Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

You wake up to the alarm, take the packed bus, clock in, head home, check your phone and fall asleep. The next day, same thing, with the same irritation at the same street corner. Joe Dispenza's book starts from that slightly embarrassing feeling that life has become a rerun, and asks an uncomfortable question: if everything repeats, could the thing that repeats be you?

The central idea is that a good part of what we call personality is a set of habits of thinking, feeling and acting that run on their own. According to the author, we spend our lives trying to change from the outside in, switching jobs, relationships or cities, and we carry along the same way of being that produced the problem.

The title already announces the plan. Breaking the habit of being yourself means deliberately taking apart the version of you that the past trained, to make room for another one. The book has two halves: one explains how the brain and body hold on to habits, and the other teaches a meditation practice for working on them.

Dispenza uses the word personality for the way you think, feel and act most of the time. And he calls personal reality the set of things that happen to you because of that way of being. In his view, the two go hand in hand: someone who always thinks the same thoughts and feels the same feelings tends to pick the same situations, and life seems to confirm what was already expected of it.

Think of the coworker who is always saying no company ever values him. He gets to work already expecting contempt, reads a curt good morning as a snub and answers sharply. The result is that the atmosphere sours and he concludes he was right. The author's reading is that this prophecy comes true because the person acts according to the expectation.

The book describes a simple ladder. First comes the thought, then the emotion it triggers, and repeating both creates what the author calls a state of being. When you think 'I can't handle this' and feel tightness in your chest day after day, the tightness stops being a reaction and becomes your default climate.

According to Dispenza, that's why willpower alone fails. Telling yourself 'today I'm going to be positive' works for one morning, but the body, used to the old feeling, pulls you back to your usual mood. The person thinks one thing and feels another, and in the end the trained feeling is the one in charge.