Rewiring your Reactions

When Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Wants to Forget

There’s a moment most of us know too well.

Something small happens a tone, a look, a pause, a message left on read and suddenly your whole body reacts like it’s been thrown back in time. Your chest tightens. Your stomach drops. Your mind starts spinning. You don’t feel like your grounded adult self; you feel like a younger, scared, angry, abandoned, or overwhelmed version of you.

And often, you have no idea why.

This is the thinking–feeling loop Joe Dispenza talks about, and honestly, it’s one of the most powerful concepts for understanding human behaviour especially in relationships. Your thoughts fire off feelings, your feelings reinforce thoughts, and very quickly you’re caught inside your past, running the same internal programme you didn’t consciously choose. The body remembers; the brain follows.

It’s wild how fast it happens. Something from years ago gets reactivated and your whole system reacts as though it’s happening in the present. To the body, the memory is now. The emotion is now. The threat is now. Your body doesn’t care that you’re older, wiser, successful, self-aware, or doing therapy. Your nervous system is simply trying to protect you with an outdated map.

And you believe that’s “just who you are.”

But it’s not.

It’s a pattern.

A loop.

A chemical memory.

Most of your daily life around 95%, if we go full Dispenza is run by automatic subconscious processes built from past experiences, emotional imprints, and repetitive habits. Your body becomes the keeper of your history, and because it reacts faster than your consciousness can think, you end up reliving old emotional states long before your adult mind gets a say.

So what do you do when your past hijacks your present?

You start by noticing. Noticing the moment your body pulls you into an old story. Noticing the tightness, the heat, the rush of adrenaline, the automatic thoughts that feel so familiar they might as well be scripted. This is the first step — becoming conscious of the unconscious. Naming what’s happening immediately interrupts the loop. Awareness is the doorway back into choice.

From there, you don’t try to “think positively” or talk yourself out of it. When your body is activated, thoughts are just fireworks. You have to calm the system before you can change the narrative. This might look like grounding your feet on the floor, lengthening your exhale, placing a hand on your chest, or reminding your nervous system: We’re safe. This is now, not then.

Because once your body softens, your brain becomes available again.

And then something beautiful happens: you get to choose a different feeling. Instead of recycling the past the fear, the anger, the not-enoughness you begin rehearsing a new emotional reality. Not a fantasy version of yourself, but the you that exists beneath all the noise. The grounded, secure, present version. The version that responds rather than reacts.

You imagine how she would move.

What she would say.

How she would hold herself.

How she would choose differently.

This is where neuroplasticity works in your favour. Your brain builds pathways from rehearsal. Your body learns through experience. Every time you respond from the present instead of reacting from the past, you’re rewiring yourself. Gently. Repetitively. Powerfully.

It won’t feel comfortable at first of course it won’t. Your body is addicted to familiar emotions, even the painful ones. When you’ve lived years feeling anxious, unseen, dismissed, or unchosen, those chemicals become your baseline. The body will literally crave what it knows. It will search for reasons to feel it again. “Give me another hit of anger. Give me another hit of fear.” That’s not weakness; that’s biology.

But when you choose differently when you slow down, breathe, regulate, and act from your adult self something shifts. You step out of survival mode. You stop living as the younger version of you who had no control. You stop performing old narratives. You stop recreating past dynamics. You step into the 5% that is conscious, deliberate, intentional. And from here, the whole architecture of your emotional life begins to change.

This is the work I do with clients every day helping them recognise when their body is running an old script, helping them unhook from the emotional autopilot, helping them step into a version of themselves that isn’t shaped by fear, abandonment, hypervigilance, or people-pleasing. A version that isn’t driven by outdated survival strategies. A version that gets to choose.

Because you’re not broken.

You’re patterned.

And patterns can be rewritten when you finally meet yourself with honesty, care, and enough courage to say:

This story ends here. I’m ready to live something new.

A nervous system that finally knows it’s safe to stop looking backward