What you need to know about your brain

Your brain isn't built to make you happy, it's built to keep you safe. It's constantly scanning for danger and running old protective patterns automatically, which is why you keep doing things you swore you'd stop doing. Once you understand how the machinery works, you can stop blaming yourself and start working with it instead of against it.

I first told you that there is nothing wrong with you. Now I want you to understand that everything you do, even the things you don't like about yourself, started as a strategy your brain developed to keep you safe. I want to show you why that's true and not just something kind I'm saying, because once you understand how your brain really works, everything begins to make sense.

Your brain's primary goal has never been to make you happy. Its goal at all costs is to keep you alive and safe. It's been doing that job long before you could even speak, often in ways you weren't aware of.

One of the main ways your brain keeps you safe is by predicting what it thinks is going to happen in the next moment. It has an enormous storage system of predictions based on your past experiences. It's constantly accessing its memories and guessing what is about to happen and getting you ready for it before it arrives. A tone of voice, a look on someone's face, a silence that lasts a beat too long, and your brain has already decided what it means and what you need to do about it. This is all running all the time right below the surface of your conscious mind.

Most of these predictions are built from your past, and especially from the moments that hurt or frightened you when you were young and depending on other people to be okay. If having needs got you pushed away, your brain learned to predict danger around having needs. If speaking up made everything worse, it learned to keep you quiet. If love arrived and disappeared without warning, it learned to watch for the smallest sign that it might be leaving again. None of that was a choice you made. It was your brain analyzing your life and building the best protection it could out of what it had to work with.

When you read his mood the second he walks in the door, when you go quiet to keep the peace, when you give and give and sense what everyone needs before they even ask, none of that is weakness, and none of it means you are broken or too much. It is a brain prediction firing. Your brain recognizes a pattern it had once marked as dangerous and steps in to protect you. These responses are lightning fast, and they're one of the reasons you keep behaving the same way under similar circumstances. Your brain is keeping you safe.

This is what I meant when I said it all makes sense. Your reactions aren't random and they're not a flaw in your character. They're what comes out of a nervous system that is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is to keep you safe using the lessons it learned. The system isn't broken, it's just that some of those lessons are old, and the danger they were built to guard against aren't prevalent anymore.

Because these reactions are learned predictions, they can be updated. The same brain that learned to brace and shrink can learn that it is safe to do something different. This isn't willpower and it's not positive thinking, it is something deeper and real.

For now I only want you to think about one thing. The next time you catch yourself reacting in a way you don't like, try on the possibility that you are not failing at all. You are being protected by a brain that has worked hard to keep you safe for a very long time, and it's simply repeating a learned pattern.