How To Reprogram Your Mind To Break Any Addiction | Dr. Joe Dispenza – Transcript

00:00The only challenge I think with addictions is that if you can't think greater than how you feel, your life will stay the same. Yeah. The solution then is I thought today I wanted to talk a little bit about addiction.

00:20So as we speak, I've been a medical doctor for 21 years. So if I look at my patient population, but even if I look across society as a whole these days, it's very hard not to draw the conclusion that almost everyone is addicted to something, whether that be their phones, Instagram, alcohol, online pornography, drugs, whatever it

00:46might be. And so I'm interested, Dr. Joe, what's your view on addiction? what's driving so much addiction and what can people do to try and break free? Sure. I think it's a a a question worthy of a conversation. I think that um uh we've been programmed and it's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just how we've been programmed. So, um I

01:10think behind every substance addiction or some addiction on some gaming or media or whatever, there's an emotion that the person is doing their best to regulate. So, let's just say a person has been exposed to a trauma, right? And and when we have an event in our life that changes our emotional state, the stronger the emotion we feel from the

01:37shock, the betrayal, the trauma, the news, whatever it is, the more altered we are inside of us, the more the brain freezes a frame and takes a snapshot. And that's called the long-term memory. And long-term memories, we remember them because we can remember the feeling associated with them. So what most people don't know is that trauma or those series of events alters our internal state and every time we think about or remember the trauma we produce

02:02the same chemistry in the brain and body as if the event was occurring. Now the body is so objective that it doesn't know the difference between the real life experience that's creating that emotion or the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone. And it only takes a a thought and a feeling an image and an emotion and a stimulus and response and you're actually conditioning the body subconsciously into that emotional state. And that sets

02:27the baseline of that person's emotional state. So then the person goes, "God, I feel empty. I feel anxious. I feel unworthy. I feel resentment. I feel frustrated. And I don't know how to change it." So then they look for things in their outer world to make that feeling go away. So whether it's a drug, whether it's gaming, whether it's pornography, uh whether it's

02:52complaining, doesn't matter what it is, but let's just use a pill as an example or a drug, a recreational drug. A person takes a recreational drug. The moment they take the recreational drug, they notice a change in their emotional state. And the moment they notice that change in their emotional state, they associate that change with what caused it. And they they remember what what caused it. So that starts to create a dependency. Now I think there are

03:19degrees of addictions. Some are very physiological. You know receptors are modified. But when you get right down to it, an addiction is when the body has been conditioned to be the mind. So then the person every time they start feeling the emptiness, they feel the unworthiness, they feel the frustration, they feel the anxiety, their brain creates the image of what they need to do to make that feeling go away. And the last time or the last series of times it was that ex

03:46exogenous substance or that that activity that made it go away. Now here's the problem. Let's use gaming as an example. Okay. So when you blow someone up or you break through a certain level or you shoot someone or you get points for whatever you're doing in a game, there's a release of dopamine in the brain. And dopamine is the reward chemical. It's the pleasure chemical. The problem is is that the amount of dopamine that's

04:13released in in a very short interval of time is outside of normal. So now rush dopamine into the brain and the receptor sites on the outside of the cells say this is way too much dopamine than I'm used to processing. So the receptor sites actually close down. They they shut down. So now in order for the person to get that same feeling, they got to play more. Yeah. They got to do more. or they got to that's the stimulus

04:40has got to be greater. So so over time we start recalibrating those pleasure centers those receptors to a higher level. Now what's the significance of that in the absence of that stimulation our pleasure centers have been hijacked to such a high level that we can't find pleasure in anything. You can't find pleasure from a sunset. He can't find pleasure from sitting down at the table and having a meal with your family,

05:06playing with a dog, going see your grandparents. A lot, especially for a lot of children, you you can look at them and you can see that something happened to them where they're just glazed over. That's because they're kidnapped by the technology. And so, in order for them to get that same rush, they have to play more. They have to do more. Now, here's really the big problem.

05:26Learning should be a reward in and of itself, right? I mean, learning should be a reward, but now for most people, they need a stimulus. They need something to drive their attention to whatever they're learning. And and now attention is dependent on something outside of us. And when you capture people's attention, you capture uh their energy. So, and you can program them as a result of it. So, the solution then is to teach people how to self-regulate.

05:53So we see people that come to our work that have had problems with addictions, all kinds of addictions, but really it's some emotional addiction that really they're trying to change, right? And so they just been programmed the thing that it has to happen outside of outside of us. So what we discovered in our research is that you could actually turn that hypnosis, that conditioning around and not wait for the experience to produce the emotion, but teach people

06:20how to self-regulate their emotional states and be able to trade resentment, frustration, anxiety for an elevated emotion. And if you keep practicing it, you get really good at what you practice. So good at it that you actually become it. So, so then when people start to self-regulate, we actually measure what happens to their physiology when they do it properly and it becomes a habit. And so then when the person notices then that their body is

06:48out of balance, they have one of two choices. They can rely on some exogenous substance or something outside of them or they can take a moment and recalibrate their emotional state. And and the only the only challenge I think with addictions is that the moment you say I'm not going to drink coffee, I'm not going to smoke cigarettes. I'm not going to drink alcohol. I'm not going to have sugar. The moment you make that conscious declaration with your conscious mind, the body has been

07:16conditioned and dependent on that substance. So two hours goes by and the body has modified its receptor sites and it starts talking to the brain. And it starts saying, "Rangan, why don't you start tomorrow? Tomorrow's a better day. Any other day but this day, this is not a good day for you.

07:31It's my parents' fault. It's my boss. It's the news." And that thought is being driven by the body mind. Now, if we act on that thought, we make the same choice, we do the same thing, we create the same experience, we feel the same emotion, and then all of a sudden that emptiness or that emotional state goes away and the person returns back to the known. So there is a biological, there is a neurological, there's a chemical, there's a hormonal genetic death of the

07:58old self because you're breaking that stimulus and response. That inhibition then causes the body to feel chaos. It's it's looking for the known, the familiar. So instead of white knuckling it to the other side, we teach people how to regulate Yeah. their and internal emotional states. And over time, you start seeing the moment you're feeling an elevated emotion like gratitude or appreciation or kindness or care and love with life, you don't need anything outside of you to make you feel better,

08:26you're actually doing it by yourself. And and people can sustain these states like any habit for an extended period of time. Yeah. There's a there's a a phrase I've heard you say before, Dr. Joe, that people often mistake love for pleasure.

08:41And when people start to feel whole again, they have less of a need for pleasure. Yeah. And I think that really speaks to what you've just said. You know, when you feel these, as you call them, elevated emotions, you have less of a need for these quick dopamine fixes, right? Yes. Exactly. I mean, think about it. I mean, how could you want if you're whole? You If you're whole, there there's no need to want.

09:08There's no lack. There's no separation. What does that mean? Whole. Well, we see we here's how we describe it. Um, we do a lot of studies on brain coherence and heart coherence. And let's talk about what it's what it's not. Okay? I mean, so, so when there's an emergency or when we're aroused by some threat or some condition in our life or we can't predict an outcome, we can't control an outcome, we have the perception that something in our world could possibly

09:35get worse, we switch on that primitive nervous system, right? that fight orflight nervous system and now the game is fight or hide. The problem is is with human beings when we're out of we feel like a loss of control. Our brain all of a sudden tries to control everything in our life. So every person, every object, everything, every place, every experience that you've ever had is mapped in your neoortex. So the arousal of the stress hormones drives the brain

10:01into a very high brain wave state called high beta. But then as you shift your attention from one meeting to another meeting to another text to another person to another thing to another place you have to go every one of those different elements has a neurological network in the brain. So like a lightning storm in the clouds the brain starts firing out of order. It starts firing incoherently. And when the brain is incoherent we're incoherent. And so think about when you're stressed the

10:29most common thing that people do is they overfocus. they narrow their focus on whatever it is that's driving them to pay attention to it. Yeah. And so then the act of paying attention to the problem is actually driving the brain further out of balance. And we've studied this. When you analyze that problem, that circumstance, that condition within the emotion that you are feeling and derived

10:54by the hormones of stress, you'll make your brain worse 100% of the time because the analysis, the overanalysis is driving it further into a higher thinking, higher beta brainwife state. So this kind of narrow focus is what causes the brain to be a house divided against itself. So we thought, well, why don't we do the opposite? Why?

11:14Instead of narrowing our focus on the cause, something physical, something material, because the hormones of stress actually heighten the senses and cause us to become materialist. So matter is the issue when there's survival. It's whatever's around the corner. It's whatever is going to happen. So we said, okay, let's teach people something else.

11:31Let's teach them how to broaden their focus. And as they broaden their focus and take their attention off of everything material and everything known and focus on space, focus on nothing. The act of doing that actually starts slowing down the analytical mind. You can't analyze when you're sensing and it starts to change the person's brain waves into a slower brain wave pattern.

11:53And so now as you start slowing your brain waves from that high beta, you start slowing down. You're shifting gears. You go into a mid-range beta, then you go into a lowle beta. And then all of a sudden you get into alpha. Now alpha, when you're in alpha, the voice in your head, the critic in your mind goes away. that voice that's talking to you stops and the brain tends to see in images in pictures. That's the imaginary state. That's a creative state. In an alpha, when you're out of survival,