“We are what we repeat, but we can change our mind”

Joe Dispenza, biochemist and chiropractor, has spent years studying how thoughts have the power to shape our lives. and how they can be cleverly used to interrupt the chain of repetitions that the brain seems to be comfortable with.

He explains it in his book Develop the brain, the science of changing your mind (Ed. Palmyra): thoughts provoke addictive chemical reactions that lead to seek the same sensations over and over again adopt the same behaviors, even if they make us unhappy.

The book invites you to learn about these mental mechanisms in order to overcome them, live more creatively and regain health.

It collects, among others, the testimony of his own physical recovery when a serious accident left him bedridden and forced to undergo surgery that he was finally able to avoid with self-hypnosis, meditation and visualizations.

One of the interviews Documentary film So, what do you know!?that aroused the most interest was his, which explained how when he got up in the morning he consciously created his day as he wanted it to happen.

Chiropractic: from hands to words

-From your profession as a chiropractor, what have you learned and incorporated into your theories?
-One of the things I know about human nature is that we are cut by patterns, we are governed by automatic processes and behaviors that we memorize and that are difficult for us to change. What interests me to study is how to break the habit of being ourselves. With chiropractic, I can free a spine from accumulated tensions, but if my patient goes back to his daily life and perceives the same problems, has the same emotional reactions, the same thoughts and the same attitudes, the body will contract again. in the same way again. In our practice we teach patients how to start thinking and acting differently.

They need both your hands and words…
-Of course. You can treat someone from a strictly structural point of view and they will undoubtedly improve, because physiological changes will take place in their body. And for some people the effect can last for a while. But after six months or a year it is very likely that they will return to the office with the exact same problem or that they will seek another therapy. If we teach people to be responsible for their health, then we must teach them that mind and body work together.

-What the mind understands, the body also understands?
-We have three brains in one, which allow us to go from thinking to doing, and from doing to being. The thinking brain is the neocortex. There we store intellectual information, which has very little effect on the body. When we apply what we learn, when we personalize and demonstrate it, there we teach the body what the mind has understood intellectually, and we record it thanks to sensations and emotions. Experience allows two brains to work together: the one that thinks and the one that does. But it is not enough to have experiences. We have to be able to reproduce them. And when we do it over and over again, we activate the third brain system. In other words, we memorize them and they become automatic. Then we come to the state of “being”.

What comes first, thinking or feeling?

-Are we what we repeat?
-90% of what we are at 35 years old are memorized programs: memorized attitudes, behaviors and reactions. Only 10% corresponds to our conscious mind. So the person who has thought a lot about suffering, and who has experienced it, intellectually may want to be happy, healthy, free, and intend it, but they will fight against a body that has memorized suffering so well that it has become his way of being You can understand it but you have to do something with those patterns of behavior, start to change.

And does it also happen the other way around? Can changes in the body affect the mind?
-That is the question: do thoughts control our feelings or vice versa? Well, in most men, the thought controls the feeling. In women it is the feelings that control the thought. There is nothing wrong with that: both can come to the same conclusions. Because if a person has high thoughts, he is going to start feeling high. And if she feels high, she can think high.

You can enter the circle wherever you want, going from thought to feeling or from feeling to thought. Every time you have a thought, you trigger a biochemical reaction in the brain, and that signal is transmitted to the body. If you have great thoughts you produce substances that make you feel very good; if the thoughts are negative, the opposite occurs. The moment you start to feel the way you think, you tend to think the way you feel, which in turn produces more substances that make you feel the way you think and think the way you feel. .

“We maintain situations that make us suffer because we have become addicted to them,” explains Dispenza.

Breaking harmful habits: getting out of the addiction to the familiar

How can you break that feedback loop?
-Most people can’t think better of how they feel. If they are angry they cannot move to joy quickly. But if they separate from the environment and start to think differently, they start to experience new feelings as well.

-Are we not very creative?
-It is the addictions that do not keep repeating the same patterns. The more you practice something and the more you involve the body and the more you repeat it, the more you memorize it. This is how we operate: if we do something for a certain amount of time it becomes automatic, we don’t have to think about it anymore. The process of thinking and acting, or thinking and feeling, over time becomes an emotional addiction. The person who memorizes suffering cannot think better than what they feel, they easily get blocked in the repetition of thoughts related to suffering and unhappiness, attitudes of self-pity, etc.

-And what satisfaction does the brain seek in repetition?
-Every time you think of something the neurons of your brain activate but do not connect, so you have to repeat it over and over again to memorize it. After a period of time these neurons release a substance that is like glue or fertilizer, which makes it possible for the neurons to have a long-term relationship. The moment the neurons connect, an energy is released and we experience the sensation that something is familiar to us, known. The more established neural circuits are stimulated, the stronger the synaptic connections become and the easier it becomes to activate them, until they become easy, unconscious, automatic responses.

– Can the brain like to repeat something harmful? Doesn’t seem very smart…
-If we continue to have thoughts of suffering, we will provoke more feelings of suffering, and once we feel the suffering, we will think more about the suffering… The cycle of producing these substances over and over again conditions the body over the years to memorize that emotional state better than the brain. We become addicted to that emotion, and the body comes to know more than the mind.

The power of inertia: how we get “hooked” on negative emotions

-Like when you want to call someone and you can’t remember their number but if you put your hand on the phone your fingers know how to dial…
-That happens because you have dialed that number so many times that the body has memorized it better than the brain. When we produce a familiar emotional state, a torrent of energy is generated in the body. Negative emotions such as anger, frustration, sadness, or fear are driven by stress substances, survival substances that make the body feel alive. When you react angrily, you move a lot of adrenaline in your body, which makes the brain wake up and the body feel alive; you are super conscious, it gives you a lot of energy!

-The person begins to associate that feeling with feeling alive.
-Intellectually, one can understand that anger does not help you, but it makes you feel so good…! So you unconsciously keep that person who has made you angry present in your life, so that it allows you to feel that again. If we have memorized well enough those mental states that direct our behavior better than our will and our ability to choose, at about 35 years of age we have a whole unconscious program: a single reaction in our environment, a single unconscious thought, can ignite all this program, and once turned on, it goes by itself, automatically. So most of the time we spend awake we are asleep, unconscious.

-How to change? Can we reprogram our brain just with new thoughts?
-No, it is not about thinking positive, because the person can feel negatively: they can want something but have memorized the emotional state of guilt. Body and mind will then work in opposition, and the interesting thing is that they work together.

Begin to change: what would you be like if you were happy?

What would your formula be?
-We have the memorized, the emotional states that direct our mind and behaviors. You have to become familiar with them, make them aware in order to control them. The second step is to reinvent yourself, start thinking about it: what would I be like if I were happy? What would be wonderful? What would I have to change about myself? What is my best idea of ​​myself? When we start thinking about the answers to these questions, we create a new mind, we make the brain activate new neural sequences and combinations. If you make the brain work differently, you create a different mind.

But why is it so difficult to change?
-Because those memorized emotional states are largely unconscious. Getting the brain aware of it requires attention, breaking the habit of being yourself. And because most people when they feel bad turn on the television. Or they call someone and complain. Or they surf the internet. They entertain themselves, they don’t ask themselves: “what is this feeling and why is it there? I’m going to observe it, I don’t want to live like this.” Most people don’t do it and experience life crises because that feeling becomes so strong that nothing can make them happy anymore: they look for a new relationship, a new car, they join a club, they go on vacation… to Let this feeling go away. They are always looking for something in their environment, around them. The problem is that after the novelty, the feeling reappears.

“Our emotional reactions create our personality. You can feel sadness, but you can’t memorize it!”

-And what do you propose to do?
-The solution is to start unlearning. You can start by asking yourself what emotion you live in every day: is it fear? is it rigidity? is it sadness? The first week you have to let the emotion surface and get familiar with it: every time you feel that feeling, you have to pay attention to it: “there it is” Taking it to the conscious plane is the…