Have you ever wondered why we often find ourselves stuck in old patterns, unable to break free from the habits we know aren’t serving us? In Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Dr. Joe Dispenza presents a powerful four-week meditation practice designed to help us break emotional and behavioral habits and develop new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. This process challenges the deeply ingrained patterns that define our everyday lives and offers a path to lasting change.
Introduction
We’ve all had moments where we feel trapped in our behaviors—those automatic responses that seem hardwired into our being. Whether it’s procrastination, self-doubt, or negative thought patterns, the habits we’ve formed can feel like they control our lives. But what if we could rewrite those patterns, creating a version of ourselves that aligns more closely with the person we truly want to be?
Dispenza’s four-week meditation practice offers just that. It’s an opportunity to disrupt the familiar, rewire your brain, and build new emotional and behavioral habits. This blog will walk you through each week’s step-by-step process, offering personal insights and quotes to inspire your transformation.
Week 1: Relax Your Brainwaves
The first week of this practice is all about preparation—relaxing your brainwaves to enter a state where real change can happen. When we’re in our normal, high-frequency beta brainwave state, we are constantly processing stimuli, making it difficult to meditate or visualize the future self we want to create. Beta waves are necessary for cognitive tasks, but when it comes to breaking the habit of being yourself, slowing things down is essential.
To relax your brainwaves, you’ll use a process called induction, a meditation technique that helps bring your brainwaves into a lower, calmer state, such as alpha or theta. This allows your conscious and subconscious mind to begin working together, making it easier to break old habits.
Types of Brainwaves:
- Beta: This is where we spend most of our time—consciously thinking, analyzing, and processing. Beta waves help with motivation and energy but can also lead to anxiety and stress when overactive.
- Alpha: When we slow down and tune out external stimuli, we slip into alpha waves, a more imaginative and relaxed state. This is ideal for emotional regulation and creativity.
- Theta: Theta waves occur when the brain slows down even further, approaching a state of near-sleep. In this state, the subconscious mind becomes more accessible, and deep relaxation takes over.
- Delta: These waves are the slowest and occur during deep sleep. Delta waves are essential for restoration, but too much delta activity while awake can impair concentration.
Take the time during this week to explore meditation techniques that work for you. You can focus on deep breathing, guided meditations, or even hypnotic counting to ease yourself into this state. The goal is to reach a point where your brain slows down enough for real change to take place.
Week 2: Break Emotional Habits
In the second week, you begin the work of breaking down the emotional habits that define you. Emotions are often at the core of our behavior patterns, and if you want to change your life, you must first change how you feel.
Start by identifying a memorized emotion that you want to un-memorize. These are the emotional responses that have become second nature to you, such as anger, fear, or frustration. Notice how these emotions make you feel and how they shape your thinking. Allow yourself to fully experience the emotion without suppressing it.
Once you’ve identified the habit you want to change, say it out loud. Confess it to the universe or whatever higher power you believe in. This step is crucial—it releases the energy that you’ve been using to hide or suppress the emotion and allows you to start letting go.
As you continue this practice, remember this quote:
“To change your reality, you have to change your personality.” — Joe Dispenza
This means that by breaking down the emotions and habits that have defined your personality, you open the door to creating a new self—one that aligns with your true desires.
Week 3: Break Behavioral Habits
In week three, you’ll begin breaking the behavioral habits that accompany your emotional responses. Once you’ve identified the emotion, take note of the behaviors that follow. For example, if you’ve memorized the emotion of stress, notice how it affects your daily actions. Do you reach for junk food, procrastinate, or withdraw from others?
Write down these behaviors, and each time you notice them happening, say “Change!” out loud. This is a form of pattern interruption—a technique that helps weaken the neural pathways responsible for your old behavior. Over time, these disruptions will help you break free from the automatic responses that have been holding you back.
This process may feel uncomfortable at first. After all, our brains are wired to favor what is familiar. But as Dispenza notes:
“The moment you decide to make a different choice, get ready to be uncomfortable.”
Embrace the discomfort as a sign that change is happening. With each small step, you’re moving closer to the version of yourself that you want to become.
Week 4: Form New Habits
By week four, you’ll be ready to form new habits—ones that align with the self you envision. This step is about taking all the work you’ve done in the previous weeks and channeling it into creating a new way of thinking, acting, and feeling.
Start by asking yourself: Who is my ideal self? How do I want to think? How do I want to feel? How do I want to behave?
Once you’ve identified these answers, begin practicing this new self every day during your meditation. Visualize yourself as this person—what does your day look like? How do you handle challenges? How do you feel as you move through life?
After each meditation session, you should feel like a different person. If you’re still feeling the same as you did before, go deeper into the practice. Real transformation happens when you see real changes in your life—when your thoughts, actions, and emotions begin to align with the future self you’re creating.
“You are the placebo. You can heal your body and change your life with the power of your mind.” — Joe Dispenza
This final step is about embodying the new habits you want and using meditation as a tool to reinforce those changes.
Why Bad Habits Are So Hard to Break
You might be wondering why breaking habits is so challenging. The answer lies in how your brain works. According to The Power of Habit, our brains create automatic patterns based on the routines we engage in most often. These patterns become so ingrained that we continue to engage in them even when they no longer serve us.
Breaking the habit of being yourself means disrupting these automatic patterns through conscious effort and deliberate practice. The more you practice, the easier it becomes to rewire your brain for the habits that align with your ideal self.
Conclusion: Becoming the New You
Breaking the habit of being yourself isn’t easy—it requires dedication, patience, and a willingness to be uncomfortable. But by following Dispenza’s four-week meditation process, you can begin to un-memorize old emotions, break behavioral patterns, and form new habits that reflect the self you truly want to be.
The key is to take it one step at a time, allowing yourself to fully embrace each part of the process. As you practice relaxing your brainwaves, breaking emotional and behavioral habits, and forming new ones, you’ll find yourself moving closer and closer to the future you’ve envisioned.
Remember: “If you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself and reinvent a new self.” — Joe Dispenza
