Book SummaryBreaking the Habit of Being Yourself, by Joe Dispenza

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

In Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, Joe Dispenza explains that unhappiness is the result of bad habits that make up our personality. Personal growth requires unlearning those habits, creating a new you, and using meditation to manifest the life you want. He explains what makes us think and feel the way we do, how that affects the condition of our lives, and how to use this information to form a brand new, better version of ourselves.

Joe Dispenza has a Doctorate of Chiropractic degree and has done extensive postgraduate...

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself Summary Where Do Our Habits Come From?

As Dispenza explains, changing your life requires changing your habits. Your habits are thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that you engage in regularly.

(Shortform note: In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey also suggests that our character consists of the habits we engage in on a regular basis, but while Dispenza’s main focus is on behavior and thought processes, Covey focuses more heavily on your perspective and how that impacts your habits.)

According to Dispenza, habits (as well as traits and skills) develop through a set of predictable steps: first, through conscious thinking—learning the information needed for that habit. Then, through doing—experiencing it, processing it, and retaining it emotionally. Finally, through being—internalizing it as an unconscious behavior or feature of your self. Once you’ve mastered a habit, skill, or trait, it becomes ingrained in you and your external environment can’t easily interfere with it.

(Shortform note: [Experts estimate...

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself Summary How Do You Change “You”?

To change who you are and achieve the life you want, says Dispenza, you have to break your old emotional and thought habits and form new ones that are in line with who you want to be. Again, this requires changing the way you think and feel. Through the power of neuroplasticity, these changes will become permanent in your brain.

(Shortform note: In Atomic Habits, James Clear expands on this idea and suggests that changing your habits requires not only changing your thought patterns, but your underlying beliefs about yourself. If you want to change yourself to be more assertive, for example, but deep down you still believe you are a timid person, the changes you make toward being assertive will not last.)

According to Dispenza, when an emotion lasts more than a few hours, it becomes a mood. When it lasts more than a few days, it becomes a temperament. When it lasts years, it becomes a personality trait. Replacing a negative personality trait with a positive one, then, requires changing the emotions that eventually build to that trait.

(Shortform note: In _[Emotional...

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself Summary Meditation: Creating a New “You”

To break the old habits that form your current personality and form new ones that support who you want to become, Dispenza recommends a four-step meditative practice, with each step taking a week to master. However, he also emphasizes that you should go at your own pace and only move on to the next week’s steps after you’ve mastered the previous ones.

Over time, your body will memorize how to perform these steps, and they will become a part of your subconscious ability.

(Shortform note: Research definitively shows that regular meditation can lead to greater neuroplastic change, lending proof to Dispenza’s claim that his meditative practices help you break and create habits more easily on a neurological level.)

Step 1: Relax Your Brainwaves

The first step Dispenza describes is a process he calls induction. This is a process you’ll use at the beginning of each meditation session to put yourself in a state of calm, characterized by low-range brainwaves. This is the same state that hypnotists put people in when performing hypnosis. It primes you for the meditation process and builds the foundation for the steps that...

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself Summary What Is the New “You” Like?

Once you’ve broken the old habits that used to make up your personality and adopted new ones that reflect who you truly are and want to be, Dispenza says that the new “you” will be fully in control of your self.

At this point, your external environment no longer controls how you feel and live. You notice bad habits as they emerge and are able to break them easily, using your mind to overpower the effects of your body, your environment, and time.

(Shortform note: Dispenza doesn’t directly address the effects of trauma in the formation or re-formation of bad habits. Someone who achieves the mastery Dispenza describes but then experiences a major trauma might find his system insufficient for overcoming the negative habits that naturally develop as part of a trauma response, especially since some of these habits are survival mechanisms that may mitigate the...

Shortform Exercise: Identify Your Gap Between Who You Are and Who You Act Like

Dispenza says we present a self to the world that is not consistent with our authentic selves. Identify a part of yourself that isn’t true to you and consider what it would take to get rid of it.

What is something that you do, think, or say to others to gain their approval or meet their expectations? This may be as complex as pretending you are happy in your marriage because you don’t want to think about your dissatisfaction, or as simple as pretending to like a sports team just because your friend likes it. What emotion is underlying this pretense?