Parwy's Blog: Do This Every Morning to Reduce Stress and Anxiety - Dr Rangan Chatterjee with Dr Joe Dispenza

The Foundational Role of Thoughts and Emotions

Your current personality, defined by how you think, act, and feel, creates your personal reality. Consequently, nothing changes in your life until you change your personality.
Thoughts can profoundly impact health: chronic stress, often driven by negative thoughts and emotions (such as fear, anger, resentment, guilt, shame), activates the body's emergency system, leading to a biological state of dis-ease and downregulating genes for health while upregulating those for disease. Conversely, positive thoughts and elevated emotions can make you well.
The brain, being a record of the past, tends to repeat familiar patterns: 90% of thoughts are the same as the day before, and by age 35, 95% of who we are is a set of memorised behaviours, unconscious habits, and emotional responses.

Understanding and Breaking Addictions

Most addictions, whether to substances, gaming, media, or even complaining, are fundamentally attempts to self-regulate an underlying emotional state, often originating from past trauma.

Traumatic events create strong emotional imprints. Remembering these events or associated thoughts produces the same chemistry in the brain and body as if the trauma were reoccurring, thereby conditioning the body into that emotional state.
External stimuli (e.g., gaming rewards) can hijack the brain's pleasure centres by releasing excessive dopamine, causing receptors to shut down. This leads to a need for increasingly stronger stimuli to feel pleasure and an inability to find joy in normal, everyday activities.
When the body is conditioned to be the mind, it craves familiar emotional states, even negative ones. Breaking this cycle requires overcoming the body's subconscious pull towards the known, leading to a "biological, neurological, chemical, hormonal, genetic death of the old self".
The solution is self-regulation: consciously cultivating elevated emotions (gratitude, appreciation, kindness, love) internally, rather than relying on external experiences or substances to alter emotional states.

The Power of Intentional Practice and Self-Regulation

Mental rehearsal is a powerful tool: the brain cannot distinguish between a real-life experience and a vividly imagined one. Mentally rehearsing desired behaviours, thoughts, and emotional states installs new neurological circuits, effectively "priming" the brain and body for the future. This can even lead to physical changes, such as increased muscle strength from imagined bicep curls.
Meditation means "to become familiar with." It involves becoming so conscious of your unconscious thoughts, behaviours, and emotions that you do not revert to the old self, effectively "unlearning" old patterns before "relearning" new ones.
Brain and heart coherence are key for creation:
- When stressed, the brain fires incoherently in high beta waves due to narrow focus on problems. By broadening focus to "space" or "nothing," brainwaves slow to alpha and theta states, suppressing the analytical mind and fostering coherence, creativity, and a sense of wholeness.
- Practicing elevated emotions makes the heart beat coherently, sending a signal to the brain that it's safe to create. This creates an external magnetic field, fostering feelings of connection and making it seem as though desired future experiences are already manifesting.
Consistency is vital: just as physical skills improve with practice, so do emotional and mental skills. The overcoming process, especially when challenging, is the "becoming process" that leads to personal transformation. Getting up from meditation as the same person who sat down means nothing has changed.

The Critical Importance of Morning Routines

The periods upon waking and before sleep are crucial for self-programming, as the analytical mind is suppressed, and the door to the subconscious mind is wide open.
Disconnecting from external stimuli (e.g., cell phones, news, social media) first thing in the morning is essential. Most people immediately connect to external knowns, which trigger familiar thoughts and emotions, allowing the environment to control their internal state and perpetuate old patterns.
An intentional pre-meditation ritual ("think box"), where one consciously decides which negative thoughts and emotions to avoid and clarifies intentions for the day, can significantly enhance the effectiveness of meditation by assigning meaning and engaging the prefrontal cortex.

Overcoming Trauma and Fostering Forgiveness

While acknowledging that traditional trauma therapy (revisiting and unpicking the past) can be powerful, Dr. Dispenza suggests a potential danger in spending too long in past emotions, as this can lead to reliving the trauma.
His approach focuses on overcoming the emotion associated with traumatic memories, rather than endlessly analysing the memory itself. When the emotion is released, the memory loses its charge, becoming wisdom that liberates the individual from the past.
Forgiveness is an "emotional survival strategy". Holding onto resentment or anger towards others (e.g., an ex-partner) keeps one trapped in past emotional states, draining vital life force and preventing new, healthier experiences. Forgiving oneself and others, by releasing the emotional charge, frees up energy for healing and creating a new life.

The Science of Change and Future Creation

Epigenetics demonstrates that our internal emotional state signals our genes, meaning we can downregulate disease genes and upregulate health genes by changing our consistent emotional environment. Even novice meditators show profound biological changes within a week.
The journey of change is not always linear but involves a continuous process of becoming conscious of unconscious thoughts and emotional reactions. The key is to keep "catching yourself" when you fall back into old patterns.
By consistently cultivating a new personality (new thoughts, actions, and feelings), the body reorganises to a new chemistry, leading to profound biological changes and a shift from being a victim to being a creator of your life.
This self-transformation can lead to "synchronicities, coincidences, and opportunities" appearing in one's life, reinforcing the belief in personal agency and inspiring further practice.