Imagine, he told me, that “your marriage just broke up, and you lost your job, and you know what? Your mother just had a stroke. It’s pretty overwhelming.” Because you are feeling intense pain for a long period, your brain will assume this is the state in which you are going to have to survive from now on—so it might start to shed the synapses that relate to the things that give you joy and pleasure, and strengthen the synapses that relate to fear and despair. That’s one reason why you can often start to feel you have become somehow fixed in a state of depression or anxiety even if the
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