Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

If the limbic brain had a motto, it might be: Experience is for the body.

If the neocortex had a motto, it might be: Knowledge is for the mind.

You have to feel as though whatever you want is in your reality at this very moment.

The moment you begin to feel the way you think, you begin to think the way you feel

experience enriches the brain even further than new knowledge.

Ask any mental-health professional who specializes in working with young people, and she will tell you that one word defines what it is like to be an adolescent: insecurity. As a result, teens and preteens seek comfort in conformity and in numbers.

We can’t face exposing that self to the world, so we pretend to be someone else. We create a set of memorized automatic programs that work to cover the vulnerable parts of us. Essentially, we lie about who we are because we know that societal mores do not have room for that person. That is the “nobody.” That is the person whom we doubt others will like and accept.

But that is different from who we are—how we feel—without the stimulation of our outer reality: Feelings of shame and anger about a failed marriage. Fear of death and uncertainty about the afterlife, related to the loss of a loved one or even a pet. A sense of inadequacy due to a parent’s insistence on perfectionism and achievement at all costs. A sense of stifled entitlement from having grown up in circumstances barely above poverty. A preoccupation with thoughts of not having the right body type in order to look a certain way to the world. These kinds of feelings are what we want to conceal.

It appeared to me that I needed everyone, everything, and everyplace outside of me in order to feel good.

There are two types of declarative memories: knowledge (semantic memories derived from philosophical knowledge) and experience (episodic memories derived from sensory experiences, identified as events in our lives with particular people, animals, or objects, while we were doing or witnessing a certain thing at a particular time and place).