"When troubles come, they come not single spies but in battalions." (Claudius, Hamlet Act IV, Scene V)
Shakespeare certainly knew how to drive a point home. With tongue firmly in cheek, I write today that my week has sometimes felt like a Shakespearean tragedy. The vicissitudes of life are unavoidable, of course, but this week threw a couple of extra stinkers at me. Nevertheless, as self-help and mindfulness teach us, it's not about what happens to us but how we deal with it, and I did not cope well. The impenetrable mud that was my thoughts this week seemed impossible to surmount, and I had considerably more bad days than good ones. As resolute as I am about dealing with these periods without medication, I have to admit that, in these downtimes, I almost always consider it. While I struggle to focus on motivational or self-help literature during these periods, what has helped me is working on this week's blog post, and I am reminded that they serve as a personal release, too.
As my week progressed, I considered how to approach this blog post. Sure enough, an element of (Part 1 of) Dr Joe Dispenza's book Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself offers a natural segue to last week's post and is well-suited to my horrendous week. Chapter Two is called 'Overcoming Your Environment', and in retrospect, I'm sorry that I didn't review my notes on this chapter alongside the segments of the book I examined last week. My week might have been more manageable if I had. Anyhow, hindsight is 20/20.
To recap, given the length of Part I of Dr Dispenza's book, I dedicated two posts to it. Last week's blog touched on the book's gist, its scientific and philosophical approach, and its premise, which suggests that to make meaningful changes in our lives, we must break ingrained habits. Essentially, we have to break the habit of being ourselves.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
The above is yet another misattributed quote - this time, it is one most often associated with Albert Einstein, which would have been perfect given the reference to him in the previous post. However, it was said by Rita Mae Brown, the feminist writer and civil rights activist, and I am here for it. It is a simple quote, but it lends credence to Dr Dispenza's position that to change our lives, we need to change our habits - especially those deep-rooted ones that have formed our identity. In spite of my efforts in the self-help space, my reaction to the events of this past week is due to years-long habits that have become part of my personality. It's a natural reaction because I have always acted that way.
I'm going to do my utmost to avoid too much science in this post, but it is essential to mention Dr Dispenza's reference to Hebb's Law, which states that:
"Any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become 'associated', so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other." (Donald O. Hebb, 1949)
Dr Dispenza's book summarises the above quote as follows: "nerve cells that fire together, wire together". This means that when a cell consistently activates another cell, the relation between the two cells strengthens. It is particularly important to mention that Donald O. Hebb was a psychologist who was influential in the field of neuropsychology, and Hebbian Theory states that neuronal connections can be altered by experience.
In the first couple of pages of Chapter 2 ('Overcoming Your Environment'), I made the connection between my personal experience and the quote mentioned a couple of posts back ("If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present."). Dr Dispenza posits that:
"When you think from your past memories, you can only create past experiences."
This was a lightbulb moment for me. How many of us have sat alone in a room years after a traumatic event, feeling the same emotion as we did at the time of the event, and then reacted in the same way? This is Hebbian Theory made manifest. The neuronal thought of a past event created a neuronal emotion in the present. This is how strongly those cells are wired together. Even years later, if I think back to a not-so-pleasant memory, I will experience the same feeling. The unfortunate thing, as Dr Dispenza says, is that our bodies can't tell the difference between whether we're experiencing a past feeling or a present one - it just knows that we're feeling it, and the effects on us are the same. If we're replaying trauma in our minds, we're living it all over again, and we all know how damaging this can be to both our physical and emotional states.
How Did I Become Myself?
Dr Dispenza writes that the more we react to our circumstances, the more our brain connects to those experiences and becomes neurochemically attached to them. This leads to creating a mental signature that is essentially our personality. I particularly like his wording around this:
"You have formed the habit of being yourself by becoming, in a sense, enslaved to your environment... you, as the quantum observer, are creating a mind that only reaffirms those circumstances into your specific reality."
A stressful situation is a stressful situation, no matter the circumstances. So, during this past week, when I experienced a challenging event - whether it made me anxious or depressed - I resorted to the same behaviours and reactions because they have sadly become a part of me. Anxiety and depression have become inherent in my personality - intrinsic to myself.
Remember, physics teaches us that, as an observer, we can alter outcomes on a cellular level. I don't want my personality to be defined (even in part) by depression and anxiety. Still, given how often I experience both conditions, it is undeniably part of my identity. I want to remedy this, not because I am ashamed but because I want to be defined by other aspects of my personality. Dr Dispenza references a repetitive loop (I say vicious cycle) of our own making - one that sees us stuck in a continuous repetition of the same experiences, feelings and attitudes. But, in true self-help fashion, he offers a solution: given we orchestrated the loop, we can also stop it.
"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2)
Well, what do you know? William Shakespeare wrote about mindfulness, too, circa 1600. The Bard, the Stoics, ancient mystics, and modern-day self-help gurus all say the same thing. After reading Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, I was more convinced than ever to explore mindfulness as a means to mollify my mental state, whether it is during bouts of depression or episodes of anxiety. I've already established that mindfulness is incredibly difficult, so how do I do this? I understand the purpose and even some of the science, but how do I put it into practice?
Warren Buffett said, "When people tell me they've learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people's experience." I think that, ultimately, my self-help journey will be a combination of both. However, I will lean decidedly toward the experience of others, most notably the authors I'll feature in this blog and Dr Joe Dispenza is undoubtedly included among those. His journey is borne of personal experience. He endured a life-changing event that allowed him to put his work into practice long before he published a book. He doesn't just teach mindfulness; he practices it. His story is fascinating and inspiring, and if you haven't heard of him, I encourage you to visit his website (link below), listen to a podcast or start reading his books. What I like about the author is that he is unassuming, focusing more on the achievements of others than he does on his own journey. Knowing what I know about his personal experience, I am inclined to note what he says because he has lived it.
The remainder of Part I of Dr Dispenza's book is focused on how to break the habit of being you. He presents that we must become more (or "greater") than our environment and circumstances to change. He states, "It is possible to think greater than your present reality..." before citing historical figures like Martin Luther King, Jr, Mahatma Gandhi and Marie Curie (among others) who did exactly that. I wrote a different name in the margin alongside Dr Dispenza's quote: Viktor Frankl.
As I reached that page, I was reminded of the twofold reason for that margin note. Firstly, in one of my earlier therapy sessions, I told my psychologist that I felt awful talking about my problems when there were people who were worse off than I was. She responded that the pain of others doesn't diminish our suffering (paraphrasing). That therapy session sprang to mind in 2016 when I bought Frankl's book Man's Search For Meaning and then again when I read Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.
There is an undeniable common thread that runs through mindfulness and self-help literature. I have mentioned it twice before, and I will mention it again. For this week's blog post I want to reference two critical quotes from Viktor Frankl's simultaneously heartbreaking and empowering book. In the first, he writes:
"To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. This suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore, the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative."
In my experience, a lot of the pain around my mental health struggle has been linked to feeling a sense of guilt, followed by the unnecessary and unwarranted compulsion to apologise for it ('it' being my mental state). There are endless self-help and motivational books centered around self-compassion, and I cannot wait to sink my teeth into some of them. For now, I will heed Viktor Frankl's words and declare that I will never again draw comparisons with anyone's struggle, for whatever the size or shape, the chamber is mine. I also resolve to never apologise for a dip in my mental health or how I choose to cope with it. The pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps and tough-love/get-over-it approach to dragging oneself out of the doldrums sometimes works but can also be counterproductive depending on the depths one finds oneself in. I have recently come to realise that I know my limitations, so more and more, I am listening to my inner voice and being kinder to myself, and I will no longer apologise for how I choose to heal.
The second Viktor Frankl quote ties almost directly into what Dr Dispenza says about becoming greater than our circumstances. Frankl wrote:
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Frankl took one of the most painful human experiences and turned it into a remarkable story about the human capacity to endure. Within the confines of a Nazi concentration camp, he thought so much greater than his reality that he was able to gift the world one of the most inspiring books ever written. Perhaps all those years ago, my therapist quoted Viktor Frankl, but things would only fall into place when I started this journey and connected it to Dr Dispenza's work. When looking at the experiences and words of great minds, maybe the key is not to draw comparisons but to extract the commonality and draw inspiration from the often shared (or, at the very least, similar) experiences.
Where To Next
Two posts in, and I still don't feel like I have done any justice to Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. I have marked up almost every one of the book's three hundred and twenty-nine pages because so many things resonated with me. Dr Dispenza thoroughly examines how our thoughts influence our reality and offers a means to change that. In my first post about this text, I mentioned some aspects I couldn't relate to, so over the next week, I'll formulate a plan of action to deal with the remainder of the book. There is much more to say about Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, but the author has said it best. I may be able to extract two more posts from Parts 2 and 3, but given they're primarily focused on elements that I haven't entirely warmed to, there may be only one more. Either way, I hope you'll join me next Sunday.
If you'd like to learn more about Hebbian Theory, a fascinating article from the Neuro Quotient website is in the 'Hebb' button below:
If you want to know more about Dr Joe Dispenza, head over to his website here:
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself is available at this affiliate link:
Man's Search For Meaning is available at the affiliate link below:
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