We like to think we make our decisions in the moment, but more often than we realize, that isn’t what’s happening. A lot of what we do each day happens before we’ve given it much thought at all. We wake up and reach for the phone. We walk into the kitchen at a certain time and start looking for something to eat, whether we’re hungry or not. Someone says something that reminds us of an old disagreement, and we can feel ourselves getting defensive before we’ve even decided whether there’s anything to be defensive about. We tell ourselves all day that we’re going to work out and then when the time comes, our body suddenly feels tired and starts making a pretty convincing case for why tomorrow would be better.
“The body becomes the mind.” — Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
That’s how Dispenza describes what’s happening in those moments. This book is the one that started it all for me. I wrote about it in my very first piece here, Transforming Your Life at 53: A Personal Journey, when it helped me change my mindset and eventually my body. This time I want to touch on a different angle from the book, one I didn’t get into then and one that might be the more important half of his argument. His point runs deeper than the body just reacting before we decide something. A thought produces a feeling and that feeling triggers more thoughts that match it. Repeat that cycle enough times and the body begins to memorize the emotional state. Eventually, it can produce the feeling automatically, without waiting for the conscious mind to tell it what to do. At that point, the body isn’t trailing behind the mind. It’s operating as a second mind, running on its own and pulling us back toward whatever it already knows.
A certain name on the caller ID can make our shoulders tense before we’ve even picked up the phone. A particular song on the radio can pull us back into a mood we thought we’d left behind. We can drive the same route so many times that we arrive without remembering much of the trip. None of that takes a conscious decision. The body recognizes the situation and runs whatever program it has used before. Honestly, that works in our favor most of the time. We don’t want to relearn how to drive every time we get behind the wheel and nobody needs a pep talk before brushing their teeth. The whole point of making repeated behavior automatic is that it makes life easier.
The problem is that the body doesn’t care whether a familiar pattern is helping us. It just knows the pattern is familiar. That helps explain why change is so hard, even when we understand exactly what needs to change. The conscious mind decides it wants to be healthier, more patient, more disciplined or less reactive, while the rest of us is still used to being whoever we’ve already practiced being.
I’ve lived with an example of this since I was a kid. When my parents argued, I never knew what was going to happen next and that not knowing would set my heart pounding until I’d end up crawling under my bed and staying there until the arguing stopped. That was decades ago, but if people start arguing near me at a restaurant, or just about anywhere else, my heart starts pounding the same way it did before I went under the bed.
I’m not seven years old anymore, and the people arguing aren’t my parents, which my conscious mind knows perfectly well. My body just doesn’t seem to care. It’s still running the program it built when I was seven, the one that learned to brace anytime voices started rising, because the danger was never really the argument. It was not knowing how it would end.
That’s the part we tend to miss. We assume that once we understand something intellectually, our behavior should just fall in line and when it doesn’t, we get frustrated with ourselves for making the same choice we already know better than to make. But knowing better and being conditioned to do better aren’t the same thing.
If I’ve responded to stress the same way for twenty years, reading a book about stress isn’t going to erase that overnight. Dispenza breaks down how that happens. An emotional reaction that lasts for a few hours becomes a mood. Hold on to it for weeks and it becomes a temperament. Hold on to it for years and it’s no longer just a reaction. It has become a personality trait. Nobody decides to become an anxious or defensive person but the same reaction, repeated long enough, stops feeling like something we do and starts feeling like who we are.
If I’ve spent years avoiding discomfort, my body isn’t suddenly going to welcome discipline just because I’ve decided I want it. If I’ve used food, a drink, my phone or anything else to change how I feel, that urge doesn’t disappear the second I understand what I’ve been doing. The old choice still feels natural because I’ve rehearsed it a thousand times. The new one feels like work because I haven’t.
We tend to read discomfort as proof that the change isn’t working. We start exercising and wonder why we’re still having to talk ourselves into it. A few weeks into eating differently, we start questioning whether we really want to live this way. Then we start losing our patience over some stupid thing that’s always gotten to us and think, well, guess we really haven’t changed that much after all. Maybe that’s backward or maybe the discomfort simply means the old pattern isn’t getting the response it’s used to.
The body wants what it recognizes, even when what it recognizes stopped being good for it a long time ago. Given the choice, it will usually take the certainty of an old pattern over the unfamiliarity of a better one. Sometimes that grip gets tighter the further we’ve drifted from who we actually want to be, since the old pattern is at least familiar, and familiar, for the most part, feels safer than facing the distance. That’s why motivation can get us started but rarely gets us much further than that. It’s a mood competing against a behavior we’ve rehearsed a thousand times and since moods don’t usually win that fight, discipline is what gives the new behavior enough time to become familiar.
That discipline can be as small as writing the angry email or text and then deciding not to send it or getting partway through the argument we’ve been making to ourselves about why we can skip the workout and going anyway. Those choices don’t feel particularly significant when we’re making them, but each time we don’t automatically do what we’ve always done, we’re teaching the body something it didn’t know before.
At first, that takes real conscious effort. We catch ourselves in the middle of the pattern, sometimes early enough to choose something else, sometimes halfway through and sometimes not until after we’ve already done the exact thing we said we wouldn’t do. That isn’t wasted effort, because noticing an automatic response is where the work of changing it begins. We can’t interrupt a pattern we refuse to see in the first place.
Given enough time, something shifts. The workout we used to dread becomes the thing we miss when we can’t get to it. The food we used to crave loses some of its pull. The situation that once triggered an immediate reaction leaves us a little room between what happened and how we respond to it. The promise that used to take real effort to keep stops being something we even debate.
That’s what I find most encouraging about all of this. The same process that conditioned us into a bad pattern can also condition us into a better one. Repetition doesn’t only keep us stuck. It’s also the tool that can get us out. Our first thought might still come from an old place and the urge to react the way we always have might still show up before we’ve had time to think it through. Although we’re not going to control every impulse that arrives uninvited, we can become more deliberate about how we respond when it does.
Every time we make a different choice, we’re teaching the body through experience that discomfort isn’t the same as danger, that an urge doesn’t have to become an action and that the way we’ve always responded isn’t the only way we’re capable of responding. Eventually, the body starts learning what the mind has been trying to teach it all along. That kind of learning takes time and I don’t think real change happens the moment we decide we want something different. That decision matters, but it’s only the beginning. Change happens when we repeat that decision enough times that the new response stops feeling new. I’m not all the way there myself.
I think about that restaurant table sometimes and how my heart still pounds the way it did back then. I don’t know if it will ever fully stop but it doesn’t pound as hard as it used to and I’ll take that.
That’s exactly what I don’t think ever fully disappears. I don’t believe we ever get rid of the old self completely, and that’s where I differ from Dispenza and from others who teach some version of the same thing. It’s always there, somewhere in the background. Someone who spent years using alcohol to cope doesn’t erase that history because they stop drinking. They’ve just learned to live differently. The same is true of someone who’s spent years surrounded by chaos, always angry at somebody. Find them some peace and part of them may still go looking for a fight, because peace feels unfamiliar and chaos still feels like home. The difference is whether they follow that pull or choose something else.
The things we’ve lived through don’t disappear just because we’ve moved past them. They’re still part of our story. But the goal was never to erase them. It’s to keep going, remembering what we had to overcome without letting it decide who we become.
That’s why, for a while, we’re working against the person our body has practiced being. I don’t think that person ever disappears completely and maybe that’s a good thing. It reminds us where we came from, how we used to live, and why we don’t want to go back.
The Person Our Body Has Practiced Being
A Reflection by Alexander Bush
© 2026 | krysalisforge.com
Leave a Comment