You're a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Make You You

by Mike McHargue

“Mike, autism is notoriously difficult to diagnosis in adults. The DSM-V leans heavily on childhood behaviors for good reasons: Adults who can make it to adulthood without a diagnosis are very good at hiding most of their symptoms. There aren’t many clinicians who specialize in diagnosing adults, even here in L.A., and I want you to know that diagnosis requires people from multiple disciplines weighing in. It requires looking at records from preschool and early elementary school. If possible, it involves interviewing your parents. Diagnosis is much, much harder for adults who weren’t diagnosed as children.”

our human cultures do a terrible job of acknowledging the value of that diversity.

The world that we, as a species, have created for ourselves

is nothing like the one we evolved in—and yet we wonder why our behaviors are so hard to control.

The outcome of our supernormal world is a growing pattern of addictive and compulsive behaviors in response to the stressful, supernormal world we’ve created for ourselves.

For addiction to take root, a person’s environment and life experiences have to reinforce those genes. In other words, someone who grows up with loving, supportive parents who model healthy behaviors around alcohol will be less impacted by their genetic predisposition, while someone with a lower genetic predisposition may become an alcoholic if they grow up in a traumatic environment, or start binge-drinking during adolescence.

Life’s strategies have been overwhelmed, and we now face an obesity epidemic, which has spawned a far-reaching diet and fitness media culture, and, in turn, driven a rise in disordered eating.

any behavior that offers some relief from anxiety can become a compulsion, whether it’s food, sex, video games, or even something as benign as reading.

Most communities shame people for curiosity about taboo topics—or overcompensate by encouraging behaviors that are risky or dangerous.

Finally, punishment and prohibition are really ineffective. They train people to hide their behaviors, not to alter them.

Acceptance beats shame every time.

Infants have emotions that are just as powerful as an adult’s, but they lack the capacity to regulate those emotions or change their circumstances.

Instead of communicating our basic emotions, we learn to stop them by feeling anxious, worried, guilty, or ashamed.

But that’s not how feelings work. Our feelings aren’t here to break us. They’re here to help us—even heal us. Our feelings can be powerful, especially when we repress them for years or decades.

Many of us lack the emotional literacy to understand what we’re feeling in moments of stress. We often don’t know what emotion we’re having, much less how intense it will be if we don’t suppress it.

The same neurotransmitters that make us feel down also impact the neurons in our guts and interfere

with our digestive processes—which is why digestive issues often coincide with stress or depression.

sometimes we need more help and support to make

it through the difficulty of working through our past trauma.”

Ron told me that the way to reduce the panic attacks wasn’t by getting rid of the memories, but by honoring them by accepting them as part of me.

I’ve learned to sit and be sad when I need to be sad, instead of deflecting or making a joke. I’ve also learned that when I feel anxious or guilty, those feelings are inhibiting something else. I take the time to ask, “What do I feel anxious about?”

Anxiety doesn’t tell us very much. It’s like the “check engine” light in your car, which tells you something’s wrong without telling you what it is. To escape anxiety, we can’t just focus on external factors. We have to look under the hood.

There are no easy answers in the arena of human emotions. Sometimes, protecting yourself means backing off, like when I took that form off my website.

When people look at social media, they see all their friends hanging out, smiling and having fun without them. But the reality is their friends don’t go out any more than they do—and when they look at Instagram, they experience the same sense of isolation.

Sociologists even coined a name for this collective sense of loneliness: the Instagram Effect.

Social media has showed us a side of our friends and family that many of us had never seen. As social media moved away from a chronological presentation of information to an algorithmic presentation, the content that caught attention was elevated to the top. One of the surefire ways for a piece of information to hold our attention—and drive us to act by sharing or commenting—is to make us feel moral outrage.

We even take these devices into our beds. The rise of smartphones and streaming video has been met by an accelerating trend toward mass sleep deprivation. People are sleeping less, and when they do sleep, that sleep is of lower quality.

If you take anything from this book, let it be that sleep is vital to your physical, emotional, and mental health. It’s how bodies handle critical maintenance on our brains and other systems.

But eating healthy foods and getting adequate exercise won’t help you much if you are sleep deprived.

In addition, studies have shown that not getting enough sleep increases your risk of cardiovascular disease by 45 percent. And people who sleep more are more creative, happier, and more able to cope with stress. If there’s one way to unlock your full potential as a human being, it’s getting seven or more hours of sleep every ni...

Our smartphone notifications are an irresistible siren’s call for our attention, to the point that people often feel uneasy when they don’t have access to their phone.

Smartphone notifications were originally designed to let you know when you had a meeting or needed to wake up.

The immediacy of social media has enabled advocates to press topics into public view that are more often swept under the rug by politicians and traditional media.

Physical pain had the advantage of offering a predictable path toward healing. What bleeds right now will scab tomorrow, and turn into a scar over time. But the pain that came from words? Those invisible scars can last a lifetime and show up in the most unpredictable moments.

There is a pain that every person who survived childhood bullying knows and understands. Every insult, every tease, and every act of abuse is another brick that grows over time into a monument of rage.

Our culture has a powerful stigma against talking about suicide, in part because of religious beliefs that deem suicide an “unforgivable sin.” If you feel alone and there’s social pressure against talking about thoughts of suicide, you will feel even more isolated at the precise moment when you need to feel like you matter to other people.

That voice in our head is the voice of childhood scars trying to protect us from being hurt again by sharing our thoughts, our creativity, and even our feelings with those around us.

It goes without saying that every parent’s worst fear is the death of their child.

When you have thoughts that discourage you or make you feel bad, interrupt and correct them. So if you notice yourself thinking, “No one wants to be my friend,” stop your train of thought and push back by thinking (or even saying aloud), “I am likable. I know that because Jon, Ketan, and Todd are my friends.”

it helps explain why self-help fails to deliver lasting change for so many people. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to improving mental health.

When we stop fighting our emotional brain, and instead learn to train and trust it, we have the power to confront, influence, and change the words that run through our own mind in a way that can empower us, heal us, and help us be the people that we want to be.

of friends, is prone to this same cycle, in which a community begins with symbiotic joy before sliding into mission drift, power struggles, backbiting, and, ultimately, a split or dissolution.

Dismissive-avoidant attachment looks like someone who doesn’t need other people. This is an illusion, of course. All humans need intimacy with others in order to be stable. People with this attachment style learned to avoid showing needs to their caregiver based on how their caregiver reacted when they expressed their needs. As adults, they launch preemptive strikes against rejection by hiding their need for connection with the people they love. They appear detached or aloof in relationships, and they avoid relying or depending on others. In times of conflict, dismissive-avoidant types have the capacity to shut down their emotions and respond with indifference if a relationship seems on the verge of irreparable harm.

On the other hand, fearful-avoidant types know they want to be loved but are terrified of being close enough to others to be hurt. People with this attachment style tend to have unpredictable and explosive emotional displays in their significant relationships. They’re in a constant “push-pull” cycle trying to draw others near enough to meet their needs while keeping them at arm’s length as a defense. Relationships with fearful-avoidant types are roller-coaster thrill rides with soaring highs and crushing lows. These types lean into their partner for safety, but start feeling trapped once they get close enough to feel safe.

One of the main challenges of life is learning to support others from our strength, and accept the support of others in our weakness.

HAVE YOU EVER wondered why some people live “in their heads,” lost in an inner landscape of abstractions and thoughts, while others live with their toes in the sand, and an arm around a close friend? That’s because left vs. right isn’t the only interesting division in our brains. Though the lines of demarcation are less stark, there are also contrasts between the front and back areas of the brain—especially in the neocortex.

I think most of the time, our consciousness is a beautiful story told by the voice in our head, and that story is about the sensations and experiences we face every day.