Before I hit my teens, I’d already begun a habit of rumination and self-loathing; research now shows that youth who learn these thinking patterns are more prone to adult depression. When you wear a groove of self-denigration into your brain, your thoughts simply tend to slide into it more often: like a muscle that gets repeated use, the pathway of negative thinking gets stronger. As with any other habit, it then becomes less conscious and more part of the background, like your mental furniture. Rather than something you have constructed, it comes to seem like “the way it is” rather than a
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