Most persistent habits and anxieties stem from either brain chemistry like cortisol or forgotten trauma stored in memory. A car accident you don't consciously remember can later trigger panic attacks or street-crossing avoidance. Recognizing these hidden roots is the first step to changing the behaviors they drive.
I've noticed that most tics and behaviors can actually be tracked down to one of two things. And this is really things that we ourselves can't explain, like why we are a certain way, why we're afraid of the dark. Most things either come down to biochemistry, which is your brain's chemistry, or something that happened to us, a previous event which we've totally forgotten buried deep in our mind, and later it starts making its way into the behaviors that we start expressing in adulthood. A good example of this is if you're walking on the street and you almost get hit by a car, and the car does not hit you, but your brain doesn't register it. It registers that as stress, as a trauma. And your brain feels like you were hit by a car. And in the future, you may not realize it, but you just really don't like crossing the street. You maybe look for an alternative. You will go around and spend extra five minutes walking just so you don't have to cross either a certain street or just streets in general. Maybe five years down the line. That's an extreme example, but sometimes you may just wake up, middle of the night and just feel panic, and you don't know why you had that panic attack. And it could be tracing back to that incident where you almost got hit by a car and your brain is alerting you, hey, there was sudden danger. These are examples where modern society, this sort of protection mechanism, where our brain is trying to save us or protect us from danger, is working against us. Because what it's actually doing instead is it's raising cortisol levels, it's raising stress hormone, and it's making us worried sick. So next time you do have a sort of tic or something really, you know, unique about you, and you think, hey, why am I like that? Why do I not like asking people for help, for instance? Or why is it so hard for me to, you know, reach out to others when I need help? It may be connected to something that happened to you when you were younger or even just a year prior. It helps being cognizant of these things because when we have the awareness, we can start working towards change.
