Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

Dispenza's argument is that personality is a habit like any other. On his account a person's beliefs, emotional patterns and sense of who they are have been rehearsed so long that they run automatically, and the life that results feels like fate because it is being produced by the same repeated states of mind every day. Breaking that, he says, requires changing the internal state before the circumstances change rather than waiting for the circumstances to justify it. The book is written as a step by step programme, built largely around meditation, attention and deliberate rehearsal of a different emotional state, and it draws on a mixture of neuroscience, particularly the language of neuroplasticity, and material the publisher describes as bridging science and spirituality. That mixture is where readers should be careful. The claim that repeated mental states become habitual and that attention can change behaviour is uncontroversial; the further claims made in this genre about thought altering physical and material outcomes are not supported by the research it borrows its vocabulary from.

Written from the publisher description, Open Library.

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• Joe Dispenza