How To Identify Your Negative Patterns And Escape The Cycle

“We are not punished for our sins but by them.”

This statement, although attributed to Joe Dispenza (a scientist and author whose book will be relevant throughout this article), has a much older origin, with its roots going as far back as the Bible. In essence, the meaning of this quote is that we are not punished directly by an external being (some higher power) when we fall into sinful behaviour, but rather, we face the repercussions internally as a consequence of the immorality of the action itself. This means that it is entirely our responsibility to rectify these negative habits if we want to rise above the trappings of sin. No matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise, we can never get away with the sins we commit because we will always have to pay the price for our immoral actions within ourselves.

Fortunately, we do not have to suffer in this realisation without a solution; with the wisdom of Joe Dispenza in his book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, we can learn how to change our negative patterns of behaviour in favour of more productive ones.

Unless you are a saint, chances are you have negative patterns of behaviour that you struggle to overcome. Whether it is your thoughts, feelings or actions, there will be negative feedback loops that you can't shake off, some unproductive pattern of behaviour that you can't help but fall back into despite knowing it is bad for you. Joe Dispenza calls these "thought-feeling loops", where the repetition of the same thought "re-creates the same emotions and so drive your brain and body further out of order". The reason for this is for the sake of efficiency as "the physical body [is made of] organised patterns of energy and information". As a result, the body needs to establish an equilibrium so that everything is unified.

The danger with this is that you can get used to any negative pattern of behaviour once it is ingrained in your wiring. This realisation is found in the Author/Philosopher Albert Camus’ book the Plague, observing that the effect of living through an epidemic is that “after a while you could get used to anything". Likewise, with our negative feedback loops, we may not see how it is negatively harming us because the feeling has been normalised by our memorisation of the environment.

So how do these loops form?

The development of these feedback loops can be ordered as follows:

1.        You have a thought about yourself,

2.        The body feels the way you're thinking

3.        You think the way you’re feeling

This is rehearsed again and again (whether it is a thought or something external) and our brain then stores that memory to be used as a shortcut for the next relevant situation. Think of these loops as autopilots. As our brains prefer efficiency, the less utilised pathways are thrown away to make room for often-used behaviours. Memorising a pattern of behaviour can act as an autopilot which saves time and energy when making a decision. In other words, our brain memorises what behaviours are used more often and discards the less conscious thoughts. Dispenza calls this the “use it or lose it” mindset. To explain, he offers a gardening analogy, likening your brain to the pruning process in which a plant will selectively remove what is not essential (branches, leaves, roots etc.) in order to stimulate growth and improve overall health. The plant, like your brain, removes what is dead, diseased, damaged, or simply superfluous. Our neurons will sacrifice any pathway that we don't use so it isn’t taking up any unnecessary space.

Likewise with our development, we have to lose what is taking up space if we want to move forward.

You need to think bigger than your internal environment.

It is important to think greater than your internal environment as this on its own is not the full picture. If you don’t, the next time you experience the inverse of your ingrained belief, you will be reactive and unprepared and may get swept up by an emotional response. We will then revert back to the loops that our brain already have firmly in place. Therefore, without looking past our internal environment, no room is left to consider a different perspective with an open mind.

If you want to keep an opening for growth, we must also refrain from announcing how we view ourselves. This may be familiar if you have are aware of the writer Don Miguel Ruiz’ “The Four Agreements” whose first agreement is to be “Impeccable with our word”. Our word is so consequential because as soon as we say we are a certain way, a self-fulfilling prophecy will begin to form. There's a famous joke that you may have heard that is apt, one of my dad's favourites:

I used to be indecisive, now I'm not so sure.

For example, by saying you are an impatient person, you will initiate a self-fulfilling prophecy where you will become defeatist, and impatient moments will crop up in any future actions until it becomes part of your personality. This will stunt your development towards the person you want to be. To use another example, if you proclaim to others that you can’t concentrate when reading a book and can barely finish a page, you will be less inclined to disprove this statement and so, your defeatist attitude stunts any potential for progress. It is much easier to dwell on your past failures than it is to disprove your firmly held beliefs.

Internally, when we remember things from the past, chemicals are released that makes us feel good. When we dwell on memories too much, we will be too fixated on the past that we will believe it as our body can't tell the difference between what is real and what is a memory. Reminiscing about "the good old days" can be even more appealing when we are in a static point in life; if nothing new is happening to stimulate your feelings you can reaffirm yourself by thinking about the past.

Our beliefs are formed by our past experiences and our brain is the database, recording them, with our most-valued beliefs being the most memorised (thought about). What makes this problematic is if these beliefs go unchecked i.e. are not verified by an external source. Memories are unreliable at best and may even be a complete fabrication, filling in the gaps of the reality with an inflated story that either makes us look good if we have a "holier-than thou" persona, or makes us appear worse if we are in a crisis of self-esteem. Moreover, shifting our identity only becomes harder as we get older, with studies indicating that by age 35 our identity is so solidified that our feelings/ thought associations are hard wired; by this age, 95% of our behaviours are formed of unconscious autopilots.

The Greek philosopher Epictetus advised against this proclamation of intention, asserting that “if you want to appear a certain way, appear to yourself and that should suffice”.  Or as Carl Jung said, “you are what you do, not what you say you’ll do”.  We must therefore stop vocalising what type of person we think we are and be content with living “in accordance with the best thing in us” based on the principles we deem productive, stripping ourselves of the negative loops that make us regress in favour of more productive loops that encourage growth.

Replacing these loops won't happen overnight.

You can't just change a thought the next day and expect your brain to abide by the new outlook straight away. Ideas alone lead us to nowhere, but with action following from ideas, we are able to align ourselves with the person we want to be. As the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, we must “be consistent [with our] thoughts and actions”.

Here's a relevant quote by Dispenza that illustrates the importance of favouring consistency over ideas:

"Why are you secretly expecting something different to show up in your life, when you think the same thoughts, perform the same actions, and experience the same emotions every single day? Isn't that the definition of insanity?"

It is only until you condition your body consistently to feel a different way that you can begin to shift your negative feedback loops that are stunting your growth. If your brain hasn't memorised the new action, you are likely to revert back to the autopilot that is more ingrained in your brain. Therefore, if you hope to reprogram your brain, you must pay constant attention of when you are on a negative path.

Look at it as a retrieval process, observing negative patterns so you can classify which ones are detrimental and, subsequently, rise above them. Jung writes that "constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its cooperation". This can be likened to a muscle which requires constant training and attention in the interest of maintenance and development. In other words, if you need to tear muscle to grow it, likewise, mentally you need to dig through your behaviours and find which loops are negatively affecting you. Only then can you start to forget an unproductive emotion and introduce a different pathway.

Observation doesn't guarantee an accurate assessment.  

Another complication that makes this self-analysis tricky is to do is diagnosing our feelings with words. When we use language to describe a feeling, we struggle to give an accurate explanation, yet in our minds we believe it to be objective. Language is in the realm of the brain, whereas feeling is the language of the body. So, when we describe a feeling, we are activating two different areas and merging them together, inevitably causing some contradictions. Moreover, just because we feel a certain way, it doesn’t mean that it is the reality of the situation because there may be aspects we are missing when we decide on an opinion and the emotion surrounding it.

Asking the right prompts is a more reliable approach.

Asking prompts in situations when you find yourself in a negative feedback loop can help snap you out of the pattern. As mentioned with our internal environment, we can be ignorant of a different perspective because we haven’t considered it as being viable. How we think and how we feel produces a state of being, which generates an electromagnetic signature that influences every atom in our world. This should prompt us to ask, what am I broadcasting (consciously or unconsciously) on a daily basis?

Who are you being in this moment and every other moment? Is it helping me being this way?

To use an analogy of a room, think of this negative loop as the result of being confined to a single room. The reason you can't think differently is because you have not considered another option: what if you walked forward into another room?

This demonstrates the importance of prompts in the moment, so as to stop yourself from self-entrapment, and instead turning around to notice that the walls are not closed in on you and you can escape from the room, alleviating the power of the loop that is stunting your development. In this sense, when you stop clinging to these loops thinking that this is all there is, you become the creator of your own thoughts and behaviours. In other words, when you give less attention to the negative feedback loop, only then can you begin to unmemorise an emotion, only then can you liberate energy that is needed for a new pattern to form.

This brings us back full circle to the quote I began with which is a misconception we cling onto: we are not punished for our sins (that is, our thoughts, feelings and actions) but by them. When we play the victim and believe that we get punished by an external force, it is a personal reality that we put ourselves in. Life is a state of mind and the knowledge we hold is the result of what is the most memorised.

Over time, this becomes wisdom which, if productive, can help us rise above the game and change the situation entirely. It is only with the continuous awareness and consideration of new options with an open mind that we can start to break free from the erroneous judgement that what we are has already been decided and we are powerless to change.

If we instead refuse this conclusion and keep observing and re-observing these patterns of behaviour, only then can we begin to change our behaviour.

‍

‍

‍

Thanks for Reading, till next week!

‍

Brandon

Newel of Knowledge Writer