Have you ever tried to catch a greased pig at a county fair while wearing roller skates and a blindfold? No? Well, good job on making good choices in life. But if you’ve ever tried to break a deeply ingrained habit, like checking your phone every four minutes or reaching for chocolate when your boss emails you after 5 PM, you’ve done something similar to what your brain does.
I was recently in a strange situation where I was trying to meditate and my German Shepherd, with her long, unclipped nails, thought it would be a good time to practice her model runway walk on the hardwood floor of my room. Click-click-click-click <pause> click-click-click-click. While I was sitting there trying to calm my mind while also planning her death, I couldn’t stop thinking about the strange ideas of Dr. Joe Dispenza and how he talks about neuroplasticity.
The Circus That Breaks Habits
In his book “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself,” Dispenza makes a strong case for how we can become addicted to our feelings. We are creatures of habit, and our brains have what neuroscientists call “default mode networks,” which are like autopilots for our brains. These networks are as stubborn as a cat that won’t admit it lives in your house rent-free for eight years.
The average person makes about 35,000 decisions every day, but very few of them are made with conscious thought. We think we’re using the latest technology, but we’re really using old software. It’s like thinking you’re using a quantum computer when you’re really using Windows 95.
Dispenza says, “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” This sounds inspiring until you realize that most of us are creating futures based on past programming, like sleepwalkers raiding the refrigerator.
The Neuroplasticity Dance
This is where things get interesting, like when you watch ice melt and are really interested in the outcome. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change itself by making new neural connections. This means that we don’t have to live with the way our brains are wired forever. Our brains stay flexible for the rest of our lives, which is both comforting and scary when you think about what we usually focus on.
Neuroscience substantiates that simultaneous neuronal activation leads to synaptic connectivity (Hebbian theory, for those tracking at home). This means that anything you think about or do a lot of times gets stronger in your brain. It’s why you can still sing along to that embarrassing pop song from the 1990s but can’t remember where you put your keys seventeen seconds ago.
Dispenza uses this well-known science in meditation to say that focused intention during meditation can actually create new neural pathways. It’s like being both the electrician and the power source for the rewiring project in your brain.
Fighting the Neurological Pig
Back to our example of “catching a greased pig.” It’s not just hard to break a habit; it’s laughably hard. Your habit, the pig, knows the area well (your neural pathways). It’s been stuck there for years. You, on the other hand, are blindfolded (not aware of what makes you tick), slipping around (emotionally reactive), and probably wondering if you made the right choices in life (existentially confused).
When you try to meditate like Dispenza says, by focusing on a new desired state instead of your usual one, your brain acts like a toddler who has been denied a fifth cookie. “Cognitive dissonance” is the technical term for this, but I like “neural rebellion” better.
Think about this: your brain has spent years getting better at worrying about the future, going over the past, or mindlessly doom-scrolling through social media feeds. Then, all of a sudden, you tell it to sit still and think about something like abundance or thankfulness. When you tell your neurons that the annual holiday party is now a silent meditation retreat, they look at each other like office workers.
The Meditation Prescription
Dispenza’s method includes certain meditation techniques that combine focused attention, heightened emotion, and a clear intention. It’s not just about sitting cross-legged and not thinking about lunch.
He describes a process in “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” that includes:
- Recognizing habits and emotions that you don’t want
- Getting into a meditative state where the analytical mind calms down
- Making a clear plan for a new state you want to be in
- Creating strong feelings about that new state
- Giving up on the result
This process sounds simple, like putting together IKEA furniture sounds simple until you’re sitting on the floor at 2 AM with extra screws you don’t understand and wondering if you really understand how to make basic shapes.
The main difference between Dispenza’s method and just wishing things were different is that it requires sustained attention and heightened emotion. Neuroscience has shown that emotions can help with learning and remembering things. When you meditate and feel happy, grateful, or free, you are basically giving your brain a lot of energy to change.
The Doom-Scrolling Puzzle
This is where the strange things in life really stand out. Our brains easily rewire for things that don’t help us much, like learning how to scroll through social media for hours without getting anything useful out of it. But we have a hard time spending twenty minutes rewiring for things that might actually make our lives better.
We didn’t mean to, but we’ve taught ourselves to be experts at catastrophizing, doom-scrolling, and rumination. Most of us can come up with the worst possible situations with the same creativity as a horror writer on a deadline. But if you ask us to picture good things happening, we suddenly become as unimaginative as a rock.
In “You Are the Placebo,” Dispenza talks about how we’ve trained ourselves to live in stress response, which is ironic. Our bodies get used to stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline so much that we need them to live. We’re basically addicted to our own stress hormones, always looking for the next hit of worry or anxiety.
The Science Behind What Seems Like Magic
Don’t just write this off as new-age nonsense; there is a lot of research on how meditation affects the brain. Research using fMRI and EEG has shown that regular meditation changes the structure and function of the brain in ways that can be measured.
Studies published in journals like Frontiers in Human Neuroscience show that meditation makes gray matter more concentrated in parts of the brain that are important for learning, memory, and controlling emotions. It also lowers activity in the default mode network, which is the part of the brain that controls mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts.
Dispenza’s ideas aren’t magic; they’re neuroscience put to use with a little bit of focused intention. The “magical” part comes from how little we know about consciousness and how it relates to brain states. This is a field that even the smartest neuroscientists can’t figure out.
The Practical Rewiring Process
A lot of us have our own “greased pig moment” when we try to use Dispenza’s methods in our daily lives. As soon as we sit down to meditate, our brain tells us that we need to remember the name of our third-grade teacher or reorganize the tools in our garage right away.
The process requires a level of persistence that is almost stubbornness. You have to keep bringing your mind back to your desired new state, like trying to teach a cat to fetch when it doesn’t want to.
Dispenza says that you should meditate at the same time every day, find a quiet place to do it, and start with guided meditations before trying to do it on your own. He says that consistency is more important than length: fifteen minutes every day is better than two hours once a week.
The hardest part isn’t the meditation; it’s staying aware all day. When you’re stuck in traffic, have a deadline at work, or have to deal with that family member who always asks why you’re still single, that’s when the real test comes. Can you notice when you’re falling back into old emotional patterns and choose a different path?
The Surprising Side Effects
People who keep working on this neurological renovation project often say they have unexpected side effects. Some people talk about synchronicities, which are coincidences that seem statistically unlikely but have a lot of meaning. Some people notice changes in their relationships or chances that fit with their new mental states.
This makes sense from a neuroscience point of view. You literally change what you see when you change what you focus on. Your brain’s filtering system, called the reticular activating system, starts to focus on different parts of your environment based on your new priorities.
It’s like finally seeing all the red cars on the road after you decide to buy one yourself. They were always there; you just weren’t ready to see them.
The Last Paradox
The most ironic thing about this whole neuroplasticity thing is that the brain you’re trying to rewire is the same one you’re using to do the rewiring. It’s like trying to fix a plane while it’s in the air.
This loop that refers to itself creates interesting problems. Your current neural patterns will fight change as hard as a dog holding onto the dishtowel it stole out of your hands. Your logical mind will come up with good reasons why meditation is a waste of time, especially when you don’t see results right away.
But this same paradox holds the answer. The brain’s capacity for self-observation, known as metacognition, serves as the pivotal mechanism that facilitates change. By cultivating the witness perspective that meditation fosters, you establish a gap between stimulus and response, as well as between automatic reaction and deliberate choice.
You can be free from the habits that have defined you in this space. It’s not easy, comfortable, or quick, but neither is wrestling a pig with grease on it. You can keep your dignity and clothes clean when you rewire your brain.
And this is a fight worth the inevitable faceplants and muddy setbacks, unlike county fair competitions. When you finally catch that pig, when you break free from old patterns and make new neural pathways that are in line with who you want to be, you realize that you’ve done more than just change a habit. You have changed what it means to be human for you.
And that’s worth all the brain wrestling matches in the world.
