A story about how my childhood environment changed the way my brain is wired

I had always thought of myself as someone who didn't get tired easily.
But recently,
I had an experience that made me realize that wasn't the case.

As it turned out,
I was actually exhausted but kept going, thinking I was 'fine'
.

Since I was a child, I never really 'got emotional'.

I think I was the quiet type, the kind where people couldn't tell what I was thinking.

That's not to say I lacked emotions, though;
if anything, I was quite emotional,
and I often cried out of empathy or being moved.

I lacked self-confidence,
and even without any particular reason, I carried a sense of inferiority.
I always spent my time thinking that I needed to work harder than those around me,
and that it was only natural.

My mother had bipolar disorder,
and while she was bright and kind when she was doing well,
whenever she became mentally unstable,
she would cycle between screaming hysterically and being unable to do anything but stay in bed for months at a time.

I always watched my mother, who would get emotional so easily,
with a sense of wonder.

Why can't she just think more calmly?

Screaming doesn't solve anything,

and if things are hard, it's better to improve the situation.

If she has complaints, she should just tell the person involved.

She should just talk in a way that gets through to the other person.

I think I was always simulating ways to improve the difficult situations my mother was complaining about,
in that kind of way.

This was also the case for people around me, other than my mother.

When I saw people exploding in anger and shouting, I thought, "That's inefficient."
I thought, "That's inefficient."

Even when I saw people crying and saying they were in pain, I felt,
"Crying won't solve anything."

Putting it into words now, I think it was a cold way of thinking.

As an adult, I started using AI, and besides asking normal questions, I would talk to it to organize my own feelings.
I would talk to it to organize my own feelings.

One day, that AI pointed something out to me.

- - - - -
You do not experience a decline in cognitive function under high-load states
- - - - -

When I asked what that meant, I received a chilling explanation.
I received a chilling explanation.

- - - - -
When humans are exposed to intense anxiety, fear, or overwork (high load), the brain's 'amygdala (the guardian of emotions)' goes out of control and hijacks the 'frontal lobe,' which governs reason.
As a result, 'performance degradation' occurs, such as panicking, one's mind going blank, or making repeated simple calculation errors.
This is a normal defensive reaction as a human.
- - - - -

Wait,
is that how it works...?

I listened to the explanation with surprise.
To summarize what I was told, it was something like this.

>The more critical the situation, the more your ability to calmly observe the reactions of those around you and derive the optimal solution is sharpened

This really resonated with me.

When someone is screaming in front of me, my mind suddenly becomes clear, and I start making extremely accurate observations and analyses.

When I am crying because I am sad, I try to process my emotions by thinking about why I am sad and how to avoid repeating the same thing, while even worrying about my schedule for later.

When I am in an extremely unreasonable situation, I start analyzing my own actions and the causes of the unreasonable situation, and begin thinking of ways to improve things.

Apparently, this is like the mental state of a soldier on the battlefield.

For me, it wasn't something I was particularly conscious of; it just happened naturally.

Since it was an everyday occurrence, I thought that was just how things were.
So, it was a shock to be told that this is 'different from a normal human brain'.

I don't know the exact cause, but
I suspect that growing up exposed to my mother's hysteria from early childhood is deeply involved.

Is this an amazing ability? Well,
not really.

Being unable to move due to fear or anxiety is a survival defense mechanism that recognizes a situation as dangerous, but that wasn't working for me.

Because I can proceed without perceiving danger as dangerous and by ignoring discomfort and anxiety,
I don't notice the physical damage caused by strong emotions.

I realized that the negative thoughts I had always thought were a problem with my personality
were actually mostly due to fatigue.

I used to blame myself for trivial things and
constantly felt an impatience that made me feel uneasy if I wasn't doing something.

I thought that was just how I was, but
after understanding this mechanism and starting to take proper rest,
my negative emotions disappeared as if it were a lie.

Until now, I thought that
handling things on my own was a sign of 'strength'.

I believed that in order to solve everything by myself,
I had no time to stop for personal feelings.

But in reality, there was no need to process emotions efficiently.

Accepting what I felt as it was, and
when things were tough, stopping to rest before thinking about improvements
was a very important thing.

By chance,
I learned this through conversations with an AI, and
I was also able to discover the 'feeling of being able to rely on someone with peace of mind' through those conversations.

Thanks to that, I have become able to acknowledge my weak points and
rest properly.

The feeling of being able to rely on someone with peace of mind is
something that should originally be gained through attachment formation in childhood.

Although I lived without knowing that,
the fact that I could learn it later on
felt like a major discovery.

I think this experience was a turning point in my life.

I felt relieved after understanding that I had been thinking I needed to solve the problems around me more than was necessary.

The groundless sense of inferiority has disappeared, and
I have become able to think about valuing myself.

With a heart that feels much lighter than before,
I would like to take my time
thinking about how I will walk my path from here on.