The key ideas

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

Joe Dispenza, 2012

You change your job, city, partner, yet inside everything stays the same. Joe Dispenza believes the problem is the habit of being yourself: a cycle of thoughts and feelings the body has learned by heart. We examine his four-week meditation method and show honestly where the book draws on research and where it ventures into quantum mysticism.

Who it is for

For anyone who notices themselves reacting the same way again and again and wants to understand that cycle, and for anyone who has heard of Dispenza and wants to separate his practice from his controversial theory.

If you want a new result, you will have to break the habit of being yourself and reinvent yourself.

What the book is about

Morning. You wake up, reach for your phone, think about the same tasks and worries as yesterday, and take the same route. Joe Dispenza asks a simple question: if the input is identical every day, where will anything new in the output come from?

His answer is in the title: to change your life, you have to break the habit of being yourself. Dispenza is an American chiropractor, lecturer, and author of popular books about the brain and meditation. Here he offers a four-week meditation program for personal change.

First, its status. This book presents a method rather than scientific research. It places real studies alongside bold interpretations and ideas that science rejects, especially its claims about quantum physics. We will show which is which.

Idea 1. Your personality is your personal reality

The book’s central formula is that how we think, feel, and act is our personality. And personality, the author believes, creates our personal reality: the decisions we make, the people we interact with, and what we notice at all.

Here is his conclusion. According to Dispenza, attempts to change life on the outside without changing habitual thoughts and feelings often take people back to the same place. In his logic, change must proceed in the opposite order: first your inner state, then your outward circumstances.

Someone changes jobs to escape a critical boss. A year into the new job, they are expecting criticism again and hear it even in neutral remarks.

In the author’s model, change begins with what repeats inside. New surroundings may not help if you bring your old way of thinking and feeling into them.

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About the author

Joe Dispenza is an American chiropractor, lecturer, and author of popular books about the brain, meditation, and personal change, including Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, You Are the Placebo, and Becoming Supernatural. He runs seminars on his meditation method.

All books by this author: Joe Dispenza

Terms from the book

  • Hebb’s rule: A neuroscience principle: connections between neurons that frequently fire together grow stronger. The author uses it to explain how habits become established.
  • Survival mode: The author’s term for a state of stress in which attention narrows to the body, surroundings, and problems. An image from the book rather than a medical category.
  • The gap: The author’s term for the difference between how people present themselves and what they actually feel.
  • Mental rehearsal: Imagining an action or situation in detail without performing it. Studied in sport and medicine; it generally supplements actual practice rather than replacing it.
  • Observer effect: In quantum mechanics, the influence of measurement on a particle’s state. It does not mean that human thought or attention changes events in life.
  • Quantum mysticism: A label for attempts to explain consciousness, healing, or luck through quantum physics. Physicists do not support these explanations.

All terms

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