You’re Addicted to Your Stress - The Work of Dr. Joe Dispenza and Positive Intelligence
Part of a series of articles on the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza. Dr. Joe’s work is extraordinary and powerful. My hope is to show that Positive Intelligence coaching can make the work of personal transformation more simple, accessible and practical.
The work of Dr. Joe Dispenza changed my life.
Before I discovered the work of Dr. Joe, I had already done a lot of work on myself - through therapy and 12-step fellowship work. I had implemented some basic tools of personal development and personal awareness that had brought me out the depths of neurotic addiction and dysfunction to being a highly-functioning adult and professional.
Despite the improvements from the personal work, I had still been prescribed an SSRI for my anxiety and depression. I had gotten married but we were growing further and further apart - although I was mostly numb to it and unwilling to address it. My work as a manager in a corporate setting was fraught with stress and imposter syndrome and a dysregulated nervous system - hardly the ingredients of feeling fulfilled at work. But, regardless, my life had entered into a stable routine.
And then it all came crashing down.
My wife said she wanted a divorce. On the day of her divorce proceedings, her mother (who I had come to love as closely as my own mother), committed suicide. I kept the house and had to afford the mortgage on my own. I got two roommates and became immersed in a whole new, and highly active, social circle.
There was a lot of good that happened too.
My roommates are like brothers to me now. We played music together in the basement. I had met a woman that showed me so much of gentleness and presence and empathy and sweetness. The divorce from my ex-wife was actually for the best. I found myself connecting with an exponentially wider social circle, as opposed to being relatively socially isolated before. I felt like I was getting an inkling of my potential as a human being to have a wider impact on this world. There was hope and excitement and vibrancy. I weaned myself off the antidepressants.
But then, all the change, good or bad, simply overloaded my nervous system and something terrible happened.
On this fateful day, if you had seen me, you probably wouldn’t have recognized that something terrible happened. Without knowing it, I’d been running on stress hormones, adrenaline, caffeine and sugar for the previous 6 months. In a department store, with that woman that had become my girlfriend, the combination of navigating a new intimate relationship, the fluorescent lights, picking out a new pair of jeans and feeling insecure about it, responding to an employee that was trying to strike up a conversation with us, simply all became too much. Internally, I collapsed. It felt as though the scaffolding that was keeping my nervous system up all came crashing down. Instead of a rickety structure maintaining some sense of functioning, in its place was a cloud of suffocating dust that filled my brain. I felt as though I couldn’t see, I couldn’t form complete and coherent thoughts, I felt this emotional numbness combined with a low-grade panic.
I had entered into a state of nervous system dysregulation.
The scales of neurochemical balance had finally tipped over into a disrupted state of fight-or-flight and fear.
I felt numb. I felt disconnected from self and others. I wanted so badly to be helped. But the numbness made it so that I couldn’t bring up the energy to reach out for help.
It was absolutely terrible.
And, day after day, it kept going.
I kept doing my 12-step program practices, engaging in them even more than I had before. But they had absolutely no impact on this numbness, this brain fog, this dysregulation.
Then somebody, a local influencer named Daniel Tardy, heard me in conversation and suggested an author to me - Dr. Joe Dispenza. I looked him up online and became interested. What immediately drew me to Dr. Joe’s work was how it attempted to explain spectacular transformations in humans through a scientific lens. What, exactly, are the physiological processes that happen as we heal and transform on the psychological, emotional and spiritual levels? If I learned and supported these physiological processes, could I bring about that same healing in myself?
Dr. Dispenza’s Teachings
Dr. Joe Dispenza describes the suffering of the human condition as a combination of perspectives and attitudes that perpetuate physiological states of stress and dysregulation. As he likes to say, he “demystifies the mystical.” He demystifies it by writing and teaching on the scientifically proven processes of stress, of healing, of transformation. As we cause this physiological state of stress with our thoughts, our body then begins to send signals to our brain that there is something deeply wrong. Brain tells body to be stressed. Body gets stressed. Body tells brain “There’s something wrong, I think you should be stressed.” Brain gets stressed. It’s a terrible and self-defeating feedback loop.
As human beings, we have incredibly powerful cognitive powers. More so than other beings, we can generate entire narratives within our minds, entire experiences of memories or imagined futures. This is because of our massive prefrontal cortex that makes up a larger percentage of our brain mass than any other creature on the planet - 40%. This has allowed us to invent tools and language and agriculture as well as to build the pyramids and land a man on the moon and create AI.
But, this incredible ability can have a darkside.
But, this incredible tool can become our worst enemy.
This incredible capacity is still physiologically intertwined with all of our natural instincts to survive and respond to threat.
Imagine that, instead of this cognitive capacity being in service of you, it begins to go on auto-pilot and be in service of its own processes. Imagine that you’re brushing your teeth and you begin to imagine an embarrassing interaction from high school. Say that you’d attempted to make a joke in class but it failed miserably. You remember the look of the teacher, the rolling eyes and sighs of other students, the grimace of your friend who’s embarrassed by you. You remember the shame you felt. Here, in the bathroom brushing your teeth, you literally feel the same flush of claminess across your skin, you literally feel the same cringe. You’re not aware of it, but if somebody was watching you they would see an absent look in your eyes, as you brush your teeth. You’re obviously not here in the present moment, mindlessly brushing your teeth. If somebody was watching you they would see your posture change, your shoulders crowd your neck, a cringe and wince come to your face.
Your mind has such an ability to generate such an immersive experience that it’s almost as if it’s tricking your body into responding as if you’re truly in that experience.
Your own thoughts re-generate a stressful experience, and you re-experience all the same emotional damages, again and again.
Your own mind is able to create this immersive experience so much so that your amygdala, the “threat detection” part of your brain, begins to activate, believing there’s a true, present-moment danger to you. It alerts the rest of your limbic system to generate adrenaline and cortisol, because you need to be able to respond to this “threat”. Your heart begins to pump faster. Your extremities become cold, resources are redirected from your digestive and restorative body systems to go to your muscles and extremities to be able to fight or flee - your body believes it must sacrifice digestion and rest and restoration in order to survive. Your immune system is suppressed and your body experiences pervasive inflammation from the flood of cortisol.
Furthermore, we can unconsciously become dependent upon these stress chemicals. We can literally become addicted to stress. Even with all these injurious effects of negative states of being, there is still a rush of energy from the cortisol and adrenaline. We can unconsciously become dependent upon this rush of energy.
A central pillar of Dr. Joe’s work about what the solution is to this terrible condition has to do with our brain wave states.
There’s “High Beta” - this is a frenetic state of hyper-cognitive analysis. Often anxiety-producing and associated with an overall dysregulated nervous system, this is not a good state for learning.
“Beta” is a lower level of activation. This is our normal, every-day consciousness where we’re taking in information and analyzing it, coming up with new solutions. Although a cognitively powerful state of mind, it’s still not a great state of mind to learn, to rewire new synaptic connections. You need to be able to form these new connections, and get rid of old ones, and this is not a good state for that. “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
“Alpha” is a lower level of activation but is a more whimsical, intuitive, flowing state of mind. This is actually when we’re starting to bridge the gap between the conscious and subconscious. Learning to achieve this state in an intentional way, infusing it with positive emotions and states of gratitude, is a powerful state of mind for making changes in our mind, our baseline way of thinking.
“Theta” is the state of deep hypnogogic states or deep meditation. The inner landscape of our imaginative and intuitive mind becomes just as real as our physical surroundings, if not more so.
“Delta” is the “deepest” state, associated with deep sleep. However, high-levels of nervous system regulation, deep calm, and an openness to intuitive thoughts, a synchronization of the more “analytical” aspects of our brain’s hardware with the more intuitive and positive parts of our brain’s hardware, people have been observed to be in a delta brain-wave state while being awake and conscious and interacting with their surroundings.
“Gamma” is a deeper, yet more “energetic”, level of brainwave activation that was only recently discovered while observing Buddhist monks (the world’s star athletes of meditation) deep in meditation.
By leveraging meditation, emotional state change, all of the physiological processes listed above, and the brainwave states described above, Dr. Joe teaches his students to bring about incredible transformations in their baseline states of being. This is where Dr. Joe’s work can get pretty mystical. While the natural laws governing manifestation, non-local consciousness, and how we can extend our consciousness to interface with a larger, interconnected universe are delving into the realm of the mystical and notoriously difficult to prove scientifically, there is enough research and data out there to demonstrate that there’s some sort of connection between our own, individual consciousnesses and the world around us. By leveraging all the tools and concepts described above, Dr. Joe endeavors to teach his students the actual mechanics of intention and manifestation.
This is when his work begins to try and bring in the concepts of quantum mechanics.
Back to my story…
When I started doing Dr. Joe’s work, the novelty and excitement of the material was making a difference in my mood. I began to feel like my brain was actually beginning to ignite with glimpses of inspiration and hope and creativity. It seemed like there was a chance that this work might finally make a difference in my brain - the brainfog, the depression and anxiety, the numbness. But, the course I had been taking was building up to a finale. At the end of the course, all of your learning is meant to serve as a mental structure of belief as you apply all the principles in a guided meditation.
I had been an avid meditator before.
But this wasn’t like any meditation I’d ever done before.
Aptly, it’s called the “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” meditation.
I practiced the meditation several times, to varying degrees of success. After everything I had learned, I had hoped that the meditation would produce the fantastic state change in my nervous system and body that would sweep away my mental fog and depression. But my analytical mind was still too loud as I attempted to immerse myself in the visualizations. Recall that the brainwave states that are most conducive to change are the alpha and theta brainwave states, which are the more intuitive, non-analytical states of consciousness.
At the end of this meditation, you’re invited to envision something that represents the gift or healing that you’re trying to manifest. For me, the gift I was hoping to manifest was a healing from this constant brainfog and emotional numbness. I felt so weak. So, the gift I was focusing on was related to strength. In this whimsical land of visualization, I had concocted the image of a powerful being, an Angel that could fly through this meditative land. The Angel represented all that was powerful. At least, that’s what I was deliberately intending as I practiced these meditations.
But, the first few times I did the meditation, it felt just that: concocted.
I didn’t necessarily feel a huge change or shift.
I was almost ready to give up, as the fear of disillusionment built up.
The cynical voice of my mind’s baseline negativity began to troll me. See, this was all just a bunch of bullshit.
But I tried the meditation one more time. Unrealized at the time, by practicing the meditation, I had begun to lay down new neural paths that would allow the flow of the guided meditation to become more automatic (alpha and theta brainwave states) and require less of my cognitive input (beta and high beta). But I didn’t realize this had been happening in me.
I go into the meditation. The visualizations were indeed immersive and becoming more powerful (signifying that my capacity to enter into the alpha and theta brainwave states was increasing). Yet, when I got to the end, the culmination, where I would see the gift of strength symbolically manifest in the form of this Angel I had concocted, the cynical voice had one last thing to say: ah, here comes to the corny, stupid Angel part. You’re so dumb for thinking this can actually help.
But I carried on with the visualization.
And, something truly remarkable happened.
The Angel went from being a dream-like aspect of a self-generated visualization to an autonomous being that did something I had not concocted or expected.
He flew and then appeared, standing directly before me. I could see his face as vividly as if I was staring in a mirror. And the expression on his face was the most reassuring, loving, empowering, and powerful expression I had ever seen. Without saying a word, he communicated to me You ARE good, you ARE loved, you ARE worthy, you ARE powerful, lay down these shackles of self-contempt, step into the LOVE that Universe is constantly streaming to you, it is ALWAYS there for you. The words I’m writing to attempt to communicate all the meaning in this look are not enough.
But the impact on me was profound.
I burst into tears.
The tears of catharsis and relief. Tears that I hadn’t been able to shed in over a year.
I was shaking as I wept.
My body felt electric and I felt loved.
Finally, I felt the emotional channels of love opening up.
I felt like there was hope. I felt like a miracle had opened up in me.
Almost instantly, my thoughts turned to how I could share my own continued healing with as many people as possible? How, while continuing my own journey, help others to experience similar breakthroughs?
I continued doing the work of Dr. Joe for many months. I began to feel inspired by this overarching aim to help others to heal and grow. This work was a catalyst that shook me loose from a terrible rut, a rut of self-perpetuating numbness and dysregulation. Indeed, in one of the more advance meditations of Dr. Joe, one where you “put into the quantum field” a new reality and you “call it into being” by broadcasting the emotional frequencies of gratitude and joy and love, I settled upon the image of a “C” - for “coach”. I was becoming a coach. I wanted to change the trajectory of my professional career to one where I directly helped people to implement these mechanics into their lives, to experience this healing. That would be a worthy cause to devote my life to.
How Positive Intelligence © Comes In
But eventually, the work of Dr. Joe receded from my life. There was so much powerful information in it, but it wasn’t easy to implement it into my daily life. Dr. Joe’s meditations, for example, take anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes. It’s suggested that you do them very early in the morning, while your brain is still close to the theta and delta waves of sleep so that the meditations will be more effective. While I’ll always be grateful and admiring of the work of Dr. Joe, if I were to be a life coach that could provide an easy and accessible process to heal, I felt as though I needed something different.
That’s where the work of Shirzad Chamine and Positive Intelligence © come in. After completing my ICF-approved life coach certification, I was introduced to Positive Intelligence © (PQ, for short) for coaches.
PQ is thoroughly research-based, rooted in the arenas of ICF-approved coaching best practices, cognitive behavioral psychology, positive psychology, neuroscience, and performance science. Mr. Chamine and his team scoured these areas of science and filtered them through the process of root factor analysis to discover what are the fundamental ingredients of positive change.
Root Factor Analysis is the process by which you discover, well, the root factors of something. It takes a very complicated field of variables and radically simplifies them to the root causes.
Imagine that you want to paint a painting. You know that this painting has 10,000 colors in it. You could go to the store and buy 10,000 colors OR you could do factor analysis and discover that there are only 3 primary colors at the root of all 10,000 colors: Red, Blue, and Yellow. And that if you could learn to master these three colors and mixing them, you would have the power to create all of those 10,000 colors.
When applied to the field of personal and professional development, Factor Analysis does the same thing.
Shirzad Chamine and his team discovered that there are just 3 root factors to all positive change:
Saboteur Interceptor
- this is our ability to recognize and intercept our patterns of self-sabotage, our unconscious patterns that are driven by fear that are meant to protect us and get us what we want, but actually backfire and cause more harm than good.
Self-Command
- this is our ability to command our attention to focus on something we choose to focus on. This is the root factor mechanism of all mindfulness and meditation practices and it’s the component that’s actually the source of all the positive benefits of these practices. Self-Command simplifies and makes extremely practical this practice of mindfulness.
The Sage
- the opposite of a saboteur-driven narrative is one of discernment, wisdom and love. When we grow the muscle of the Saboteur Interceptor, we begin to quickly learn that there is a much better mode within us for fulfilling our potential - to respond to stress by looking how it can be turned into a gift and opportunity, and to grow the muscles of the 5 modes of the Sage state of mind - Empathy, Curiosity, Creativity, Purpose, Focused Action.
The work of Dr. Joe can more be operationalized into a practical framework by these three core mental muscles.
All of the teaching around our negative states of being, the physiology of neurochemical addiction and transformation, the idea of “neurons firing together, wire together,” the characteristics of high beta and beta brainwave states, the negative feedback loop caused by our body’s fight or flight and survival response with our subconscious narrative that feeds into the physical state of being… All of this can be radically simplified into one core muscle: The Saboteur Interceptor.
All of the teaching around the theta and alpha brainwave states, the long processes around meditation and visualization, the breathwork and the kundalini-style yoga movements, the attempts to improve our brainwave states through moving cerebrospinal fluid through our spinal column in an ideal way, the activation of our pineal gland and the release of its transformative neurochemicals, the change in our brain activation to one of receptive intuition rather than a hyper-analytical discursive background noise that keeps us out of the present moment… All of this can be radically simplified into one core muscle: Self-Command.
All of the teaching around filling the quantum field with our gratitude and joy, of creating our destiny by broadcasting a self-fulfilling prophecy of love and giving and receiving, of flooding our bodies with healing hormones and neurochemicals, of filling our minds and bodies with belief in ourselves and the world, of tapping in to our deepest creativity and confidence… All of this can be radically simplified into one core muscle: The Sage.
All the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza can be radically simplified into three core muscles:
The Saboteur Interceptor
Self-Command
The Sage
But rather than an attempt at replacing or competing with Dr. Joe’s work, I believe PQ work can be seen as a support for Dr. Joe’s students’ work. If you are a student of Dr. Joe, there’s a reason that his work resonates with you so much.
But what if you could target the muscle groups in a more focused way so that it would support your Dr. Joe work? What if, like me, you’re in a place where active Dr. Joe work has receded from your life because it has become impractical? What if you could re-invigorate the work of Dr. Joe into your life by targeting the muscle groups that he was actually teaching you all along?
Answers to those questions are exactly what I’ve found in my PQ work. I became a PQ Coach in early 2023. And, whenever I coach clients with this framework, I’m validated that I’m living my life’s purpose. The transformations I’ve seen as my clients have grown their 3 Core PQ Muscles have been nothing less than extraordinary.
And, in no small part, Dr. Joe and his teachings played a pivotal role in bringing me to this work. It was through his teachings and one of his meditations that I “put into the quantum field” my destiny to be an impactful and positive and loving coach.
Dear reader, it’s my purpose in life to do this work for the rest of my life. If there’s room on my calendar, I would love to do a free Saboteur Discovery session with you (just go take the Saboteur Assessment and then schedule with me by going to this page: https://www.lionheartcoaching.org/saboteur).
I wish you ease and flow - and may we meet in joy and gratitude and love in the quantum field!