wide open, he's crying, he's hugging his wife and she's looking at me like, what happened to him? He just fell into something really big. So yes, of course. Is that common in terms of the people who come to your work? I'm interested as the difference between males and females and something you said that really

resonated with me. So what I've seen time and time again is that men, and they're well known for this, and of course this is a gross generalization, but I've certainly seen it to be true in my own experience, is they wait. They've got things going on. They don't want to see the doctor.

They don't want to go and get help. And often when they turn up, the first thing they will say is, hey, doc, look, I'm sorry to bother you. My wife made the appointment for me. My girlfriend told me I have to come in and see you. It's almost as if they want to excuse themselves for, hey, I wouldn't be here wasting your time, but actually, you know, my other half made me do this.

Is that something you see as well in your work? Something similar, but in terms of this kind of genre, we have a very high percentage of men that come to our work. And I think the number one reason why I'm going is because we use science as the model. We rationalize, we combine quantum physics with neuroscience, with neuroendocrinology,

with psychoneuroimmun immunology the mind body connection Epigenetics electromagnetism we build a model so guys like they like that They like to understand all of that stuff so they can reason with it so they can leap Women somehow tend to be a lot more intuitive. Yeah, it resonates with them They trust that and they just seem to flow a little differently. But then again, we have men that come and of course a lot of times their partner wants them to come, but they really come because they notice

the change in their partner. They're like, wow, they're way different. I can see that their response to things is completely different. In other words, my memory of them, this person is not fitting into how I remember them. They're out of phase, you know? So then when men finally do commit

and they understand the science, and gosh, I mean, it's a really big thing for a man to get in touch with those feelings, right? Because in the game of competition, you know, the rut, you know, the roost, you're always trying to compete, you're always trying to get ahead, you're always trying, can't be vulnerable.

Well, that works for really a good amount of time when you are matter trying to change matter, when you gotta do things and you gotta work hard and you gotta be driven and all that stuff, sacrifices. But we teach that there's another way to create actually. And that is really that opportunity for them to open their hearts. Now I have stood next to men that have done it

and completely reversed the health condition within a very short amount of time, because here comes the house of cards. They just realize that they've been holding this facade, this image of themselves, just so that they can keep up and play the game. And instead of waiting for crisis or disease or diagnosis, and once they get in touch with their feelings again,

there's nothing like a man who's leading with his heart. Oh my God, they consider the whole. And so, and then you take a look at women, and this is just again, a general observation. Women hold the family together. They make a whole lot of sacrifices. They continue to forgive. They do a lot of things.

They put themselves after they've taken care of their family. And all of a sudden they already know how to love. You just teach them how to get very clear on their intention and watch out. I mean, they're, they're women do amazing, amazing work. A couple of times of this conversation, the word practice has come up and you mentioned earlier on what we practice, we get good at. So for many people, the first thing they do in the morning is that 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 then that conditions their body. So that's the way I see it. And in a view of what we've been talking about so far, of course, we've mentioned addictions, which are rife these days. 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. 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.

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 and local and space and time.

When you go to bed at night, you go from beta to alpha to theta to delta 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 those two points in the day when we wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, 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,

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to do is go to vivobarefoot.com forward slash livemore. 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, but 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 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, see if I can maintain it. Now you're in the game. You're out of the bleachers and 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 they're thinking 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 of something to do with your destiny, wow. And then the emotion that's associated is now now their bodies 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 there is now the bodies in the past because thoughts are 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 record 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, I've discovered when I have some intentional times 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 sure, could I do the same thing at lunchtime or later on? Technically I could, but I never find time. Number one. Number two, I don't think it's as powerful later because I feel first thing 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 in our own life.

We don't think, yeah, I need to be rehearsing for the person I want to be in my own life. Yeah. The game of life. The game of life. The most important game. The most important game. Well, 95% of who we are is a set of memorized behaviors, automatic emotional responses, unconscious habits, 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, I'm worthy, and your body's saying no, you're not, you're miserable. So it makes sense that there's gotta be an unlearning process and we gotta stay conscious of our unconscious thoughts that slip by our awareness unnoticed.

We gotta watch how we speak, we gotta observe how we act, we gotta 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 relearning 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 rewire. You got to deprogram and then reprogram. How do you unlearn?

Sorry, because I guess we think about addiction. For many of us, this is just living in the past. We're just repeating behaviors that we've done in the past that made us change our state, that gave us that dopamine boost. 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 got to go out into life and try it out. Okay. I've changed my internal state. You could have a great meditation and connect your heart could open. This happened to me.

You could open your heart. It'd be amazing. You feel like a 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 gonna wait 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? 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, you know, I really believe that this is the truth. I really believe that you could heal yourself. I really believe you could change your life. I've seen the testimonials.

I just never believed that it could happen to me. Now this is a big moment. Now you're really stepping on the playing field. So the person who starts doing their work, they're not interested in healing. The person who's truly interested in this work, they understand that the only way they can heal is that they have to change.

They're not saying, I'm gonna wait for my wealth and my healing to happen in order for me to feel grateful and be joyful in life. They're saying, if I feel grateful, my healing is gonna begin, right? If I feel more whole, then there should be some change in my gene expression. So they've studied the content,

they've studied the information, and now it becomes extremely practical. So they may have a great meditation, and we've seen this happen to many people. They sleep better, they have less pain, they have more energy, but their blood values never change. Now they don't say, oh, I feel better, but I'm failing, this doesn't work.

They say, what is it about me that's stopping this from completely healing? 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? I had another opportunity. How would I do it differently? They'll tell you, I've seen them stand on the stage

and tell their story and say, I had to start really watching myself in my life, how I was emotionally responding to my acts, how I was emotionally responding to my financial problems. I had to really, really pay attention to 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 there.

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 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 gonna do it again. You wanna do it again, you're back in the habit, back in the routine. If you say, this is it, the next time that happens, I am not gonna do that, not for anybody else,

but because those emotions, actually, my response to that person or that circumstance is actually weakening the organism. Is that person, that circumstance worth it? So then, it's evolution, it's evolution, the challenge then has to be met with a greater level of mind. Now, if you're just doing your meditation,

just because you wanna please God to do the right thing or feel good about yourself, that's gonna get stale 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 into 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? I'm not going to sit down and just jump into a meditation. 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? 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, how am I going to do it? So I just like, just like any, anybody who does anything really well, you get in your think box and you organize what you're going to do. You doing this in bed or you 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, is you processing them away, them away of sort of quietening down the noise so that you can drop into meditation? Let's say I have 10 Zoom meetings in one day. I look at my calendar and I go, 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 wanna be as an example for my team. I wanna make sure I'm communicating really clearly. I'll make time for this, that. Okay, I get all that out of the way. Well, that's all the known stuff.

But when I come to execute now, what am I gonna do to open my heart today? Like, what am I really gonna do? When I do the breath to bring energy into my brain, what am I bringing? Like, where am I gonna do to open my heart today? Like what am I really gonna do? When I do the breath to bring energy into my brain, what am I bringing? Like where am I gonna go to that? What do I want to experience? How do I do that?

Let me just review that. Okay, then I'm gonna open my focus. I'm gonna go deep into nothing. I'm gonna go as far as I can. And then when I get to that point, then I'm gonna create. And when I create, this is what I'm gonna create. So I'm not thinking in one, 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 gonna create. So I'm not thinking in one of them there, what should I create? I've already got that all worked out. I'm rehearsing and getting clear on what I'm gonna do. I'm getting clear on what I'm not gonna do. I'm getting clear on how my last meditation was and how I wanna evolve my next meditation. So then when I get to my play box, 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, I allow for two hours for myself. If it takes me half an hour to get very clear, and then sometimes there's disturbing things that I have to get through because there's meetings and stuff like that. And, 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 gonna be. But when you talk about your morning routine, you have a pre-meditation ritual.

Yeah. Which I find really, really interesting. Cause I wanna get into it. I wanna 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 that 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 learned 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 gonna hit the ball, I was thinking about the club I was gonna use, how I was gonna swing, and how I was gonna 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 gonna 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 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 gonna go straight, I'm gonna just keep, 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 gonna go straight, I'm gonna just keep, 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 gonna make those turns and then you drive right past the exit. I drive right past, I'm too old. I drive right past, I'm too out of shape. I drive right past, I'm gonna go away. There's something wrong with me.

You just keep driving past those and the next thing you know, you run into something big. So it's trial and error you know I mean this is like It's so important for people to realize if it took them if it took them two years to Of chronic stress develop their health condition. It's not going to go away into meditations You know when I tell them I say you're not that good You're just not that good like just get real here like one foot in the quantum world one foot in the real world This i'm a pragmatist. I don't want to talk about quantum superposition if it has no value in my life Just get real here, like one foot in the quantum world, one foot in the real world.

I'm a pragmatist. I don't wanna talk about quantum superimposition if it has no value in my life. I wanna talk about what it is that evolves my experiences. So if you're truly in the game of change, then you would be rehearsing how you're going to be in the next Zoom meeting if you were really off in the last one.

If you wouldn't say, oh, I'm this way because of that person or that circumstance. That's that program of being a victim saying that person or that circumstance is actually controlling the way I feel and think. My response to that person is making me sick. It's actually weakening the organism. Okay, 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 gonna react, that would be a victory for me. That would be a victory. So then when you're at the end of your day, you go, I 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 gonna 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. Rungans all of a sudden starting to smile a little 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 gonna 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. And emergent consciousness is that everybody's behaving differently and that is what's going to change the world. You know, one of the core ideas I get from your work is that we all have a choice. We can choose and practice the way that we want to feel so that we actually start feeling every day. You mentioned victim mindset a little bit already and I want to talk a little bit about that shortly because I think many people will say, I'm the way I am because of this.

And we'll get to that in just a second. Before we move to that, 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. Sometimes it can do. How quickly might someone, if they wake up and they don't reach out the phone and don't put the news on and they decide to engage in a meditation, maybe with a pre-meditation ritual like you do, how quickly might someone start to feel the difference?

One day is two days or is it realistic that within seven days someone's going to start to feel quite differently? Okay. Let's talk about this because I don't want to mislead anybody. Knowledge is the forerunner to experience. The more people understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, the how gets easier. And this is a time in history where it's not enough to know. This is a time in history to know how.

The practical application in understanding that philosophy, that theory, that intellectual knowledge, that information, once you start to apply it and personalize it and demonstrate it, the more you can understand that, why you're doing it and what you're doing it, you get greater value out of it. So we have people that are diagnosed with serious health conditions that are nurses,

that are cancer researchers, that are physicians, that are engineers, or just a person who just really wants to understand the content. Now this is, it's so much easier to forget this information than to remember it. It's just, I always laugh at myself because I have to go back and relearn it again. And I think I know it pretty well and yet I forget.

I don't know why, but it's just the way it is. So when our meditations get stale, it's because we forget what we're doing, right? So the person who really, really takes the time to study instead of watching Netflix, instead of scrolling through TikTok, instead of getting on their phone and doing mindless texts or whatever.

They're only set aside an hour a day and I'm gonna learn this information. When they sit down to do the work, they're present. They understand if they feel this emotion that they're gonna signal a new gene in a new way. If they feel the other emotion, they're gonna down-regulate that gene and up-reg they feel the other emotion, they're gonna down regulate that gene and up regulate the gene for their disease.

So now it's an understanding. If I rehearse how I'm gonna be mentally, I'm gonna install the hardware in my brain. If I keep doing this, it's gonna become a software program and 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, the person who's truly present and not thinking about their shower or the emails they have to do or their cell phone or their texts

or when they have to take their kids to ballet or whatever, you're gonna get to all of that. The person who's truly present, if they follow the instructions, we've seen them have very significant changes first in their subjective experience of themselves. Like, huh, wow, my back pain isn't fair, that's kind of weird, or God, I slept better last night.

These small indicators are feedback to tell you that whatever you're doing inside of you is producing a result outside of you. Keep that up over a period of time and you see instrumental changes taking place in the person. Now, another person who has had a series of traumas been abused in some way from childhood, is facing a lot of health conditions,

a lot of emotional and psychological conditions. We don't want them to heal in one week. We want them to work on overcoming those emotional states and those are the victories. So sitting down in the meditation and when their body starts getting agitated or starts getting anxious instead of quitting and saying, I can't meditate

because that would be the extent of that person. Just be curious, what's on the other side of this? Can I lower the volume to this emotion? My body's craving this emotion. Let me settle it down into the present moment. That would be a victory. So that person with a lot of trauma, there's a moment in the meditation where they feel uncomfortable. The easy thing would be, hey, I'm going to stop. I'm going to put on Instagram. I'm going to get a coffee. I'm going to do anything else to distract me.

You're saying that's the key moment. You want to sit with that and hopefully break through that. What I'm saying is there's no such thing as a bad meditation. There's only you overcoming you. People think I'm doing my meditation wrong. No, you're doing it right. Even if it's difficult. That is the moment that is going to define the person. So then the person goes, oh God, I feel really uncomfortable.

I'm not a good meditator or something wrong with me. It's my trauma, it's my past, it's my parents, it's whatever. The person who says, no, no, I'm gonna sit in the presence of this anxiety and I'm gonna keep working with my body. I'm gonna keep lowering the volume to that emotion. Now listen, you keep lowering the volume to that emotion, you're gonna take your attention off that past problem

because you only put your attention on that past problem because of the emotion. I'll never tell anybody to go back and review their past. I'll say overcome the emotion, overcome the emotion. This is a key point I think, which I really want to talk to you about today, Dr. Joe. Trauma, right? There's a lot of awareness growing now about trauma, the impact of our childhoods, how we're spoken to, the beliefs we take on as kids, how that impacts us as adults.

Now one approach to deal with trauma is to go there, to go and unpick it and uncover it and see a therapist and detail what happened, why it happened, you know, get an understanding of why you're behaving a certain way as an adult. Now, I think for many people, I include myself in this, that can be incredibly powerful and incredibly important. But I also see when I think of your work, I wouldn't say it's mutually exclusive necessarily from the outside at least. But is there a danger that we can spend too long in our trauma, processing our trauma, trying to think about it? Because effectively a key message from your work is don't get stuck in those emotions of the past.

Don't let your past define you. Think about that vision of the future. Start to feel what you want to feel in the future so you can experience it right now. But can someone go back, revisit their trauma, try and process it? And is that approach consistent with yours or would you say it's a better approach or a different approach is to not spend time there, just create the new reality? This episode is sponsored by Thriva, the app that helps you listen to your blood and get personalized guidance on how to to your blood and get personalized

guidance on how to optimize your health and fitness. Now, I think regular blood tests can be a really valuable tool that can help tell us which lifestyle changes are working and where we might want to make changes. And Thriva is the perfect tool to help us do that. You just take a blood test at home, which is really easy. I do it regularly. Just a simple device. You stick on your arm that draws blood automatically. Easy, quick, pain-free, even if you're not great with needles. And then you just send it off and get all of your results in a matter of days in an

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nutrient levels. And also with Thriva, you can test your ApoB levels, a much more reliable indicator for your risk of heart disease than standard cholesterol tests. For listeners of my show, Thriva are offering an exclusive offer of 20% off your first Thriver cycle when you enter the promo code LIVE MORE at checkout. Just visit thriver.co to get started today. That's T-H-R-I-V-A.co. Thriver, listen to your blood. This episode is brought to you by Airbnb. Regular listeners of the podcast will have heard me mention this before, but I have been using Airbnb for many years now for pleasure and for work.

In fact, I have just bought another Airbnb to record some more episodes of this podcast. And it's not just handy for finding places to stay. Two of my closest friends from medical school recently told me that they regularly host their own places on Airbnb whenever they go away with their family. And that the extra money they make has been super helpful for things like household bills and other family expenses. Which got me thinking, when we're next away as a family and our house sits empty, perhaps we could host our own home on Airbnb and make some extra money to go towards our next holiday. Days out with the children or even a nice

meal out as a family too. Seems like a smart thing to do. And if you have a trip coming up, you could potentially do the same. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.co.uk forward slash host. I'm down the middle on this. Okay. I think there are many modalities that work for trauma. I'm down the middle on this, okay? I think there are many modalities that work for trauma. What I've discovered is that insight never really changes behavior. You can see that your father was overbearing or was an alcoholic or you could see all these

different things, you know, like you could come up with the insight and all these different things. The problem that I see with people is then they tend to excuse their change by saying, oh, I had a rough childhood, that's why I am the way I am. They are excusing their present position. So, and again, trauma is a difficult thing, but for me, the person who's living by the identity

in their life that they were traumatized as a child or whatever it is, or they've had a trauma in their life, I'm not saying forget the trauma and create another emotion. I'm saying that the person who's willing to go through the emotion and keep working on lowering the volume to it. We have had so many people in this work with brutal pasts, really, really difficult pasts do the work

and finally they reach that point where they just break free from the emotion. They look back and I have interviewed enough of them. It's the same thing. They look back, and I have interviewed enough of them, it's the same thing. They look back at their entire past, and they don't wanna change one thing in their past because it brought them to this elegant moment where they're liberated.

They see their betrayers, they see their abusers, they have nothing but love for them. Now the side effect of that, and many times they'll say, it was like my heart blew wide open. They had to pass through the valley of the shadow of darkness to get there. They just thought, I don't know if I can go any further, and they went one more time.

And the body literally was liberated from the past, right? Because the trauma's not just in the brain. The trauma's stored emotionally in the body. So you wanna take the body out of the past, out of the known. What do you think the body's gonna say if it's been conditioned to be the mind? The unknown is a scary place. You step out into the unknown,

you're gonna be unprepared for that trauma. You don't know how it's gonna happen. And so the person keeps clinging to the known. But when the person finally overcomes the emotion, the body literally is freed from the chains of the past. The side effect of that is seeing the past from a greater level of consciousness. Lo and behold, there goes the suicidal tendencies,

there goes the dysfunction, there goes the irritable bowel syndrome. That was because the body was still living in that past event by living by the same emotion. So the research on memory is kind of fascinating and I just, I've studied it enough. And the way we recount the past is not the way it happened, even if you absolutely think you remember it being that way.

So we don't have the same brain as we did when we were eight years old or 12 years old or 20 years old. We have a different brain. We have a completely different brain. So the fabrication of the story for many people, they embellish the story and make it seem even worse than what it was.

But really what you're saying is I changed in those moments and from a biological standpoint, I haven't been able to change since. So let me tell you why it's been so hard for me to change. And the story becomes dramatized or embellished. A person works them up, fire themselves into this emotional froth and then fires and wires the same circuits in the brain,

and they're actually reaffirming their limitation. Now there's nothing wrong with that. I think we're just taking too long, right? So 50% of that story isn't even the truth. It means in a sense we're reliving a miserable life that we never even had, and we don't want, but the unknown, people would rather cling to their suffering.

None of that, and this is not a judgment, we all do this. We'd rather stay in the known than take a chance in the unknown because those emotions of survival are saying what? Run from the unknown, the unknown is a scary place. So now the unknown, you gotta come up against that moment where you're gonna actually leave that behind and step into the unknown. This is not a scary place. So now the unknown, you gotta come up against that moment where you're gonna actually leave that behind and step into the unknown.

This is not a intellectual process. This is David and Goliath. There's a battle going on where the body keeps wanting to go back to its familiar state because it's subconsciously been conditioned to be the mind, stay in the known. So then if the person keeps revisiting the trauma

from the past, I'm not certain enough that when they revisit the trauma from the past, unless they learn how to desensitize their emotional response to it, that it's gonna work for them. What I learned is that if the person overcomes the emotion, the memory without the emotional charge is called wisdom. And now you no longer belong to the past.

So the body gets frustrated in the meditation. Instead of taking your blindfolds off or turning the lights on and say, I listen to the voice, I can't meditate, this is too much. The sincere person says, what's on the other side of I can't? What's on the other side of this emotion? Let me see if I can settle my body back down

out of that emotion and recondition it to a new mind. And the act of doing that in the beginning is very tedious. And all of a sudden the person starts getting better at it. And they're telling their body it's no longer the mind that they're the mind. They're executing a will that's greater than that program. And just like training an animal, you stay, you're not gonna die, I'm gonna feed you, you can check your emails, you can check your texts,

but this is my time right now. And you keep doing that with the body, keep settling it down to the present moment. It acquiesces, it surrenders to a new mind. And when that happens, we've seen this, we've measured it, there's a liberation of energy. We go from particle to wave, we go from matter to energy, that emotion is liberated from the body.

And now there's energy to heal. There's energy to create a new life. It's available energy, it's free energy. So the person goes, wow, I see it from a different level of consciousness. I have nothing but love. Or my goodness, I'm no longer that person. And they're now free from the past.

Now the side effect of that is that there's a biological upgrade. There's a neurological upgrade. There's a chemical upgrade. There's a genetic modification that's taking place. Why? You think the same way, you make the same choices, you do the same things, you create the same experiences, you do the same things, you create the same experiences,

you feel the same emotions, your biology will stay the same because you're the same. Now the person's thinking differently, they're making different choices, they're doing different things or behaving in different ways, they're having new experiences and they're certainly feeling different emotions,

the body reorganizes to a new chemistry and they'll tell you, I'm not that person any longer, I'm literally not that person and and They're betrayers even if they're family members. They have Forgiveness for them and what is forgiveness? You take your attention off the emotion you overcome the emotion You don't pay attention to the person or the problem now. You're free you free yourself and you free them And what if someone says to you dogs Dr. Joe, look, I get what you're saying,

but my ex-husband cheated on me, right? They shouldn't have done it. I cannot forgive them for what they did. And the reason I'm asking is because this is exactly what happened with one of my patients. Because this often happens, so I talk a lot about forgiveness and a lot of people push back.

They go, yeah, I want to, but you don't know what happened to me. This was really, really bad. Like this cannot be forgiven. What would you say to that person? I'd say to them, I want you to think about something in your life that you've done, that you would like forgiveness for, that you don't feel good about and forgive that person in the way that you would wanna be forgiven

and you would be forgiven yourself. I mean, we all have done, we've all had indiscretions. Nobody's perfect. So that person that is in that state is still in the emotional state. The problem with that is that no new information can enter the nervous system that is not equal to the emotion enter the nervous system that is not equal

to the emotion the person experiencing because it's not relevant. So the question really is, is how long do you wanna do that? How long do you wanna do that? And again, knowledge and information about what that is doing to that person's health and their biology. If you reason with them,

we've had this happen enough times in our work, that's not an uncommon situation. When the person finally, finally takes their attention off that and puts it on something else, they notice that they feel differently. You can't just tell a person to forgive because it's kind of an ethereal thing. It's a subjective process, right?

So if you're, we've seen this, our oxytocin levels and a lot of our participants go up 200 times, right? That's a lot of love. Oxytocin signals nitric oxide. Nitric oxide signals another chemical that literally causes the arteries in your heart and lungs to actually expand. There's more energy, there's more blood going

into your heart. Okay, so when that person takes their attention off their ex, takes their attention off their past and starts looking at themselves, denaturing that identity that's built on the past. See that person had a reaction to that circumstance and that reaction produces a refractory period of chemicals and emotions, right?

And if you don't know how to control that refractory period and it lasts for hours or days, it's called a mood. You keep that same refractory period going on for weeks or months, now it's a temperament, one long emotional reaction. You keep that refractory period going on for years on end, that's a personality trait, and most people's personalities are defined by, I am this way because my husband

cheated on me. What you're really saying is, you haven't changed in 10 years, and you're giving your vital life force to that person. Who is worth 10 years of your life. Who's worth it? So then the stronger the emotion we feel, the more we pay attention to the cause.

Where you place your attention is where you place your energy. That person's giving their vital life force to heal. Their life force to change to that person or that circumstance. Lower the volume to that emotion. You take your attention off that person or problem. It's not the person or the problem. They're using, unconsciously, that person or that circumstance to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. That's why they keep thinking about it. If they weren't addicted to that emotion, they would stop thinking about it. So then, is it the person?

No, it's your left, we'll take your ex-husband and put him in a rocket and a straight jacket, let's shoot him to the moon. Now what? Now what? Now what do you know? You still have that embossed in your brain and conditioned in your body.

At what point? So then the research on oxytocin, you can only talk around this. You can't say to someone forgive if they still feel the emotion, they're separate from the act of forgiving. Imagine feeling so much love, by no one's doing it to you,

it's actually coming from within you. You have that moment, that catharsis, where you feel that emotion. Oxytocin levels go up just slightly in the research, just a little bit more elevated. An elevation in oxytocin makes it impossible to hold a grudge. They've done the research on the data.

You cannot hold a grudge. It's impossible. You just go, I like this feeling better than that feeling and because I like this feeling better than that family You're okay. Forget about it. I'm good. I'm good that person Who falls in love again? that whose husband cheated on them who falls and loves again and finds a person who is Intelligent and caring and kind and loving and provides, all of a sudden they can forgive that person.

Like, oh my God, that had to happen because now I have a better person. Well, if you don't let go of that, you're never gonna have this. In fact, if you bring that into the next relationship, you're not gonna have a healthy relationship because there's gonna be a trust issue on every level. So then you want an equal,

write down exactly what you want and become that person and see what, and the experiment, see what comes to you. Try it out, try it out. If I really work on my God, this emotion is actually, now that I understand the science behind this, this emotion is actually weakening me every day. It's knocking my brain and body out of homeostasis. Stress is when our brain and body

are knocked out of homeostasis and balance, turning on the stress response just by thought alone. Hormones of stress down regulate genes and create disease. My thoughts are making me sick. Is that person or that circumstance worth it? If my thoughts could make me sick, is it? If my thoughts could make me sick, is it possible that my thoughts can make me well? Well, now you gotta come up against the belief.

Now, I don't really wanna believe this, then that really means that you wanna stay in that emotional state. But go to the, go see some testimonials of people who've had that and see the life that they're living now. The miracles, the synchronicities, the opportunities, the coincidences, the healings, who've had that and see the life that they're living now. The miracles, the synchronicities, the opportunities, the coincidences, the healings,

they bless their past, they say, my disease, that condition, that was my greatest teacher. That was my greatest teacher. And now the soul is free, like let's get on. In eternity, it's a big place, you're gonna hold onto that emotion for how long? You're not doing anything wrong. You're just taking too long, that's all.

And it works with anything. Some people want wealth, some they're bankrupt. Some people the business partner took all their, took the, you know, took all their money. Some people it's a relationship, some people it's a trauma from childhood. It's all the same. But what we're looking for is wholeness. So then it's not just the emotion.

The emotion is driving a certain behavior. The emotion is driving a certain habit of action. The emotion is driving a certain series of action. The emotion is driving a certain series of thoughts that are associated with that person or that circumstance. If you truly believe that you have the power within you to change, the first step would be saying, I have to take responsibility for myself right now because I gotta start thinking differently,

I gotta start acting differently, I gotta start feeling different, it's gonna be hard. If it was easy, everybody would be doing this. But how is self-love born? I've studied this. When the person sits through the fire and sits through all of that anxiety, all that hatred, all that anger, and keeps lowering the volume sooner or later,

the body's gonna release it. And when it's released, all that hatred, all that anger, and keeps lowering the volume sooner or later, the body's gonna release it. And when it's released, forgiveness is a side effect. You take your attention off that person because you're no longer have the emotion to keep your attention on. And in fact, you feel so good,

this feels better that you naturally forgive. It's not like, now you're forgiven. It's not like, hey, look at me, I'm forgiving you. It's just kind of like, wow, isn't life great? Whoa, you're good. I mean, you're good. I'm getting on with my life right now. Right? So, so emotions keep us stuck in the past and we tell that story and we reaffirm it. We get in trouble. It's, you know, it subjectively feels better to forgive and practice gratitude and joy. subjectively feels better to forgive and practice gratitude and joy. But biochemically you change as well. This particular patient, when she did ultimately learn how to forgive, because her lifestyle,

her diet was fantastic up to that point, but she had chronic high blood pressure. As soon as you start to learn how to forgive, blood pressure starts coming down. And you know this for well, like it's yes, subjectively feels great, but it is literally changing your physiology at the same time. And, you know... Oh, let me just say one thing about that. Because you could have the most organic, vegan, gluten-free, ketogenic, triple filtered water. Take all your vitamins, take all your nutrients, workout, do Pilates, do yoga, do your breathing,

you do all of that. Get your body chemically balanced, get your body physically balanced, but if you're not gonna get your body emotionally balanced, forget it, because the moment you get emotional, your body literally goes to the past. That's the one that matters the most. And then people, once they realize it's the emotion that's signaling the gene,

oh my God, I better start really taking care of my emotional balance as much as I do with my physical exercise and my diet and all that other stuff. Yeah, I completely agree. This is, you know, for many years I was focused on food and movement and sleep and I still am. I am too. Those things are important. But I realize actually, if you want to get to the root of the root, it's up there. It's how you think, it's how you deal with conflict, it's how you approach the world.

It's also Dr. Joe, what you said about awareness. Like the really powerful idea, one of the many powerful ideas I get from your work is it's about evolution, right? So if you've never meditated before, sure, start meditating, learn how to meditate, have a great meditation. Great, that's gonna be better than if you weren't doing it, but then learn, oh, you know, I had a great meditation, but I still was judging my coworker.

I still reacted to my boss. Okay, cool. Tomorrow, I'm going to see if I can show up and not react in that way. So it's not, and again, we're talking about trauma. You're not saying don't go back and revisit it. You're just saying, hey, maybe don't stay there too long. Maybe if you've been trying to process it for 10 years and you're still there, maybe it's time to shift a little bit.

Is that fair to say? Yeah, and look, I mean, look, I mean, human beings are so programmed for survival. And when you're in survival and you're threatened and there's a danger, you prepare for the worst. So the person who's traumatized is actually anticipating the event to happen again. And they're preparing themselves for the worst case scenario

because there's better chances of survival if you prepare for the worst. So the brain naturally fabricates an outcome, but actually, it actually says, well, what if this happens? What if that happens? And now we're actually, this is a really vivid imagination, but it's working against us in a lot of ways.

So there's nothing wrong with this. I mean, we've all done it. You've had a trauma, you've had an insult, you've had a betrayal, you have whatever, and then you get wise from the experience, but then you're always, if it's really a strong trauma, then you're expecting it to happen again, right? So the brain is selecting out of the infinite potentials

in the quantum field, the worst case scenario, and then emotionally embracing the outcome before it happens. A thought and a feeling, an image and an emotion, a stimulus and response, and they're conditioning their body into the mind of that emotion. Their past is, they're reliving their past in their future

every single day in the present moment. And now it becomes a very visceral and subconscious process. So it takes an enormous amount of will, takes an enormous amount of awareness and energy to break that apart. And we have so many brain scans of people that have severe anxiety. And you cannot be anxious if you're in the present moment.

And they just kept catching themselves, going to that thought and feeling that feeling and bringing it back and then getting frustrated and going, ah, and then all of a sudden they're there again. Well, why are they there? Because they've been practicing that. You keep practicing, feeling anxious. You get really good practicing that. You keep practicing, feeling anxious. You get really good at it.

You start practicing, feeling gratitude. You get really good at that. We're doing a study with children in Australia. And I say to them, you practice being angry. You'll get good at being angry. You practice being kind. You get really good at being kind and it feels better. At its core, it's that simple.

It's that simple. Really is, you know, what you practice, you get good at. Exactly. One thing I've heard you say recently, which has been really helpful for me, is that you don't get up from your meditation until you've overcome that emotion, until you've reached that place of calm

and gratitude and joy. And if I think back to when I started meditating on and off maybe 10 years ago, some days I'd drop in, it would be great. Other days it would be really hard. I'd think, oh, not today. So I'd walk out of it. I'd go, oh, not today.

With a complete misunderstanding that, oh, it always has to be perfect and joyful. Whereas now, I know it's a practice, I sit there for the entire time. Some days it's wonderful, other days it's hard. And I think that's very powerful, what you share there. How long do you really take for your routine? So I allow for two hours.

Two hours. I allow for two hours, the first 20 minutes or so, 30 minutes depends on me, I'm in my think box. And then the next hour and a half. If it takes me an hour, Ronangan, to get to the present moment, I will not get up for my meditation until I get there. So I'm just uncompromising to that because I know that if I overcome myself,

it's the overcoming process, that's the becoming process. So if I stretch myself as it doesn't feel good and I break through, then I'm a different person the rest of the day. If I get up and quit,'t feel good and I break through, then I'm a different person the rest of the day. If I get up and quit, then I'm the same guy. I can't expect anything really magical to happen in my life. So I'm just willing to just go that distance because I think that if you get up as the same person

that sat down, nothing really happens. Nothing really happens. And we've talked to so many people that have had so many transcendental profound experiences and they look back at all the meditations that they've done. And it's not the good ones they remembered. It's the ones where they sat through the fire and they love themselves for doing it.

They love themselves because they sat through the fire and they love themselves for doing it. They love themselves because they sat through it. That's really the value behind all of this. So for the person who's on the journey, like for me, I'm just the type of guy that like, if I do a meditation and I get, when I make it through it and it wasn't a pretty meditation, that discomfort bothers me the whole day. It bothers me because I don't wanna do that again.

And I wanna make sure that I'm not thinking about the news or I'm not thinking about what people think about me. I'm not thinking about all that, any of that stuff. I'm really thinking about what happened there, Joe? Like, where did you go? Like, why are you feeling this way? Because I'm disturbed by something because I think I could do better.

It's like a martial artist, you're sparring somebody and you're kicked in the face three or four times. Sooner or later you say, what am I doing? And you sit there and you think about it over and over and over and it bothers you until you figure it out. So you feel good because you overcame it. You're like, hey man, I can overcome it. And so then people said to me,

wow, two hours in the morning, you know? I say, listen, it's really simple. If I can overcome myself, the beginning of the day, the rest of my day, I can overcome anybody. Like I'm just okay with anyone. When you're okay with yourself, you're okay with anybody. When you're angry with yourself, you're angry with others. If you're unhappy with yourself,

you punish other people that feel unhappy because you want them to feel the way you do. It's just the way it is. You're grateful for, you get up grateful. You get up grateful just for the fact that life is a gift. I'm alive, I got a body, I have a family, I have people that love me, I can eat, I have a home. Kind of running water in my shower.

I feel pretty good. Yeah, I made a bunch of mistakes, but I'm alive. Hey, a new day, new life. You get up grateful that way and you start seeing these coincidences happening in your life. I guarantee you, the meditation will no longer be about a have to.

That's what I love about our community. We don't do the work because we have to do the work or to please God or be holy or any of that stuff. People do the work because they don't want the magic to end. The moment you see the coincidence happen in your life, you're going to stop believing that you're the victim of your life and you start going to believe, you start believing you're the creator of your life. And when you do, what do you think that synchronicity creates? You think it creates sadness or pain? The synchronicity wakes you up. You get a little energy, you feel a little joy and that inspires you like huh the experiments kind of working

Yeah, and I'll show up tomorrow for the experiment again. Hey, that's kind of weird. Hey, I'm gonna do it again Wow, and then you don't want to stop doing it because you start realizing that you actually can produce effects in your life I don't care What kind of past you've had. I don't care. You can't even tell me you're too sick to do this work. You can't tell me you're too old to do this work. You can't tell me I never meditated before.

You can't even tell me that you had a brutal past that you can't do this work. I've seen it happen. All races, all colors, all sizes, all shapes, all diets, all paths, all social status. Nobody's so special to be excluded from this principle. And so the act of making time to be a creator in your life,

if you make time to be a creator in your life, that means you must believe that you're a creator in your life. If you don't make time or you don't do it, you don't believe that you're the creator in your life. You're believing in your past more. You're believing in your past more than you're believing in your future. You show up to do the work

because you wanna believe in your future more than you believe in your past. 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. That's Joe is always so inspirational being around you. Just to finish off 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 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, Rangan, change, I want them to be inspired to try it out. It's an experiment. The hardest part about all of this, Rangan is actually making the time to do it. It'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 in order for us to believe in ourselves, we have to believe in possibility. And when we believe in possibility, 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 gonna think these thoughts, I'll write them down. I'm not gonna act this way or speak this way. And today I'm gonna work on just staying conscious

of these feelings. That's all I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna close my eyes for a few moments and remember that I'm not gonna do these things if that's the start You just demystified meditation because meditation means to become familiar with to become familiar with that symbols 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 gonna react? How long are you gonna 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, other people say, well, I don't have the time.

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? What is it? When is it going to, 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 do it because you want to try the experiment out. Dr. Joe, you're an incredible human being. That's coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Rangan. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have

a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. it's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say in a world of endless emails,

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