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How To Break Unconscious Patterns, The Power of Meditation, The Truth About Dopamine & Creating Lasting Change with Dr Joe Dispenza #549

Apr 22, 2025 1h 31m 68 insights
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
Actionable Insights

1. Prioritize Emotional Balance

Focus on achieving emotional balance because, without it, even extensive physical and chemical health efforts will be ineffective for true well-being.

2. Learn Emotional Self-Regulation

Teach yourself how to self-regulate your emotional states to overcome addictions and unhealthy patterns, trading negative emotions for elevated ones through consistent practice.

3. Practice Elevated Emotions

Consistently practice feeling elevated emotions like gratitude, appreciation, kindness, care, and love to become proficient at self-regulating your emotional state and embodying these feelings.

4. Become Conscious of Unconscious Patterns

To break free from addiction and create a fulfilling life, become conscious of your unconscious patterns and make different, even uncomfortable, choices to alter your behavior, mindset, or strategy.

5. Engage in Unlearning Process

Recognize that 95% of who you are is automatic programming; therefore, engage in an unlearning process by becoming conscious of unconscious thoughts, speech, actions, and feelings to break old habits before reinventing a new self.

6. Deprogram Before Reprogramming

To reinvent yourself, you must first deprogram and unlearn old habits, pruning existing synaptic connections before you can effectively reprogram and rewire new ones.

7. Start Each Day Intentionally

Recognize the critical importance of how you start each day, as intentional morning routines can have a powerful effect on your life by priming your mind and body.

8. Utilize Morning/Night for Subconscious

Leverage the times when you wake up and go to bed, as your subconscious mind is more open (in alpha or theta brainwave states), to program new behaviors and ways of being.

9. Rehearse New Behaviors Morning

Utilize the open door to your subconscious mind in the morning to mentally rehearse new behaviors and ways of being, evolving your experience and priming yourself for the day.

10. Avoid Morning Phone Check

Refrain from immediately checking your cell phone upon waking, as connecting to known external information and associated emotions allows the environment to control your feelings and thoughts, making you a victim to external programming.

11. Monitor Unconscious Thoughts/Habits

Actively become conscious of your unconscious thoughts, observe your speech and actions, and pay attention to your feelings to break habits and practice maintaining desired emotional states.

12. Think Greater Than You Feel

To change your life, learn to think thoughts that are greater than your current feelings, as feelings are a record of the past, and thinking in the past will keep your life the same.

13. Release Emotional Baggage

Heal and move on from the past by actively releasing emotional baggage, rather than continually reliving painful memories, to achieve liberation.

14. Overcome Emotion, Not Review Past

Instead of dwelling on past traumas by reviewing them, focus on overcoming the associated emotions to achieve true healing and liberation from the past.

15. Persist in Lowering Emotional Volume

When confronting difficult emotions or past traumas, persist in ’lowering the volume’ to those emotions, even when uncomfortable, as this consistent effort leads to breaking free from their hold.

16. Sit with Discomfort, Lower Volume

When experiencing discomfort or anxiety during meditation, choose to sit with it and persistently work to lower the volume of that emotion, which will naturally shift your attention away from past problems.

17. Commit to Meditation Until Calm

Do not end your meditation practice until you have overcome any challenging emotions and reached a state of calm, gratitude, or joy, as this commitment to overcoming yourself is key to transformation.

18. Dedicate Ample Morning Routine Time

Allocate a significant block of time (e.g., two hours) to your morning routine, including a ’think box’ and meditation, and commit to staying in meditation until you reach a state of presence, as this overcoming process is essential for personal growth.

19. Don’t Quit During Discomfort

If you quit when facing discomfort or difficulty in your practices, you remain the same person; persist through challenges to enable magical changes in your life.

20. Train Body to Present Moment

Consistently train your body, like an animal, to settle into the present moment during your dedicated practice time, asserting your mind’s will over its conditioned desires until it surrenders.

21. Assign Meaning to Practices

Assign clear meaning and intention to your meditation or self-regulation practices, as this activates your prefrontal cortex, quieting distracting thoughts and enhancing the value and effectiveness of the act.

22. Pre-Meditation ‘Think Box’ Ritual

Before meditating, engage in a ‘Think Box’ ritual where you get up early, write notes, and consciously decide what thoughts, circumstances, and emotions to avoid, and what intentions to set for your meditation.

23. Write Down Distracting Thoughts

If thoughts are popping up in the morning, write down any distracting thoughts or tasks before meditation to quiet the noise and allow you to drop more deeply into your practice.

24. Plan Meditation Intentions

Before meditation, clearly plan your intentions, including what you want to experience, how you will execute the practice, and how you aim to evolve from your previous meditation, to ensure a focused and meaningful session.

25. Review & Plan Meditation Improvements

After a meditation, reflect on what went well and what you want to improve, articulating these points to reinforce positive neurological pathways and consciously shape your brain for evolving your next experience.

26. Mentally Rehearse Desired Behaviors

If you are committed to change, mentally rehearse how you want to behave in future situations, such as a Zoom meeting, especially if you were not at your best in a previous similar event.

27. Sustain Elevated States Daily

Practice maintaining an elevated state of mind and body, first with eyes closed, then with eyes open, throughout your entire day to keep your heart coherent and inform your brain that it’s safe to create.

28. Combine Intention with Elevated Emotion

Combine a clear intention with an elevated emotion to create a powerful energetic signal that attracts synchronicities, coincidences, and opportunities into your life.

29. Cultivate Wholeness

When you cultivate a sense of wholeness through elevated emotions, you will naturally have less need for external pleasure and quick dopamine fixes, as you are generating well-being internally.

30. Practice Elevated Emotions for Heart

Truly practice elevated emotions to make your heart coherent and orderly, which then informs the brain that it’s safe to create and generates an external magnetic field for connection.

31. Achieve Brain Coherence

Practice broadening your focus to achieve brain coherence, where different parts of the brain synchronize, leading to increased energy, relaxation, and a state of being alert and awake without stress.

32. Broaden Focus for Mental Calm

Broaden your focus by taking attention off material things and the known, and instead focus on space or nothing, which helps slow down the analytical mind and shift brainwaves.

33. Avoid Stress-Driven Over-Analysis

Do not over-analyze problems, circumstances, or conditions while experiencing stress and its associated emotions, as this will consistently worsen your brain’s state.

34. Change Daily Emotions for Genes

Understand that living by the same emotions daily keeps your body believing it’s in the same environment, signaling the same genes; therefore, change your emotional state to positively influence gene expression for health.

35. Elevated Emotions Downregulate Disease

Consistently regulate elevated emotions through thought alone to signal your body that it’s in a different environment, thereby downregulating genes for disease and upregulating genes for health.

36. Follow Instructions as a Novice

If you are new to meditation or self-regulation practices, follow instructions precisely without preconceived notions, as this often leads to significant positive changes.

37. Understand Science for Change

For those who prefer a rational approach, understanding the scientific basis (quantum physics, neuroscience, epigenetics) behind self-regulation can help them reason with the concepts and commit to the practice.

38. Open Your Heart to Create

Men, in particular, should embrace vulnerability and open their hearts, as this provides an alternative, powerful way to create and achieve desired outcomes beyond traditional competitive drive.

39. Women: Clarify Intentions

Women, who often naturally know how to love and make sacrifices, should focus on getting very clear on their intentions to amplify their creative power and achieve amazing results.

40. Reflect Daily on Your Performance

At the end of each day, reflect on your performance by asking ‘How did I do today?’ to identify moments where you lost consciousness or reacted, and consider how you would act differently next time.

41. Learn from Mistakes

Embrace mistakes as learning opportunities, as the brain learns through errors and surprises; the key is to not repeat the same mistakes.

42. Commit to New Responses

Make a conscious commitment to not repeat negative reactions to people or circumstances, understanding that such responses weaken your organism and are not worth the cost to your well-being.

43. Bypass Limiting Thoughts

When limiting thoughts or old patterns arise, consciously choose to ‘drive right past’ them, refusing to engage with self-defeating narratives like ‘I’m too old’ or ‘I can’t change.’

44. Be Realistic About Healing

Understand that significant changes, especially in health conditions developed over time, require consistent effort and won’t resolve in just a few meditations; maintain a pragmatic perspective.

45. Release Past Grievances

To foster healthy new relationships, you must let go of past grievances and emotional baggage, as carrying them forward will create trust issues and hinder future connections.

46. Practice Self-Forgiveness

If struggling to forgive others, reflect on something you’ve done that you wish to be forgiven for, and then practice forgiving that person in the same way you desire forgiveness for yourself.

47. Release Old Emotions for New

To allow new information and possibilities into your nervous system, you must first release the old emotional states that are blocking anything not equal to their frequency.

48. Shift Attention, Change Feelings

When stuck in a negative emotional state, consciously shift your attention away from the cause of that emotion and onto something else to notice a change in how you feel.

49. Redirect Energy from Emotional Causes

Understand that strong emotions direct your attention and energy to their cause; consciously redirect your vital life force away from past grievances to free up energy for healing and change.

50. Choose Better Feelings

When experiencing elevated emotions like love (e.g., high oxytocin levels), it becomes impossible to hold a grudge; choose to cultivate these better feelings to naturally release past resentments.

51. Define Desired Self for Relationships

To attract and maintain healthy relationships, clearly define the person you want to become and what you desire in a partner, rather than carrying past baggage into new connections.

52. Challenge Beliefs: Thoughts & Health

If you accept that your thoughts can make you sick, challenge your beliefs to embrace the possibility that your thoughts can also make you well, thereby empowering your healing process.

53. Seek Transformation Inspiration

Look at testimonials of people who have transformed their lives and health by overcoming past traumas, as their stories of healing and new opportunities can inspire your own change.

54. Prioritize Emotional Balance Equally

Recognize that emotional states signal genes and impact health as profoundly as diet and exercise; therefore, prioritize emotional balance with the same dedication as physical well-being.

55. Evolve Meditation Practice Daily

Continuously evolve your meditation practice by reflecting on your daily reactions and setting intentions to improve your responses, rather than just seeking perfect meditations, especially if you’ve been stuck in processing trauma for a long time.

56. Practice Presence for Anxiety Relief

To overcome anxiety, consistently practice being in the present moment, as you cannot be anxious when fully present; consciously choose to practice gratitude to become proficient at it.

57. Use Discomfort as Motivation

If a meditation is difficult or uncomfortable, let that discomfort motivate you to analyze your internal state, understand where you went wrong, and strive to improve in your next practice.

58. Achieve Self-Acceptance

Cultivate self-acceptance and inner peace, as your relationship with yourself directly impacts your relationships with others; being okay with yourself allows you to be okay with anyone.

59. Start Day with Gratitude

Begin your day by feeling grateful for life’s simple gifts, such as being alive, having a body, family, and basic comforts, as this mindset attracts positive coincidences and opportunities.

60. Observe Synchronicities

Pay attention to synchronicities and coincidences in your life, as they provide feedback that your internal work is creating external results, reinforcing your belief in yourself as a creator, not a victim.

61. Make Time for Creation

Actively make time to engage in practices that foster creation in your life, as this demonstrates your belief in yourself as a creator and your future, rather than being stuck in the past.

62. Show Up for Your Future

Consistently engage in self-transformative practices because you want to believe in your future more than your past, fostering a forward-looking mindset.

63. Don’t Wait for Crisis to Change

Be inspired to initiate change and self-improvement as an experiment now, rather than waiting for a crisis, trauma, disease, or loss to compel you to act.

64. Make Time for Self-Investment

Prioritize making time for yourself and investing in your personal growth, as this is the most challenging but crucial step for investing in your future.

65. Start with Small Conscious Experiments

Begin with small, conscious experiments, such as deciding not to think certain thoughts, act in particular ways, or simply staying conscious of feelings for a few moments, to demystify meditation and start becoming familiar with a new self.

66. Reduce Defaulting/Reacting Duration

Acknowledge that defaulting to old patterns and reacting is normal, but focus on reducing the duration for which you engage in these behaviors.

67. Act from Inspiration, Not Obligation

Engage in self-improvement practices only if you are genuinely inspired and want to try the experiment, rather than doing it out of obligation or because you feel you ‘have to.’

68. Apply & Teach Key Takeaway

Identify one actionable insight to apply to your own life and one to teach someone else, as teaching helps you learn and retain information more effectively.